“Everyone is in favor of free speech… but some people's idea of it is that they are free to say what they like, but if anyone else says anything back, that is an outrage.” ― Winston Churchill
How the Disinformation Industrial Complex is destroying trust in science
–Climate Etc., Judith Curry (by David Young)
The Censorship Industrial Complex is the Revolt of the Elites
–Public, Michael Shellenberger and Leighton Woodhouse
Disinfo Dictionary
–Tablet Editors
Like MAGA, ‘fascism’ is only two syllables. President Biden can say both reliably. His caretakers took a risk, though, when they handed him “semi-fascist.” Leaving us all to wonder which parts of actual fascism were covered and which were not. Turns out not to matter, because he doesn’t know what the root word means.
AFAIK, he’s been getting that four syllable variation right so far, even if neither he nor his affirmative action press secretary have been willing or able to define it.
Willy-nilly throwing out the word fascist and vilifying half the population of the United States in a political speech is his idea of unifying the country: Last Thursday, our President could be found driving his message home by posing before shadowy Marines (Think about that. It was a political speech.) before a background of dim blood-red lighting shining on Independence Hall. Anyone see projection here? Or, an historical reference?
In keeping with the carefully constructed atmosphere, the President delivered a speech worthy of the Italian socialist who invented Fascism. Mussolini was a better speaker, and a more accomplished and erudite man than the President.
Imitation. Flattery.
The President should ask Karine Jean-Pierre to read Angelo M. Codevilla’s 2020 article to him. Then they’d both have a better understanding of what they’re playing at:
A slice from Codevilla:
“Socioeconomic organization was fascism’s defining feature. Only employers’ and employees’ organizations approved by the government were allowed. They represented and collected dues from any and all in their category and territory, whether these had signed up with them or not. [Like taxpayers and student loans.] In 1925 these had agreed “voluntarily” to recognize each other as “exclusive representatives,” to subordinate interactions at the local level to central organizations, and to draw up procedures for their cooperation under government supervision. The Law of Corporations of April 3, 1926, codified this political-economic order. No longer would corporations be responsible to owners. Thenceforth, they would answer to higher duties as defined in the law. As Mussolini put it, “In a world of social and economic interdependence…the watchword must be cooperation or misery.” “Labor and capital have the same rights and duties. Both must cooperate, and their disputes are regulated by law and decided by courts, which punish any violation.” This resulted in the orderly servicing of interest groups, fascism’s daily preoccupation.”
What is the word to describe the fact that the FBI ‘advises’ Silicon Valley crony-capitalists on censorship, just days before a Presidential election, as news damaging to their preferred candidate is breaking? What is that word when the White House makes lists of “problematic posts,” then threatens those same corporations with: “Root out misleading speech or be held accountable?”
One might assume these left wing corporations are merely following their natural inclinations to help a sympathetic government suppress stories they both don’t want publicized. It’s “like minded” fascism: Simple cloth masks retard CCP virus transmission. The vaccine prevents disease transmission. Natural immunity is not as good as a vaccine. Hunter Biden’s laptop is Russian agitprop. Trump paid Russian prostitutes to piss on a mattress. Shutting schools won’t harm children. The United States didn’t fund gain of function research by the Chinese. Trans “women” are biologically identcal to males for every purpose, but especially sports and incarceration. If you disagree, you are a fascist. Ipso facto.
It could be a natural inclination for the Masters of the Metaverse. It also could be called collusion. Turns out the latter is most likely.
Over 50 Biden Administration Employees, 12 US Agencies Involved In Social Media Censorship Push: Documents
What do you call a government which seeds the same outlets they suppress with a fantasy dossier, and then uses the news coverage generated by that leak as a basis for secret surveillance warrants? Is that “like minded” fascism, “collusion” fascism, “conspiracy” fascism?
Here are some of the latest individual receipts for such government manipulation:
Twitter, Facebook Regularly Coordinated With Biden Admin To Censor Users
FBI Responds To Zuckerberg’s Bombshell Rogan Revelation Bureau Helped Bury Hunter Biden Laptop Story
Top FBI agent resigns amid claims he shielded Hunter Biden from probe: report
The White House privately demanded Twitter ban me months before the company did so
The White House and the FBI are prevaricating about these stories, but what do you call a government which tries to regularize corporate censorship at state direction by creating a “Disinformation Governance Board”
The Disinformation Governance Board was so outrageous an idea they had to rename it. Ministry of Truth had already been taken, so now it’s an ‘internet policy task force’ led by Kamala Harris, “with goals including “developing programs and policies” to protect “political figures” and journalists from “disinformation,” “abuse” and “harassment.””
Used to be that ferreting out “disinformation,” and “harassing politicians” was the job journalists did.
So what’s the word for this set of corporatist rules? Here’s a hint: it takes the ‘semi’ out of “semi-fascist.”
That Italian I mentioned provided the rationale in the 1930s:
-1-:
The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.
and -2-:
The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State–a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values–interprets, develops, and potentiates the whole life of a people. (p. 14)
The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.
-1- Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers, (pp. 135-136), and -2- The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore, (p. 41).
One more piece of Codevilla’s article is worth looking at in thinking about the history of Fascism in the United States.
The initial impetus came from a man who disdained the Constitution and got the transfer of power into the hands of the the Executive Branch rolling: Woodrow Wilson.
A cursory look at Wilson’s comments will demonstrate this, as well as the fact that he was a racist of the first water.
But the ball really got rolling under another President, a contemporary and admirer of Mussolini, Franklin Roosevelt:
“The view that the New Deal was “fascism without the billy clubs” was well-nigh universal among FDR’s opponents on the Left (e.g. Norman Thomas), as well as on the Right (Herbert Hoover). It could hardly have been otherwise since the essence of the National Industrial Recovery Act—the involuntary inclusion of all participants in categories of economic activity and their subjection to government-dictated prices, wages, and working conditions—was at least as detailed as those in fascism’s corporate law. The U.S. government had brushed aside the Supreme Court’s objections to the National Recovery Administration in A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States (1935). By 1942, in Wickard v. Filburn (still “good law” today), the Court approved regulation of all manner of enterprise with reasoning stricter than any Mussolini had used in 1926. Today, by the same token, Senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s proposed “Accountable Capitalism Act” would also force corporations to enroll into a legal scheme in which the government would force them to service various stakeholders as government regulators would decide from time to time. Such tools are far more powerful than billy clubs.
Until 1935 New Dealers, though careful not to add to their opponents’ ammunition, did not hide their administration’s kinship with what the Fascists, Nazis, and Communists were doing to redirect the societies over which they ruled. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes thought that “what we are doing in this country is analogous to what is being done in Russia and even under Hitler in Germany. The only thing is that we do it methodically.” FDR himself referred to Mussolini and Stalin as “blood brothers,” and spoke of having private contacts with Mussolini. “Mussolini,” he said, “is interested in what we are doing, and I am struck by how much of his doubtless honest programs to reform Italy he has accomplished.” Brain-truster Rexford Tugwell thought that the fascists had done…”
many of the things which seem necessary to me. At any rate, Italy has been rebuilt materially in a systematic manner. Mussolini has the same opponents as FDR, but he controls the press, which prevents them from daily spreading their nonsense. He governs a compact, disciplined country, despite insufficient resources. At least on the surface, he has achieved enormous progress.
So, for a man of limited intelligence, and even less erudition, tossing the word fascist about as if it were anything but a convenient epithet is a mistake. That is not to say that such men do not have a long tradition here. Mostly they are Democrats. Whose Blackshirts, Antifa, are anything but anti-fascist.
Think of fascism today as the administrative state. The “swamp.” Who are its standard bearers?
Well, we’ve gone them one better. We’ve privatized this function, setting up entire industries dedicated to trashing our history and punishing those who object. In China, taxpayers fund it. Here, people volunteer.
The ruination of the word in the U.S. arguably started around 1913 with a President openly hostile to a Constitutional Republic. A dedicated racist who RE-segregated the Federal civil service, and an oligarch who bypassed the Bill of Rights with the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918; Woodrow Wilson.
His ideas picked up steam in 1932. That’s when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was nudging the Enlightenment political definition of Liberal, “a belief in individual liberty,” toward a phrase made popular by another collectivist snollygoster: “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
FDR admired the man who uttered it: “‘I don’t mind telling you in confidence,’ FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, ‘that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman’”
–Henry Wallace, New Frontiers, p. 31.
That admirable gentleman was Benito Mussolini, and it’s no wonder FDR was interested. Benito put the principles of the New Deal more plainly than FDR dared:
“The … State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.”
-Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore. p 41.The corporate State considers that private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production.
State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.
-Benito Mussolini, 1935, Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions, Rome: ‘Ardita’ Publishers pp. 135-136
Do you detect any similar policy tendencies in current American Maim Scream Media™ headlines, or in Biden executive orders?
Il Duce’s characterizations are authoritative. So, China, among many others, is clearly a fascist state. It may not surprise you that Mussolini was a socialist before he took up the fascist cause, and you may be forgiven if you wonder whether fascism was just a way to avoid the word “nationalization.”
By the time FDR took office there were many Americans who had good things to say about Benito Mussolini’s fascism. Here’s a link to the Leftist WaPo, a site your Progressive frenemies cannot easily dismiss. It manages to bash Trump, always a Progressive treat, and lists many prominent American Mussolini enthusiasts. The author manages to get through the whole thing while never mentioning FDR, and includes this hilarity:
Mussolini’s powerful handlers tapped into widespread misgivings about the domestic cost of Wilson-style democracy and growing anxieties about gender equality by pitching Mussolini as a strong male leader with a nationalistic brand of effective governance.
‘Handlers’? Ha. You want handlers? Look up Edith Wilson in the context of Woodrow’s stroke, and think about Jill Biden. The 25th Amendment had to wait until 1967 to be added to the Constitution, and until 2020 to be part of Democrat election strategy.
‘Wilson-style democracy’? Wilson was an oligarchist.
‘Misgivings’? Ha, ha. While our Democrats were making Henry Wallace FDR’s Veep?
Implied misogyny’? Ha, ha, ha. The Italians were worried their leader didn’t respect women, while FDR was … well, not worried about it:
“Franklin deserved a good time,” Alice Longworth, a confidante of FDR, once said. “He was married to Eleanor.”
‘Gender equality’? A construct beyond the imagination of Italians or Americans of the time. In 1932 “gender” was rightly regarded as a feature of some Romance languages, not a social justice crusade necessitating a redefinition of “sex.”
The Great Depression helped FDR get away with the New Deal, and when WWII came along to actually end the Depression (FDR had prolonged it), it only reinforced FDR’s power to shift the country to acceptance of the “dollar a year man” authoritarian bureaucracy. It’s not so cheap anymore.
We still see this autocratic urge expressed through redefinition today. The word “science” used to mean “falsifiable,” for example. Now it means whatever the consensus of government dependent boffins come up with. From “climate change” to lockdowns and mask mandates. From denials of biological sex to outcome equality. For example:
Translating Social Justice Newspeak – Law & Liberty
Liberals Redefine Words
Worth reading, but both neglect some important redefinitions. “Democracy,” for example.
I don’t know when that started, but the false premise is that the United States is a Democracy rather than a Constitutional Republic (Thanks, Woodrow.). Now Democracy “belongs” to Democrats, and you aren’t part of that if you object to voting without regard to legality, dislike open borders, believe sex is binary, think the Second Amendment applies to individuals, or get grumpy when someone calls you a murderer for not wearing 2 masks. Here’s a 4 minute video worth watching for how the Democrats view “Our” Democracy.
WSJ Opinion: The Progressive Push to Redefine ‘Our Democracy’
Another important word that’s been redefined is “Capitalism.” It’s depressing how many people describe China’s economic system as capitalist. If you look at Mussolini’s definitions, China is fascist. In America, it’s fashionable for Progressives to blame “free market failures” for botched government interventions. American corporatism pays homage to the blustering Italian, and is familial with the Chinese Communists.
What words mean matters. Those who make the changing of meaning their tactic for gaining political advantage are characters in 1984.
The Left Aims to Pressure Big Tech to Silence Conservatives
That headline misses the real point. Oh, that’s part of it, but the real agenda is even more corrupt. Scarborough is advancing AOC’s call for regulating thought. Maim Scream Media™ just wants to write the regulations.
Normally a vicious attack by some noxious leftwing blowhards on a leftwing corporatist institution warms my heart, but this is actually an attempt by an increasingly irrelevant group of mendacious talking heads to weaponize the First Amendment against a rival which is eating their lunch.
And note that a Duck-Duck-Go search for – AOC’s call for regulating media – and the same search on Google search using the ‘!g’ parameter via Duck-Duck-Go, returns no reporting on AOC’s demand from CBS, NBC, NPR, ABC, NYT, WaPo, etc. etc..
Fox News, Reason Magazine, Forbes, and foreign papers, yes. But not the fifth columnists hiding behind a narrow definition of the word “press” in the First Amendment.
This is scandalous.
Brian H. Shirts, M.D., is a molecular pathologist at the University of Washington. He writes: We’ll see more shortages of diagnostic tests if the FDA has its way
“February was a frustrating month for my laboratory. We wanted to make tests to detect the virus that causes Covid-19. My virology colleagues had great ideas and solid testing platforms. The Food and Drug Administration told us to stop. [That link is worth reading!]
Why? Because of a quirk in FDA regulations. Diagnostic tests are currently regulated in one of two ways, and there’s no clear rule to determine which one applies to coronavirus tests. This uncertainty is a big part of why test shortages have caused a national crisis.
This uncertainty is no accident. James Bovard, at Mises Institute:
“Dr. David Kessler, who became FDA commissioner in 1990, quickly sought to intimidate the companies that his agency regulates. A laudatory Washington Post article concluded, “What he cannot accomplish with ordinary regulation, Kessler hopes to accomplish with fear.” Kenneth Feather of the FDA’s drug advertising surveillance branch boasted: “We want to say to these companies that you don’t know when or how we’ll strike. We want to eliminate predictability.”
See the notes at the end of this post.
Now, back to Dr. Shirts:
“The VALID Act, introduced in Congress in early March, aims to address the confusion about who regulates diagnostic testing, but it would make the situation worse. If the VALID Act passes, we would see shortages in diagnostic tests for even more diseases than Covid-19, including cancers.
Under one system of regulation, laboratory directors are licensed by their states to develop tests through a set of rules called the Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA). When a CLIA-licensed lab creates a test and documents that it works, doctors can order that test.
Diagnostic testing, and interpreting those tests, is considered the practice of medicine. The FDA is not allowed to regulate the practice of medicine. Yet it is responsible for regulating medical devices. Diagnostic tests use machines, sample tubes, and other tools that are clearly medical devices.
Here’s where the second system comes in: The FDA approves devices — not the lab that produces it — on a case-by-case basis. So which diagnostic tests are devices regulated by the FDA and which are laboratory-developed tests regulated through CLIA?
The FDA gets to choose…
The VALID Act will give the FDA power to create more monopolies on diagnostic tests. CLIA-licensed labs will be shut out of producing new tests that perform as well as FDA-approved versions — or better than them. The result will be higher costs and periodic shortages…
The VALID Act was created because large pharmaceutical companies wanted to have monopolies on cancer tests…”
If you recall, the FDA granted a monopoly to the CDC for CCP virus test kits. The kits were quite late, few, and didn’t work.
With the VALID Act, the FDA is going to be able to create a public/pirate partnership – making private industry more like the CDC.
Notes. Thoughts on complex and uncertain ‘law’ in the hands of unaccountable bureaucrats.
“After having thus successively taken each member of the community in its powerful grasp and fashioned him at will, the supreme power then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but it prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
-Alexis de Tocqueville
“We’re after power and we mean it… There’s no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted – and you create a nation of law-breakers – and then you cash in on guilt. Now that’s the system, Mr. Reardon, that’s the game, and once you understand it, you’ll be much easier to deal with.”
-Ayn Rand.
At Quillette:
Motivated Reasoning Is Disfiguring Social Science
A good criticism of the state of social science, a field closely engaged in tarnishing the meaning of the word “science.”
I will make 3 points. First, an excerpt:
The second is the culture of institutions. From my experience and perspective, these tend to function on a corporate structure… they do not appear to foster an appropriate level of critical thinking, skepticism, caution, or solicitation of opposing views… This is a recipe for conformity and groupthink. (… APA policy appears to forbid scholarly special interest groups under its fold from taking public positions that differ from its own central stated positions…consistent with a business but not an academic or scholarly model.)
The classic model of a capitalist business actually forces critical, creative thinking, or the business dies. The academic model has baked in incentives and protections for the groupthink we observe. “The University,” could only survive as a respectable institutional concept so long as diversity of thought was critically valued. It isn’t anymore. In fact, the opposite is true.
Groupthink came before the abandonment of “critical thinking, skepticism, caution, or solicitation of opposing views,” and was necessary for that abandonment.
I think the parallel here is better described by the words “corporatist” and “bureaucratic” than by “business.” Academia displays, on average, less “critical thinking, skepticism, caution, or solicitation of opposing views,” than “business.”
Now, you may accurately point to Google’s treatment of James Damore as a business exemplifying advanced hardening of the categories, but this is also only possible where diversity of thought is suppressed – and where amoral business practices are hidden from customers. That may be business, but it will not be good business in the long run.
IAC, I’ll posit that even Google fosters a higher level of freedom of conscience than your average sociology department.
As to “ignoring entire fields of research,” and “task force[s] appear[ing] … stacked with people who had taken prior … views,” we can see this rot in the social sciences penetrating the hard sciences. The IPCC folks serve as a clear example.