In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex [MIC].” At the time, Eisenhower was concerned that our arms industry with its ever increasing financial and political power might conquer our Republic from within. He recognized that the rapid growth of the MIC, along with the “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment,” would drive public policy that would “itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Since Eisenhower’s warning decades ago, the federal government has grown into a taxpayer-funded labyrinth of agencies wielding unyielding power over the people they are sworn to protect.
Now, with the rapid growth of the digital age, political division, disinformation, fake news, and the like, our world has changed again — and not for the better. Using the MIC blueprint, our government, NGOs, and academic institutions have created and are using an all-consuming “censorship-industrial complex” (CIC) to protect their own interests.
As an example, during the Covid pandemic, governments used CIC tactics to create their own “pandemic of control.” According to EngageMedia, “Officials, medical experts, the mainstream media, and Big Tech pushed the narrative that COVID-19 could be tightly controlled, and that citizens everywhere had a responsibility to abide, with no questions asked, to achieve that aim. The ‘approved’ pandemic response was defended at all costs. News media ridiculed alternative viewpoints as fake news and misinformation, and social media platforms took down contradictory views from their feeds, silencing voices that questioned vaccine passports, lockdowns, and other controls.”
The only good thing that has come out of the Covid pandemic is that citizens have started to question the wisdom and authority of their government.
In March, the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government heard testimony on the CIC, as documented in the report The Censorship Industrial Complex: U.S. Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation Campaigns, 2016 – 2022. Even the executive summary of the 68 pages of testimony is chilling, as it portrays a government out of control, with “government-funded censors” who “invoke the prevention of real-world harm to justify their demands for censorship.”
The summary continued:
The censors have defined harm so broadly, in fact, that they have justified Facebook censoring accurate information about COVID vaccines, for example, to prevent “vaccine hesitancy.” Their goal, clearly, is not protecting the truth but rather persuading the public. That is the purpose of open debate and the free exchange of ideas. Persuasion by covert means is censorship.
CIC is a threat to all free people. Our government’s use of CIC is quickly making George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth a reality. President Biden is using the CIC to push his woke environmental, social-justice, and equity agenda, spending billions of taxpayer dollars to spread disinformation as facts.
Michael Shellenberger, whose testimony is contained in the report of the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, is president and founder of the nonprofit organization Environmental Progress (EP). That group shared their concerns about the CIC, warning readers that the “US government is targeting you”:
It has moved from fighting ISIS recruiters and Russian bots to censoring and de-platforming ordinary Americans and public figures they don’t like. Funded by billions of taxpayer dollars, the Censorship-Industrial Complex is using direct coercion along with the most sophisticated AI tools to manipulate people, label social media posts, and discredit factual information.
With the CIC quickly being exposed as a threat to liberty and freedom, people are taking a stand and fighting back. The Federalist shared last week that “members of the Election Integrity Partnership and Virality Project conspired with government actors to censor speech at Big Tech companies in violation of the First Amendment, a class-action lawsuit filed on Tuesday alleges. The case, Hines v. Stamos, promises to blow open the Censorship-Industrial Complex.”
Andrew Lowenthal, co-founder and former executive director of EngageMedia, wrote a Brownstone Institute article about CIC, stating that he spent most of his career “focused on human rights online, freedom of expression, and open technology.” Now he is leading the charge against the CIC, since groups and colleagues he had worked with “for years began de-emphasizing freedom of speech and expression, and shifted focus to a new arena: fighting ‘disinformation.’”
In an effort to expose the groups that are part of the CIC, Racket News published an article Wednesday titled Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex: The Top 50 Organizations to Know. Subtitled “The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel,” the report deserves a deep dive by any liberty lover seeking to better understand the CIC and how much money is being pumped into think tanks, academia, and NGOs on the anti-disinformation front, both from the government and private philanthropy.
Racket News declared:
The Top 50 List is intended as a resource for reporters and researchers beginning their journey toward learning the scale and ambition of the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Written like a magazine feature, it tries to answer a few basic questions about funding, organization type, history, and especially, methodology. Many anti-disinformation groups adhere to the same formulaic approach to research, often using the same “hate-mapping,” guilt-by-association-type analysis to identify wrong-thinkers and suppressive persons.
