Month: January 2022

By Richard Frost, Bloomberg markets live commentator and reporter

China’s authorities are sending a clear signal that there will be no let up in their crackdown on the property market, meaning the industry will remain a concern for investors for some time to come.

Local governments are getting tough, with an order that Evergrande demolish 39 buildings in 10 days the latest extreme example. The timing and urgency of the demand is notable for a project that’s been problematic since at least 2018, when an official report showed it was inflicting damage to a vast area of coral reef.

Similarly, the Shenzhen government’s bailout of China South City last week was heavily discounted, which “may indicate the state conducted very tough M&A price negotiations,” according to Bloomberg Intelligence credit analyst Andrew Chan. And the removal of a statement by authorities in Heilongjiang last month pledging “all out efforts” to support the property sector suggested it wasn’t the message the central government wanted to send.

Beijing’s plans for the property industry has become a center of global investor focus, given its vital importance to the world’s second-largest economy. Evergrande has led a wave of defaults, with at least six developers failing to pay debts on time in the last quarter. Firms are being squeezed by a slump in sales, elevated borrowing costs and the economic slowdown. Contracted sales for 31 listed property companies fell 26% in December from a year earlier, according to Citigroup analysts.

A gauge of Chinese property stocks slid 1.7% on Monday to near an almost five-year low. On a price-to-book basis, the index is approaching the cheapest level since at least 2005. The measure rose in the previous two weeks amid speculation officials would dial back curbs on the industry to limit the impact on the economy.

Authored by Jason Ditz via AntiWar.com,

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, controls much of Syria’s Idlib Province. The group is, realistically, Syria’s al-Qaeda affiliate in everything but name, and keeps trying to present itself as a more palatable partner for the west.

This was al-Qaeda’s idea, originally. When the ceasefire in Idlib was being negotiated, HTS held a lot of the territory, and al-Qaeda was very public about the need for the Syrian faction to appear to be independent. This was done with an eye toward getting them support in the war, and now the plan is to play government in Idlib. HTS is planning local elections, and making their morality police much less visible.

The Washington Post over the weakened seemed eager to present a “softened” al-Qaeda group in Idlib: “The Islamist militants attacked the radio station for years, because it played music, because it hired women, because its liberal values posed a challenge to Syria’s zealous men with guns,” the report began.

“Lately, though, the attacks on the station have stopped, and its tormentor — a militant group once affiliated with al-Qaeda called Hayat Tahrir al-Sham — is trying to convince Syrians and the world it is no longer as radical or repressive as it once was,” it continued.

And here’s where WaPo actually tries to revive the “moderate rebels” label as applied to al-Qaeda: 

Now the group says its focus has shifted to providing services to millions of people in Syria’s rebel-held Idlib province through a fledgling government. It severed ties with al-Qaeda five years ago and says it is cracking down on other extremist groups. The founder of HTS, a veteran jihadist once seemingly ubiquitous in military fatigues, these days is photographed wearing suits.

“That faction that used to harass us is trying to show people that they are moderate,” said Abdullah Klido, the chief executive of the radio station, called Radio Fresh. “They are trying to organize things so they appear in the image of a state.”

Ruthless jihadist group has chosen to “soften its brand”. Thanks Washington Post. https://t.co/o6Wbvues16

— Jake Hanrahan (@Jake_Hanrahan) January 3, 2022

With the war slowing down, HTS wants to give the appearance of a valuable alternative to Assad.

As al-Qaeda’s affiliate, only Turkey was really willing to accept that. As al-Qaeda’s affiliate with a lot of window-dressing, they may well have more interested parties.

After 20 years in Afghanistan which featured more than 22,000 US servicemember casualties, an official 46,000 civilians killed – including 7 children droned by the Biden administration on its way out, and trillions added to the US national debt, there are really two winners;

The Taliban – which carved a path to Kabul in a matter of days and recovered billions of US military hardware left behind during the botch Biden withdrawal, and private contractors, who have raked in trillions according to the Wall Street Journal.

Those who benefited from the outpouring of government money range from major weapons manufacturers to entrepreneurs. A California businessman running a bar in Kyrgyzstan started a fuel business that brought in billions in revenue. A young Afghan translator transformed a deal to provide forces with bed sheets into a business empire including a TV station and a domestic airline.

Two Army National Guardsmen from Ohio started a small business providing the military with Afghan interpreters that grew to become one of the Army’s top contractors. It collected nearly $4 billion in federal contracts, according to publicly available records. -WSJ

Of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, approximately one-third to one-half of that went to contractors, with $2.1 trillion of that going to Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Raytheon and Northrop Grumman – for services, weapons and supplies, according to the Costs of War Project maintained by Brown University.

Of course, a constellation of smaller contractors made billions for various enterprises – including training Afghan (now Taliban) police officers, infrastructure expansion such as roads, establishing schools, and providing security services to Western diplomats, according to the report.

According to former Green Beret and acting Trump Defense secretary Christopher Miller, “you have to outsource so much to contractors to do your operations” when you’re running an all-volunteer military without a draft.

Approximately $150 billion of the funds spent in Afghanistan – a drop in the bucket – was overseen by the US Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, which catalogued waste and fraud across hundreds of reports. For example, a survey released in 2021 found that of $7.8 billion subject to inspection, just $1.2 billion, or 15%, was spent as expected on hospitals, factories, roads and bridges. At least $2.4 billion was spent on military planes, police offices, farming initiatives and other development projects that were destroyed, abandoned, or repurposed.

In yet more examples, $6 million was wasted on a project to import nine Italian goats in the hopes of boosting Afghanistan’s cashmere market. $270 million was allocated by the US Agency for International Development to build 1,200 miles of gravel road – a project which was canceled after just 100 miles were built in three years and over 125 dead due to insurgent attacks.

The Pentagon has defended its slush fund imperialism – with spokesman Maj. Rob Lodewick claiming that the “dedicated support offered by many thousands of contractors to U.S. military missions in Afghanistan served many important roles to include freeing up uniformed forces for vital war fighting efforts.”

The Inspector General who analyzed the reconstruction since 2012, John Sopko, said that many of the contractors were making best efforts to fulfill requirements by policymakers who made terrible decisions.

“It’s so easy with a broad brush to say that all contractors are crooks or war profiteers,” said Sopko. “The fact that some of them made a lot of money—that’s the capitalist system.“

The use of contractors is not new in American history. During the revolutionary war, the Continental Army made use of private firms for their military supply chain, and even to carry out raids on ships. During WWII, the US used one contractor for every seven service members, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The practice really took off in the 1990s surrounding the Gulf War, however, which accelerated even more after 9/11 when the United States set out to prosecute a global war on terror which left the Pentagon short-handed after downsizing the US military after the Cold War.

In 2008, the U.S. had 187,900 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, the peak of the U.S. deployment, and 203,660 contractor personnel.

The ratio of contractors to troops went up. When President Barack Obama ordered most U.S. troops to leave Afghanistan at the end of his second term, more than 26,000 contractors were in Afghanistan, compared with 9,800 troops.

By the time President Donald Trump left office four years later, 18,000 contractors remained in Afghanistan, along with 2,500 troops. -WSJ

“Contracting seems to be moving in only one direction—increasing—regardless of whether there is a Democrat or Republican in the White House,” said Heidi Peltier, program manager at the Costs of War Project, who added that the reliance on contractors has led to the rise of the “camo economy,” in which the true costs of war are camouflaged.

According to statics from the Labor Department, more than 7,000 US service members died during two decades of war, while 3,500 US contractors died in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Read the rest of the report here.

Authored by Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff via The Epoch Times,

On Oct. 4, 2020, with Prof. Sunetra Gupta of Oxford University, we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD). Our purpose was to express our grave concerns over the inadequate protection of the vulnerable and the devastating harms of the lockdown pandemic policy adopted by much of the world; We proposed an alternative strategy of focused protection.

The key scientific fact on which the GBD was based—a more than thousand-fold higher risk of death for the old compared to the young—meant that better protection of the old would minimize COVID deaths. At the same time, opening schools and lifting lockdowns would reduce the collateral harm to the rest of the population.

The Declaration received enormous support, ultimately attracting signatures from over 50,000 scientists and medical professionals and over 800,000 members of the public. Our hope in writing was two-fold.

• First, we wanted to help the public understand that—contrary to the prevailing narrative—there was no scientific consensus in favor of lockdown. In this, we succeeded.

• Second, we wanted to spur a discussion among public health scientists about how to better protect the vulnerable, both those living in nursing homes (where ~40 percent of all COVID deaths have occurred) and those living in the community. We provided specific proposals for focused protection in the GBD and supporting documents to spur the discussion. Though some in public health did engage civilly in productive discussions with us, in this aim we had limited success.

Unbeknownst to us, our call for a more focused pandemic strategy posed a political problem for Dr. Francis Collins and Dr. Anthony Fauci. The former is a geneticist who, until last week, was the director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH); the latter is an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). They are the biggest funders of medical and infectious disease research worldwide.

Collins and Fauci played critical roles in designing and advocating for the pandemic lockdown strategy adopted by the United States and many other countries. In emails written four days after the Great Barrington Declaration and disclosed recently after a FOIA request, it was revealed that the two conspired to undermine the Declaration. Rather than engaging in scientific discourse, they authorized “a quick and devastating published takedown” of this proposal, which they characterized as by “three fringe epidemiologists” from Harvard, Oxford, and Stanford.

Across the pond, they were joined by their close colleague, Dr. Jeremy Farrar, the head of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s biggest non-governmental funders of medical research. He worked with Dominic Cummings, the political strategist of UK prime minister Boris Johnson. Together, they orchestrated “an aggressive press campaign against those behind the Great Barrington Declaration and others opposed to blanket COVID-19 restrictions.”

Ignoring the call for focused protection of the vulnerable, Collins and Fauci purposely mischaracterized the GBDl as a “let-it-rip” “herd immunity strategy,” even though focused protection is the very opposite of a let-it-rip strategy. It is more appropriate to call the lockdown strategy that has been followed a “let-it-rip” strategy. Without focused protection, every age group will eventually be exposed in equal proportion, albeit at a prolonged “let-it-drip” pace compared to a do-nothing strategy.

When journalists started asking us why we wanted to “let the virus rip,” we were puzzled. Those words are not in the GBD, and they are contrary to the central idea of focused protection. It is unclear whether Collins and Fauci ever read the GBD, whether they deliberately mischaracterized it, or whether their understanding of epidemiology and public health is more limited than we had thought. In any case, it was a lie.

We were also puzzled by the mischaracterization of the GBD as a “herd immunity strategy.” Herd immunity is a scientifically proven phenomenon, as fundamental in infectious disease epidemiology as gravity is in physics. Every COVID strategy leads to herd immunity, and the pandemic ends when a sufficient number of people have immunity through either COVID-recovery or a vaccine. It makes as much sense to claim that an epidemiologist is advocating for a “herd immunity strategy” as it does to claim that a pilot is advocating a “gravity strategy” when landing an airplane. The issue is how to land the plane safely, and whatever strategy the pilot uses, gravity ensures that the plane will eventually return to earth.

The fundamental goal of the GBD is to get through this terrible pandemic with the least harm to the public’s health. Health, of course, is broader than just COVID. Any reasonable evaluation of lockdowns should consider their collateral damage to patients with cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, other infectious diseases, as well as mental health, and much else. Based on long-standing principles of public health, the GBD and focused protection of the high-risk population is a middle ground between devastating lockdowns and a do-nothing let-it rip strategy.

Collins and Fauci surprisingly claimed that focused protection of the old is impossible without a vaccine. Scientists have their own specialties, but not every scientist has deep expertise in public health. The natural approach would have been to engage with epidemiologists and public health scientists for whom this is their bread and butter. Had they done so, Collins and Fauci would have learned that public health is fundamentally about focused protection.

It is impossible to shut down society completely. Lockdowns protected young low-risk affluent work-from-home professionals, such as administrators, scientists, professors, journalists, and lawyers, while older high-risk members of the working class were exposed and died in necessarily high numbers. This failure to understand that lockdowns could not protect the vulnerable led to the tragically high death counts from COVID.

We do not know why Collins and Fauci decided to do a “take down” rather than use their esteemed positions to build and promote vigorous scientific discussions on these critical issues, engaging scientists with different expertise and perspectives. Part of the answer may lie in another puzzle—their blindness to the devastating effects of lockdowns on other public health outcomes.

Lockdown harms have affected everyone, with an extra heavy burden on the chronically ill; on children, for whom schools were closed; on the working class, especially those in the densely populated inner cities; and on the global poor, with tens of millions suffering from malnutrition and starvation. For example, Fauci was a major advocate for school closures. These are now widely recognized as an enormous mistake that harmed children without affecting disease spread. In the coming years, we must work hard to reverse the damage caused by our misguided pandemic strategy.

While tens of thousands of scientists and medical professionals signed the Great Barrington Declaration, why didn’t more speak up in the media? Some did, some tried but failed, while others were very cautious about doing so. When we wrote the Declaration, we knew that we were putting our professional careers at risk, as well as our ability to provide for our families. That was a conscious decision on our part, and we fully sympathize with people who instead decided to focus on maintaining their important research laboratories and activities.

Scientists will naturally hesitate before putting themselves in a situation where the NIH Director, with an annual scientific research budget of $42.9 billion, wants to take them down. It may also be unwise to upset the director of NIAID, with an annual budget of $6.1 billion for infectious disease research, or the director of the Wellcome Trust, with an annual budget of $1.5 billion. Sitting atop powerful funding agencies, Collins, Fauci, and Farrar channel research dollars to nearly every infectious disease epidemiologist, immunologist, and virologist of note in the United States and UK.

Collins, Fauci, and Farrar got the pandemic strategy they advocated for, and they own the results together with other lockdown proponents. The GBD was and is inconvenient for them because it stands as clear evidence that a better, less deadly alternative was available.

We now have over 800,000 COVID deaths in the United States, plus the collateral damage. Sweden and other Scandinavian countries—less focused on lockdowns and more focused on protecting the old—have had fewer COVID deaths per population than the United States, the UK, and most other European countries. Florida, which avoided much of the collateral lockdown harms, currently ranks 22nd best in the United States in age-adjusted COVID mortality.

In academic medicine, landing an NIH grant makes or breaks careers, so scientists have a strong incentive to stay on the right side of NIH and NIAID priorities. If we want scientists to speak freely in the future, we should avoid having the same people in charge of public health policy and medical research funding.

Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, signed a cooperative agreement with the U.S. military to explore the possibility of someday using rockets to transport cargo and people anywhere in the world in one hour. 

Blue Origin rocket company and the United States Transportation Command (US TRANSCOM), which supervises global military logistics, signed a cooperative research and development agreement (CRADA) on Dec. 17. 

Under the CRADA, Blue Origin will share information about its rockets and capabilities. However, nothing is binding, and the government doesn’t have to commit to purchasing anything. 

The military will use modeling and simulations to analyze just how effective it’s to deliver massive amounts of advanced weaponry and military cargo to anywhere in the world within short notice. Payloads can also include people. 

“Not every option will call for logistics through space, but when we need to respond faster, or assure access in challenging environments, we recognize that space now offers a toolkit, not just a concept,” Vice Admiral Dee Mewbourne, deputy commander, USTRANSCOM, said in a statement. 

“At USTRANSCOM, we want our understanding of space transportation’s potential to keep pace with the technical and operational realities that are being built now,” Mewbourne said. 

USTRANSCOM has also signed a development agreement with SpaceX and Exploration Architecture for the rocket cargo project. 

The development of the rocket cargo project was first announced in the Department of Defense Fiscal Year (FY) 2022 Budget Estimates last summer. 

Blue Origin’s entry into the military’s rocket cargo project comes as a federal judge rejected the space company’s dispute over who will build the lunar lander. It appears NASA went with Elon Musk’s SpaceX. 

Submitted by James Durso,

America’s retreat from Afghanistan was bad for U.S. taxpayers, and doubly so for Afghans abandoned in the dash to the exits.

One beneficiary was Qatar, the Persian Gulf emirate that’s hosted the Taliban’s political office since 2013, and facilitated negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban starting in 2019.

In November, the U.S. commissioned Qatar as the “protecting power” for U.S. interests in Afghanistan. Qatar will represent U.S. interests, provide consular services, monitor the condition of the abandoned embassy in Kabul, and “facilitate the exit of Afghans with U.S. Special Immigrant Visas.”

The U.S. move was panned as “hiring an arsonist as [a] fireman,” but it demonstrated that Qatar knew “to be a player, you have to be a payer.”

Until recently, Qatar’s public profile was as the host of the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the newest venue on the Formula 1 circuit, and an aspirant to be “the art Mecca of the Middle East.” Why did the U.S. give its mandate to a government that supports the Muslim Brotherhood, hosts the leadership of the terror group Hamas and funds its operations in the Gaza Strip, and is friendly to the Iranian regime with whom it shares management of the world’s largest natural gas field?

It’s been said, “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” In Qatar’s case, the “thrust upon” happened in 2017 when it was embargoed by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Bahrain, and Egypt for alleged support for terrorism and extremism, hosting Al Jazeera, the widely watched television network, supporting the Arab Spring movements, and being chummy with Iran.

Qatar had to neutralize its opponents, so it set about making friends in the U.S., the patron of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, and Egypt, all well-represented in Washington. It had work to do: Saudi Arabia and the UAE spent almost four times as much in Washington as did Qatar, and U.S. President Donald Trump initially sided with the Saudis and Emiratis, who were trashing Qatar’s image in the media.

Long before Qatar was practicing checkbook diplomacy, it remembered to gift “the big guy” – the United States. In 1996, after the previous emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, seized power, Qatar built the Al Udeid Air Base for the U.S. After an upsurge in anti-U.S. sentiment in Saudi Arabia after the U.S. attack on Iraq, U.S. forces relocated from Saudi Arabia to Al Udeid. Qatar’s hosting and improvements to the base, the headquarters for U.S. combat commanders in the Middle East, would be a brick-and-mortar reminder of the bilateral relationship. After the U.S. evacuation of Afghanistan, Al Udeid was the first stop for many Afghan refugees headed to the United States.

According to Sasapost, Qatar’s lobbying campaign after 2017 spent almost $54 million (out of $75 million spent during the last decade), which says more about expectations in Washington than Doha. Qatar’s largesse included over $1.2 million in contributions to more than 500 political campaigns and almost $300,000 to political action committees according to the Center for International Policy.

Qatar’s campaign was made up of several elements: outreach to the White House and Capitol Hill, investment deals with U.S. states to corral their congressional delegations and highlighting the human rights violations caused by the blockade. The later issue was an opportunity for Qatar to explain how it addressed accusations of worker exploitation in construction projects for the World Cup.

In June 2018, the U.S., the UAE, and Qatar called a truce in a battle over alleged subsidies received by the Gulf airlines that violated bilateral Open Skies agreements with the U.S. The Gulf airlines countered U.S. carriers’ allegations, accusing the Americans of benefitting from post-9/11 bailouts, subsidies to aviation infrastructure, and lenient regulation. The UAE and Qatar each likely thought resolving the issue would bolster their side in the blockade dispute, so a deal was soon tabled.

The money, the local outreach, the free military base, the airline war cease-fire, and Qatar’s hosting of the Taliban political office contributed to favorably shaping Qatar’s image in Washington so, when the time came for the U.S. to deputize a representative in Kabul, Qatar was probably the only candidate.

By accepting the U.S. commission, Qatar placed itself in the middle of events in Central Asia and South Asia.

While the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan will be meeting Taliban representatives in Doha, Qatar’s envoys will be meeting Taliban leaders in Kabul. Qatar can leverage that face time to pursue its own interests in the region. Those interests won’t necessarily be antithetical to U.S. desires, but the U.S. is facilitating another state’s influence in a region it engages sporadically, which will increase its future reliance on states with entrée like, say, Qatar.

If Qatar can encourage the Taliban to facilitate trade between Central Asia and South Asia, that will boost the July transit trade agreement between Uzbekistan and Pakistan. An active trade space centered on Afghanistan will also comfort Iran that already has an established relationship with Qatar due to their shared interest in the South Pars/North Field natural gas reserve.

China, which hasn’t indicated it will return to Afghanistan, may reconsider, and recognize the Taliban government if Qatar’s efforts lower the local temperature. If China Russia, Pakistan, Iran, India, and Central Asia engage the Taliban government, the U.S. will be isolated while it busies itself looking for that “over the horizon” base to strike targets in Afghanistan.

Qatar knew how to succeed in Washington and turned its isolation into an opportunity for influence in Central Asia. Now, can it keep its footing along the Silk Road?

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk captivated the financial press during Q4 by selling a chunk of his shares in the EV carmaker after asking his Twitter followers whether he should sell or not. 

But while Archegos secret billionaire Bill Hwang lost his entire fortune in 2021, Musk and other billionaires benefited from the ballooning equity valuations.

According to Bloomberg, “for the wealthiest people on the planet, 2021 was a year of enormous gains, extreme losses and unprecedented scrutiny.” BBG went on to call it the “Year of the Super Billionaire”.

And it’s not just soaring equity markets; rising valuations of everything from mansions to crypto to commodities boosted the collective fortune of the world’s 500 richest people by more than $1 trillion as the rest of the world struggled with the second year of the COVID pandemic. 

Thanks to these gains, there are now a record 10 fortunes in excess of $100 billion, more than 200 above $10 billion and Musk has now surpassed the level of riches (adjusted for inflation) achieved by modern history’s previous wealthiest person. Combined, the net worth of the 500 billionaires now exceeds $8.4 trillion, greater than the GDP of all countries except the US and China.

At year-end, 42 members of the billionaire’s index debuted on the ranking in 2021 mostly due to IPOs.

The trajectory hasn’t changed much since last year, when we reported that the world’s richest 1% had earned more than $30 trillion combined. That number has no doubt increased dramatically this year.

And back in October, we noted that, in some ways, we can’t help but sympathize with Neel Kashkari’s trumped-up “concern” about wealth inequality. Because in some ways, the US meets the standards of a banana republic, since the wealthiest 0.1% own as much assets as the bottom 90%.

While the very richest benefited from bumper markets and loose fiscal policy, the pandemic pushed as many as 150M people into extreme poverty, even as millions of jobs went unfilled and inflationary pressures sent wages soaring across varioous industries.

The reaction to this massive wealth creation has been reflected in political rhetoric from Washington to Beijing, where the CCP has started shaking down China’s wealthiest men and the companies they control for donations to the government’s new and as-yet-unformed “Common Prosperity” program.

Authored by Caitlin Johnstone via Medium.com,

Twitter has permanently suspended the personal account of Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene for what the platform calls “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation policy,” much to the delight of liberals and pro-censorship leftists everywhere. This follows the Twitter ban of Dr Robert Malone on the same grounds a few days prior, which followed an unbroken pattern of continually escalating and expanding censorship protocols ever since the 2016 US election.

In reality nobody ever gets banned for “Covid misinformation”; that’s just today’s excuse. Before that it was the fallout from the Capitol riot, before that it was election security, before that it was Russian disinformation, foreign influence ops, fake news, etc. In reality the real agenda behind the normalization of internet censorship is the normalization of internet censorship itself. That’s the real reason so many people get banned.

I myself had already written many, many articles warning warning about the increasingly widespread use of internet censorship via algorithm manipulation and deplatforming long before the first “Covid misinformation” bans started happening. Arguably the most significant political moment in the US since 9/11 and its aftermath was when liberal institutions decided that Trump’s 2016 election was not a failure of status quo politics but a failure of information control, which just so happened to align perfectly with the agendas of the ruling power structure to control the dominant narratives about what’s going on in the world.

Having unelected tech oligarchs ban duly elected members of Congress – or even the sitting President – from using their massive platforms is dystopian. Remember how many world leaders warned that FB & Twitter’s banning of Trump was a threat to democracy.https://t.co/zIT7l04hMW https://t.co/2BPFrgeZXv

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 2, 2022

We saw this exemplified in 2017 when Google, Facebook and Twitter were called before the Senate Judiciary Committee and instructed to come up with a strategy “to prevent the fomenting of discord”.

“We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America,” the social media giants were told by think tanker and former FBI agent Clint Watts, who added, “Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced — silence the guns and the barrage will end.”

Since that time the coordination between those tech platforms and the US government in determining whose voices should be silenced has gotten progressively more intimate, so now we have these giant platforms which people have come to rely on to share ideas and information censoring speech in complete alignment with the will of the most powerful government on earth.

The danger of this is obvious to anyone who isn’t a stunted emotional infant. The danger of government-tied monopolistic tech platforms controlling worldwide speech far outweighs the danger of whatever voice you might happen to dislike at any given moment. The only way for this not to be clear to you is if you are so psychologically maladjusted that you can’t imagine anything bad coming from your personal preferences for human expression being imposed upon society by the most powerful institutions on earth.

Silicon Valley Should Not Restrict Public Discourse About Covid Measures Which Affect Everyone

“Government-tied oligarchic megacorporations are among the very last institutions who should be in charge of worldwide political discourse.”https://t.co/WlDypacgmM

— Caitlin Johnstone ⏳ (@caitoz) December 30, 2021

It really only takes the tiniest bit of personal growth to understand this. I for example absolutely hate QAnoners. Hate them, hate them, hate them. They always used to make my job annoying because they saw my criticisms of the mass media and the oligarchic empire as aligning with their view that Donald Trump was leading a righteous crusade against the Deep State, so they’d often clutter my comments sections with foam-brained idiocy that perfectly served the very power structures I oppose. They saw me as on their side when in reality we had virtually nothing in common and couldn’t really be more opposed.

When QAnon accounts were purged from all mainstream social media platforms following the Capitol riot, it made my work significantly less irritating. I no longer had to share social media spaces with people I despised, and, if I were an immature person, I would see this as an inherently good thing. But because I am a grown adult, I understand that the danger of giant monopolistic government-tied platforms controlling worldwide human speech to a greater and greater extent far outweighs the emotional ease I personally receive from their absence.

I therefore would choose to allow QAnoners to voice their dopey nonsense freely on those platforms if it were up to me. Whatever damage they might do is vastly less destructive than allowing widespread communication to be regulated by powerful oligarchic institutions who amount to US government proxies. The same is true of Marjorie Taylor Greene and everyone like her.

This should not be an uncommon perspective. It doesn’t require a lot of maturity to get this, it just requires some basic self-preservation and enough psychological growth to understand that the world should not be forced to align with your personal will. It says bad things about the future that even this kindergarten-level degree of insight has become rare in some circles.

*  *  *

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