Will the Censorship Regime Deploy Weapons of Mass Suppression in 2024?
The means and motives are there for a mass censorship effort the likes of which we've never seen. Recent developments suggest where the information war is headed
Censorship in the Group Quota Regime
If our ruling regime felt that its reign was under threat, and believed itself justified (if not morally obligated) to defend itself, what wouldn’t it do to retain power?
It might seek to break, bankrupt, and jail its political opponents and those who would dare defend them via lawfare; obstruct justice for political “made men;” and delegitimize and destroy any institution that would dare stand in its way. That effort is already afoot.
Another line of attack might be to weaponize every public and private power center against those who would back its political opponents — demoralizing if not terrorizing the electorate into submission, or dividing it so it can more easily be conquered. That effort too has been humming along.
Still another line of attack might be to wage information warfare against the public in a bid to prevent it from fully understanding the nature and extent of, let alone discussing, the ruling regime’s depredations. It would do so not only by propagandizing via de facto regime media but by crippling alternative sources and prohibiting citizens from freely sharing news and views anathema to the ruling regime.
That happened in 2020 with the rise of a public-private censorship apparatus that has engaged in perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” as one federal judge deemed it. Some evidence suggests collusive efforts between the intelligence community, corporate, and social media companies to discredit and deep-six the Hunter Biden laptop story weeks from Election Day alone might have swung the race in President Joe Biden’s favor.
Given the stakes in 2024, and with our ruling regime exhausting every possible option to win yet finding Donald Trump leading in many polls, shouldn’t we expect the regime to execute a still more pervasive and pernicious censorship effort this time around?
For Tom Klingenstein’s site, I wrote about how the Censorship Industrial Complex might wage information warfare going forward; how significant its impact is at this very moment; and how we got here in the first place.
You can find my essay here.