fox files

“It’s a private company” they say. Really?

During the George W. Bush years, Glenn Greenwald rose to prominence for his opposition to the White House’s record on civil liberties.

Oh, the left-liberal establishment loved him.

Then he decided he would apply his principles equally to both sides.

Then they didn’t like him so much.

Today he published an important thread on Twitter, a portion of which I wanted to share with you. Here he describes exactly what’s going on with the suppression of dissident voices. And unlike all too many libertarians, whose entire analysis was “they’re private companies; they can do what they want,” Greenwald gets to the heart of what’s happening:

The regime of censorship being imposed on the internet – by a consortium of DC Dems, billionaire-funded “disinformation experts,” the US Security State, and liberal employees of media corporations – is dangerously intensifying in ways I believe are not adequately understood. 

A series of “crises” have been cynically and aggressively exploited to inexorably restrict the range of permitted views, and expand pretexts for online silencing and deplatforming. Trump’s election, Russiagate, 1/6, COVID and war in Ukraine all fostered new methods of repression.

During the failed attempt in January to force Spotify to remove Joe Rogan, the country’s most popular podcaster – remember that? – I wrote that the current religion of Western liberals in politics and media is censorship: their prime weapon of activism.

But that Rogan failure only strengthened their repressive campaigns. Dems routinely abuse their majoritarian power in DC to explicitly coerce Big Tech silencing of their opponents and dissent. This is *Govt censorship* disguised as corporate autonomy.

There’s now an entire new industry, aligned with Dems, to pressure Big Tech to censor. Think tanks and self-proclaimed “disinformation experts” funded by Omidyar, Soros and the US/UK Security State use benign-sounding names to glorify ideological censorship as neutral expertise.

The worst, most vile arm of this regime are the censorship-mad liberal employees of big media corporations. Masquerading as “journalists,” they align with the scummiest Dem groups to silence and deplatform.

It is astonishing to watch Dems and their allies in media corporations posture as opponents of “fascism” – while their main goal is to *unite state and corporate power* to censor their critics and degrade the internet into an increasingly repressive weapon of information control. 

A major myth that must be quickly dismantled: political censorship is not the byproduct of autonomous choices of Big Tech companies.

This is happening because DC Dems and the US Security State are threatening reprisals if they refuse. They’re explicit.

But the worst is watching people whose job title in corporate HR Departments is “journalist” take the lead in agitating for censorship. They exploit the platforms of corporate giants to pioneer increasingly dangerous means of banning dissenters. *These* are the authoritarians.

This is the frog-in-boiling-water problem: the increase in censorship is gradual but continuous, preventing recognition of how severe it’s become. The EU now legally mandates censorship of Russian news. They’ve made it *illegal* for companies to air it.

So many new tactics of censorship repression have emerged in the West: Trudeau freezing bank accounts of tucker-protesters; PayPal partnering with ADL to ban dissidents from the financial system; Big Tech platforms openly colluding in unison to de-person people from the internet.

All of this stems from the classic mentality of all would-be tyrants: our enemies are so dangerous, their views so threatening, that everything we do – lying, repression, censorship – is noble. That’s what made the Sam Harris confession so vital: that’s how liberal elites think.

This is why I regard the Hunter Biden scandal as uniquely alarming. The media didn’t just “bury” the archive. CIA concocted a lie about it (it’s “Russian disinformation”); media outlets spread that lie; Big Tech [censored] it — because lying and repression to them is justified!

The authoritarian mentality that led CIA, corporate media and Big Tech to lie about the Biden archive before the election is the same driving this new censorship craze. It’s the hallmark of all tyranny: “our enemies are so evil and dangerous, anything is justified to stop them.” 

How come **not one media outlet** that spread this CIA lie – the Hunter Biden archive was “Russian disinformation” – retracted or apologized? This is why: they believe they are so benevolent, their cause so just, that lying and censorship are benign.

The one encouraging aspect: as so often happens with despotic factions, they are triggering and fueling the backlash to their excesses. Sites devoted to free speech – led by Rumble, along with Substack, Callin, and others – are exploding in growth.

But as these free speech platforms grow and become a threat, the efforts to crush them also grow – exactly as AOC, other Dems and their corporate media allies successfully demanded Google, Apple and Amazon destroy Parler when it became the single most-popular app in the country.

It is hard to overstate how much pressure is now brought to bear by liberal censors on these free speech platforms, especially Rumble. Their vendors are threatened. Their hosting companies targeted. They have accounts cancelled and firms refusing to deal with them. It’s a regime.

It’s not melodrama or hyperbole to say: what we have is a war in the West, a war over whether the internet will be free, over whether dissent will be allowed, over whether we will live in the closed propaganda system our elites claim The Bad Countries™ impose. It’s no different.

In even the most despotic nations, the banal, conformist citizen thinks they’re free. As Rosa Luxemburg said: “he who does not move, does not feel his chains.”

Of course the Chris Hayes’s and Don Lemon’s think this is all absurd: Good Liberals threaten nobody and thus flourish.

The measure of societal freedom is not how servants of power are treated: they’re always left alone or rewarded. The key metric is how dissidents are treated. Now, they are imprisoned (Assange), exiled (Snowden) and, above all, silenced by corporate/state power (dissidents)….

As I’ve often said, the media outlets screaming most loudly about “disinformation” are the ones that spread it most frequently, casually and destructively (NBC/CNN/WPost, etc.).

It’s equally true of those now claiming to fight “fascism”: real repression comes *from them.*

It’s Time To End DC Now!

There is much talk about how to “fix Washington”: how the administrative state might be brought to heel and made accountable and responsive to the practical problems facing the American people. The election of Donald Trump is best understood as a populist effort to “fix Washington.” But Washington was not fixed. On the contrary. As we learned from the soft coup that was the “Russian collusion” psy-op, the two fake impeachments, Democrats’ condoning of the George Floyd riots, and the manipulation of the 2020 election, the administrative state has only grown more brazen, more authoritarian, and more abusive in its exercise of power since 2016.

Perhaps Washington can’t be fixed. But it can be dismantled. Do we need Washington D.C. as the central locus of national power? With enormous technological changes in how business is conducted and how communication works, it may be that a capital city is a vestige of an earlier era. Perhaps rather than working to fix D.C., we should work to end it.

The benefits of a decentralized government

Until recently, there would have been no way that the federal government could function without a centralized place to conduct business. But today, we shop online. We work online. For two years, people went to school online. If all these essential life activities could be moved to the internet, why couldn’t government? While one could argue that online education and similar enterprises have decreased the quality of the services they provide, it appears that online governance might enhance the function of our democracy.

A major reason that Washington can’t be fixed is what has been called the “monoculture” that obtains throughout the government. The culture of any place breeds conformity: to refuse to assimilate to a culture is to mark yourself as an outsider. Because the presence of outsiders threatens the maintenance of any culture, cultural insiders often withhold their approval from those who don’t conform.

Imagine that a new representative is elected from the state of Delaware. He arrives in the capital as an avatar for the culture of Delaware, which is not the culture of Washington D.C. Because he shares the interests of the people of Delaware, he serves as an effective representative his constituents. But D.C. institutions have a different way of doing things: a different way of governing, socializing, doing business, and influence peddling. This creates a pressure for our representative from Delaware to adapt. After all, if he doesn’t, he won’t earn many friends—and he may even find some enemies. And if that were to happen, his tenure in Congress could be very brief. He doesn’t want that. So, the longer he is in the capital, the more he acculturates to the D.C. way of doing things. This wins him friends, donors, and more elections. After 50 years of “public service,” our regular Joe from Delaware will be almost entirely unrecognizable to the people he used to represent.

Remote government by Zoom might be the best way to break this monoculture. If all the official proceedings of the legislature were conducted virtually, this would keep the officials in the states that they represent. Not only would they be more aware of the situation in their home states (since they’d no longer spend much of the year far away), they would be more accessible to their constituents. Regular physical contact with the people who elected for them would increase the accountability of officials as they serve out their terms. This would also impede the formation of close friendships with representatives from other states, and hinder coziness between our representatives and the lobbyist and consultant class that parasitizes the body politic inside the Beltway. These friendships—which the culture of a centralized capital encourages—create an opportunity for an elected official to develop personal allegiances, obligations, and favoritism that may run counter to the interests of the people he represents.

Still, it wouldn’t be enough to simply conduct official state proceedings virtually. It would be even more important that the business of unelected bureaucrats also be moved online. Right now, the staff of the Department of State, the Internal Revenue Service, or the Environmental Protection Agency is largely composed of educated urbanites, raised in the monoculture of the university and the eastern power corridor. Imagine if the mid-level clerks at the State Department weren’t all working together in Washington, but were spread out across the country, working independently from home: one in Kalispell, Montana, another in Little Rock, Arkansas, and another in Birmingham, Alabama. There would be no more potent way to erode the influence of the monoculture in government. Bureaucrats wouldn’t have personal relationships with most of the people they work with. Further, because so many colleagues would come from outside the monoculture, they wouldn’t be able to reliably ascertain where their political loyalties lie, which would discourage internal schemes. And the fact that one could never be sure that one’s online communication wasn’t being recorded or surveilled would be a strong disincentive for conspiratorial corruption. Finally, the tedium of online communication (emails, Zoom calls, etc.) would encourage workers to eliminate almost all inessential interaction, which would undermine the informal advocacy and organization that occurs behind closed doors in D.C.

There would also be a variety of peripheral benefits to be had from eliminating a national capital. As it stands, the capital city always represents a desirable target for hostile military action—this was tragically illustrated on 9/11 and various other occasions. With all government business conducted online, enemies of the United States would be deprived of an attractive hard target. Additionally, as we have recently seen, the courts of Washington routinely serve the objectives of the state monoculture. For cases that involve the interests of the federal government (which are often tried in Washington simply because the government is located there), the outcome is all but predetermined. But if the government wasn’t physically located in Washington, some other criteria could decide where these critical cases were tried, and juries could be drawn from places other than the capital.

The future of the former capital

Surely, there would also be some drawbacks to abolishing the capital, most notably that the basic functions of government would come to rely almost entirely upon the availability and quality of internet access. In some extreme scenarios, this could inhibit the ability of the state to respond to emergent crises rapidly and effectively. But as it is, no one would say that responsiveness is a major characteristic of the federal government in Washington.    

What would happen to D.C.? It would still exist as the historical seat of government. All the great monuments of our nation, along with the Capitol, the White House, the Smithsonian, and more would still be there, ensuring that tourism remains a major source of revenue for the city and its inhabitants. The National Archives would still hold the great documents of the Founding. The federal district could take on the status of the Tower of London in Britain as an official, ceremonial representation of the power of the United States; or like Kyoto in Japan, as a historical center of the nation. Many nations build new capitals to reflect new domestic needs. Egypt is currently building its “New Administrative Capital” to relieve congestion in Cairo, and Indonesia is relocating its capital from Jakarta to the new planned city of Nusantara. America will do something new, extraordinary, and cutting-edge: we won’t move the seat of political power, but devolve power to the provinces.

It increasingly seems that the very function of having a capital in our era is to protect and nourish the monoculture that makes DC seem so remote—politically, culturally, and geographically—from so many of the Americans that the government purports to represent. Dissolving the capital could reduce the corruption that is now implicitly associated with any mention of “Washington.” This could be a great step forward for our democracy. Somewhat ironically, decentralizing the federal government might make it feel a good deal closer to many of the people it serves.