It's Not Just Censorship - The Fog Of War Is Covering Property Theft Under Color Of Authority

lewrockwell  |  I have argued in this column and elsewhere that the Biden administration sanctions imposed on Russian and American persons and businesses are profoundly unconstitutional because they are imposed by executive fiat rather than by legislation and because the sanctions constitute either the seizure of property without a warrant or the taking of property without due process.

When the feds seize a yacht from a person whom they claim may have financed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, they are doing so in direct violation of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Similarly, when they freeze Russian assets in American banks, they engage in a seizure, and seizures can only constitutionally be done with a search warrant based on probable cause of crime.

As well, when the feds interfere with contract rights by prohibiting compliance with lawful contracts, that, too, implicates due process and can only be done constitutionally after a jury verdict in the government’s favor, at a trial at which the feds have proved fault.

As if to anticipate these constitutional roadblocks to its interference with free commercial choices, Congress enacted the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 and the Magnitsky Act of 2016. These constitutional monstrosities purport to give the president the power to declare persons and entities to be violators of human rights and, by that mere executive declaration alone, to punish them without trial.

These laws turn the Fourth and Fifth Amendments on their heads by punishing first and engaging in a perverse variant of due process later. How perverse? These laws require that if you want your seized property back, you must prove that you are not a human rights violator.

As if to run even further away from constitutional norms, a group of legal academics began arguing last week that the property seized from Russians is not really owned by human beings, but by the Russian government. And, this crazy argument goes, since the Russian government is not a person, there is no warrant or due process requirement; therefore, the feds can convert the assets they have seized and frozen to their own use.

To these academics — who reject property ownership as a moral right and exalt government aggression as a moral good — the argument devolves around the meaning of the word “person.” The Fourth and Fifth Amendments protect every “person” and all “people,” not just Americans.

And in American jurisprudence, “person” means both human beings and artificial persons — corporations and governments capable of owning property. Property ownership is defined by the right to use, alienate and exclude. Only persons can exercise those rights.

Madison and his colleagues clearly sought to protect property rights from government aggression, no matter the legal status of the owner. We know this from the judicial opinions involving foreign property that preceded and followed the ratification of the Fifth Amendment. If this were not so, then nothing could prevent the feds from seizing and converting the property of states or local governments or international religious institutions to federal use.

War is the health of the state and the graveyard of liberty. The drug war was a disaster for freedom. The war in Ukraine will be so as well, only if we permit it.

While Speaking In Delhi Boris Johnson Discarded Brandon's Ridiculous Ukraine Narrative

indianpunchline |  This is where the defeat in Donbass turns into a climactic event calling into question the entire US narrative on Ukraine — NATO expansion, European security, and dialogue with Russia — and, of course, the fixation about Vladimir Putin’s leadership of Russia.

A poll published Thursday by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows Americans’ desire to get involved has waned somewhat. Only 32% say the U.S. should have a major role in the conflict, down from 40% last month. An additional 49% say the US should have a minor role.

While speaking in Delhi, Johnson all but discarded Biden’s narrative. Instead, he called for “setting out a vision for the future of Ukraine in the security architecture of Europe. Where does Ukraine fit in now?”

Johnson said Ukraine needs to be able to answer that question eventually — “what the Ukrainians want eventually.” Interestingly, he didn’t use the word “Ukrainian government.”  

Johnson dilated on “a collection of security guarantees from like-minded countries — security commitments about what we can do to back them up with weaponry, with training, and with intelligence sharing.” But he quickly added that this cannot be “like an Article 5 (NATO) guarantee.” Instead, he said, Ukraine should have “deterrence by denial.”  

Per Johnson’s vision, Ukraine’s NATO membership is inconceivable. Britain anticipates new facts on the ground. Johnson appeared to recognise the emergent political realities as the Russian juggernaut relentlessly “grinds” Kiev’s war machine to dust.

Censorship And Disinformation The Only Western Weapons That Still Appear To Work

mtracey  |  Another severe difficulty of Ling’s, which raises fundamental questions about his ability to cover his declared beat, is recognizing what “disinformation” even is. Maybe Ling missed it, but earlier this month Ken Dilanian of NBC News — one of the most faithful mouthpieces of the US national security state — went on air and openly revealed that the US Government is mounting a full-fledged “information warfare” campaign related to Ukraine. A key component of which is feeding fake information to the media. Dilanian cited one particular fake story that had been deliberately planted to journalists by intelligence officials — despite those officials knowing it was fake. Weirdly though, all the newly emboldened, “disinformation” debunking journalists like Ling don’t seem to regard that campaign of unconcealed information warfare as within their job’s purview.

Ling also appears to have missed a recent revelation reported at CNN of all places, in which an anonymous “Western” official is quoted saying this about the current PR activities of Ukraine government officials: “It’s a war — everything they do and say publicly is designed to help them win the war. Every public statement is an information operation, every interview, every Zelensky appearance broadcast is an information operation.” And yet despite the admitted existence of this “information operation,” Ling is gleeful to participate in it, by giddily spreading around the Ukraine officials’ photos, videos, and claims without a shred of independent corroboration — all under the veneer of Ling’s tough, adversarial journalism. Russia is obviously engaged in its own “information operation,” but so too is Ukraine. Will Ling report on himself next as a “disinformation” culprit?

Of course he won’t, because despite his bogus pretensions, Ling has made it perfectly clear that he has no problem at all with “disinformation” as such. In fact, he actively supports disinformation tactics when it’s in service of his desired political objectives. He publicly demanded that the “intelligence service” of his own government, Canada, ought to be “doing a lot more” to proactively counter Russia by utilizing more robust information warfare techniques. So that’s Justin Ling for you: a “disinformation” reporter who loves disinformation.

If you want to understand why there is so little deviation today from the burgeoning pro-war consensus, it’s got a lot to do with media functionaries like Ling. Most journalists would be utterly mortified to be accused, in a “Serious” outlet like Foreign Policy, of abetting a “Russian disinformation operation.” And their fear would probably be rational: this could genuinely be a career-killer, particularly in the current war-fevered climate. All bets are off in terms of what retribution tactics are potentially on the table. They could be socially shunned, professionally ostracized, and have their material well-being seriously imperiled. The self-appointed “disinformation” pontificators such as Ling, posturing as these tenacious public-spirited watchdogs, really could destroy them.

Ling is an especially blatant joke and fraud, but the media industry is increasingly dominated by creeps like him. Fortunately, they can’t do much to me — except to provide occasional amusement at how pathetic they are.

The West Lacks The Productive Capacity To Supply Ukraine And Thus To Supply Itself

guardian |  The past week furnished a grim glimpse of the future that awaits if Putin is able to continue to wage war with impunity, commit more heinous crimes, threaten nuclear and chemical blackmail and trash the UN charter. Drastically downgrading its growth forecasts due to the conflict, the International Monetary Fund predicted global economic fragmentation, rising debt and social unrest.

David Malpass, head of the World Bank, said a “human catastrophe” loomed as an unprecedented, estimated 37% rise in food prices, caused by war-related disruption to supplies, pushed millions into poverty, increased malnutrition, and reduced funding for education and healthcare for the least well-off.

More than 5 million people have fled Ukraine in two months, and more will follow, exacerbating an international migration emergency that extends from Afghanistan to the Sahel. In drought-hit east Africa, the World Food Programme says 20 million people may face starvation this year. Putin’s war did not create the drought, but the UN warns it could hurt efforts to reduce global heating, thereby triggering further displacement and forced migration.

The broader, negative political impact of the war, should it rage on indefinitely, is almost incalculable. The UN’s future as an authoritative global forum, lawmaker and peacekeeper is in jeopardy, as more than 200 former officials warned Guterres last week. At risk, too, is the credibility of the international court of justice, whose injunction to withdraw was scorned by Putin, and the entire system of war crimes prosecutions.

In terms of democratic norms and human rights, the full or partial subjugation of Ukraine would spell disaster for the international rules-based order – and a triumph for autocrats everywhere. What message would it send, for example, to China over Taiwan, or indeed to Putin as he covets the vulnerable Baltic republics? Islamist terrorists who now furtively plot to exploit the west’s Ukraine distraction would relish such a victory for violence.

Failure to stop the war, rescue Ukraine and punish Russia’s rogue regime to the fullest extent possible would come at an especially high price for Europe and the EU. In prospect is a second cold war with permanent Nato bases on Russia’s borders, massively increased defence spending, an accelerating nuclear arms race, unceasing cyber and information warfare, endemic energy shortages, rocketing living costs, and more French-style, Russian-backed rightwing populist extremism.

In short, the dawn of a new age of instability. Why on earth would politicians such as America’s Joe Biden, Germany’s Olaf Scholz, and France’s Emmanuel Macron tolerate so fraught and dangerous a future when, by taking a more robust stand now, they might prevent much of it from materialising? By supposedly avoiding risks today, they ensure a much riskier tomorrow.

No Amount Of Ukraine Crisis Propaganda Can Save Old Brandon

BAR  |  The U.S. propaganda victory over Russia will do Joe Biden and the democrats little good. Their willingness to act on their promises and meet the people's needs will be the deciding factors in determining their political fate.

Biden’s actions aren’t very surprising. He was the Ukraine point person after the Barack Obama coup in 2014. He was always one of the most hawkish democrats and came into the presidency with Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland and the same cast of characters who first violated Ukraine’s sovereignty. He hoped to instigate Russia and kill the NordStreamII pipeline and sanction Russia. He didn’t expect the full incursion that he spent months saying would happen.

Now he is hoisted on his own petard, trying to bully other nations into condemning Russia when it isn’t in their interests to do so, and causing world wide suffering in a futile effort to destroy Russia’s economy. Sanctions against Russia have increased fuel prices all over the world. Disruptions in wheat production will reduce Ukraine’s harvest and decrease supplies in places that had no connection with this ginned up conflict. The anti-Russian propaganda is working but the pro-Biden effort is not, hence the public disapproval.

Millions of Americans are now convinced that Putin is evil and Zelensky is good, but they still have doubts about their own president. The corporate media pro-Biden propaganda said that he was the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt and had cut child poverty in half. Now the child tax credit is gone, Build Back Better is up in the air, and promises to relieve student loan debt are a distant memory. Biden and his team think that spin about “Putin’s price hikes” will help to minimize political damage but the polls are an indication of a sour national mood.

Biden is mistaken if he thinks that Putin hatred is enough to save his and the democratic party’s political fortunes. They will sink or swim based on how well they meet needs here at home. Right now, public money that we’re told can’t be used for a child tax credit is going to the military industrial complex to “save” Ukraine.

Is Unselfconscious Absurdity A Symptom Of Senile Dementia?

NYPost |  President Biden on Friday celebrated Earth Day in Seattle with a rambling speech vowing to make “every vehicle” in the military “climate-friendly” while admitting his personal fleet includes a prized Corvette that “does nothing but pollute.”

Biden didn’t offer specifics while telling local Democrats in a park that he intends to cut the emissions of war machines like tanks, helicopters and fighter jets.

“I’m going to start the process where every vehicle in the United States military — every vehicle is going to be climate-friendly. Every vehicle. No, I mean it. We’re spending billions of dollars to do it,” Biden said.

The president, who uses large amounts of fossil fuels for regular weekend trips home to Delaware, admitted he’s had a hard time practicing what he is preaching.

“I’m an automobile buff. I have a ’68 Corvette that does nothing but pollute the air. But I don’t drive it very much,” Biden joked, appearing to refer to his 1967 Corvette Stingray.

The gaffe-prone president’s week began with an aide dressed as an Easter bunny intervening to stop him from talking to reporters, but no staffers stepped in as he proceeded to use baby-talk to imitate a child’s plea for him to”pwomise” him to “pwease” protect the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

Why Brandon Can't Ditch "The Ukraine Is Winning" Narrative...,

The West made an unforced political error - right at the start - by pushing the volume up to eleven. Since then, it has effectively painted itself into a corner. It’s unclear exactly why this happened, but at least three things seem to have been operating. One was genuine shock and surprise, as the house of cards they had built over several decades started to fall apart. A second was the confident predictions that the Russians would fail. 

How much of this was wishful thinking? How much inability to face facts? How much bad analysis? How much excessive trust in the Ukrainians? How much the escalation effect, as one government felt it had at least to equal, if not exceed, the condemnations of another.  Historians of the future will have to sort all of this out. But it’s clear that, to the extent that western leaders believed the attack would fail, and that the war would be unpopular, they must have felt that amping up the volume would have no adverse consequences. 

A third factor is the fear engendered by the capabilities the Russians have been demonstrating and the low-key practical response of the US. It’s not that Europeans ever naively imagined that the US was going to “defend” them. Rather, the hope was that in any political crisis in Europe, first with the Soviet Union and then with Russia, the US would necessarily be an actor, and this would give the Russians pause. But it’s clear that the Russians had already gamed out a lack of US response in their planning. In addition, I think that western elites have been genuinely shocked at how little high-intensity warfare capability the NATO countries actually have.  To some extent, all this shouting is aimed at keeping up their collective morale. Most of our leaders are of a generation that grew up with the belief that if you want something badly enough, you can will it into being. But let's digress for a moment...,

Because Obama was inexperienced in Foreign Affairs, he was coerced into partnering with the corrupt and compromised Joe Biden for foreign affairs supervision. Even worse, as Senator Obama he had been "schooled" by Sen Joe Lieberman on the Middle East and foreign affairs.  Consequently, when he was tapped for the presidency, Obama made extremely poor choices for his foreign policy team. 

The nomination of Hillary was not just clumsy, it was a disaster. Susan Rice and Samantha Power with regime change policy .... drone assassinations ...Iraq, Afghanistan (nixed advise in 2009 from Richard Holbrooke), Libya and Syria. War crimes and crimes against humanity. Gross failure in the so-called reset with Russia. Obama was so outmanned by Putin, that he initiated the policy to make Russia a pariah state. Obama also initiated regime change in Ukraine in 2014.

A U.S. President gets a daily briefing from the CIA. Then he gets the same story a second time from the Washington Post. Then he gets it a third time from the NYTimes. If that president is Joe Biden, his aides are a pack of nitwits. His Vice President is astonishingly stupid. Are there any better informed parties in Biden's circle? Probably. Do they have access? Who knows. 

Another old story, this is one Seymour Hersh used to tell in interviews. Shortly after Obama was inaugurated Thomas Pickering, then retired but still the dean of US diplomatic corps, got a call from parties in Iran. Said parties complained they were being shut out by the new administration and wanted Pickering to get a message to the President. Pickering had worked for every US President from Johnson to Bush Jr. And had had some interaction with Ike and JFK. Pickering could not get through. Baby Bush was often called the boy in the bubble. Obama’s bubble was far more exclusive. Iranians could not believe such an arrangement was possible; it was so.

The U.S. was the first to mine oil and gas in a big way, and exploited that to build a huge economy. But it has mostly wasted this gift, this patrimony, and now depends on the looting of others. On the other hand, Russia is pretty much self–sufficient, has a very advanced economy, has a very well educated workforce, has huge reserves of energy, and the most efficient military in the world, spending but a fraction of the U.S. and equal or surpassing it in every important way. This is real power, unlike the froth of the present U.S. economy with a hollowed out industrial base and a bloated military, led by incompetent and corrupt politicians who have swallowed their own propaganda and have come to believe the lies they tell.

The U.S. empire and the British empire before it (and more or less successful European competitors also) grew to prominence mostly by piracy and looting, imposing their world view and economic and religious regimes on the rest of the world by force. That system is collapsing before our eyes.

One of the reasons that the “Ukraine is winning” narrative is still (just) holding up, is that nobody in a position of responsibility or influence wants to consider the real consequences of a Russian victory – which will, of course, go much wider than just Ukraine. 

This is why it’s wrong to see the Europeans as passively following American orders. For a start, the major European powers (notably the French and the UK) have been investing heavily in Ukraine for a long time, and this is a significant and long-term defeat for them. In addition, their leaders are beginning to understand that the results of this chaos are going to include a hostile and distrustful Russia on the frontiers of the EU, and with a military capability that exceeds now anything the Europeans could collectively generate in less than ten years. Get out of that. But how? 

I suspect we are in for a period of epic sulking, a bit like that after the Communist victory in China. But that won’t solve any practical problems, and I also suspect we shall see the slow disintegration of EU solidarity as countries like Spain and Portugal ask exactly why they should continue to sacrifice their economies to make political points against a large country, far away, with which they have no quarrel.

The Devil Has To Have Access To You In Order To Tempt You...,

Central European states, whose political and economic systems had been completely destroyed, and which in any case were regarded as having been imposed by a foreign power, looked westwards for help, and much of their leadership saw western Europe as an inspiration. 

It is important to understand what that inspiration was for.

The fundamental contradiction of the Soviet system was that the nomenklatura had control over fantastic real wealth but did not have the official right to live better than the common worker. And in fact did not live better for a long time, and even later on it wasn’t enough — privileged people did gain access to luxury goods from the West in the last couple decades of the USSR, but there were limits to that (you had to keep appearances after all, as there were serious punishments for crossing certain lines even in the 1980s). They also could not pass that control over resources to their progeny, which was a huge problem on its own.

Once economic ties were established between East and West that contradiction became really glaring. Imagine being one of those Soviet officials signing the original gas and oil export deals — you go to the West, they wine you and dine you in various fancy mansions, drive you around in limousines, etc. the people you negotiate with are all very wealthy. And you negotiate with them as an equal, signing deals worth many billions. But then you go back to Moscow where, if you are lucky, you live in one of the Stalinkas (the nicer relatively roomy apartments built in the 1930s in more central areas of cities), and if you are not, you at best have a 2-bedroom dingy flat in a non-descript Khrushchyovka, quite possibly something even smaller.

That starts to gnaw on people over time and the question “why can’t I enjoy the same level of consumption as those people” begins to weigh on them. Even more so under the pressure from their wives and children, who are generally even more materialistically oriented. The argument “You can’t live in a mansion, drive a Ferrari and have a yacht in order for your fellow citizens to have free housing and healthcare and high-quality education” didn’t go well with these people, if it was ever considered.

So that is what the “inspiration” was for — the Western system provided both opportunity and ideological justification for uncontrolled looting. Pure greed ruled the day.

In effect the years 1989-1991 were the second phase of the neoliberal revolution — it started in the West in the 1970s, then a certain layers in the Soviet bureaucracy saw that and decided “Hey, that sounds good, we should do it here too”, and the rest is history. The 1980s were in a way a lot more similar on both sides of the curtain than people realize.

Now notice what the turning point was — it was once extensive direct contacts between East and West were established. The Devil has to have access to you in order to successfully tempt you. So separating as completely as possible from the West would not have been a bad idea back then, and it might still be beneficial now.

That realization is starting to slowly creep into the public subconscious, we will see how far it goes.

Vladimir Putin Meets With Russia’s Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu

kremlin  |  The Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and the people’s militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic have liberated Mariupol. The remaining nationalists are hiding in the industrial area of the Azovstal steel plant.

Mariupol is a major industrial centre and the main transport hub on the Sea of Azov. In 2014, the Kiev regime declared the city the temporary capital of the Donetsk Region, and during the subsequent eight years it has been turned into a powerful stronghold and the base of far-right Ukrainian nationalists. In fact, it was the capital of the Azov Battalion.

A large amount of heavy weaponry and military hardware have been deployed in the city, including tanks, the Smerch and Uragan multiple rocket launcher systems, heavy artillery systems and the Tochka-U missile complexes. Tochka-U has a range of 120 kilometres, while the distance from Mariupol to Russia’s city of Taganrog is 94 kilometres and approximately the same to Rostov, the capital of the Southern Federal District.

The city has been stocked with missiles, munitions, fuel and lubricants, and food provisions for lengthy hostilities. The main infrastructure facilities, including the seaport and the waterway, have been mined and blocked with floating cranes. The majority of vessels there belong to foreign states.

As for armoured vehicles, there were 179 tanks and armoured fighting vehicles there, 170 various guns and mortars, including multiple rocket launchers which I have already mentioned, the Smerch and Uragan systems. When the city was surrounded on March 11, there were more than 8,100 troops of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and nationalist units in the city, as well as foreign mercenaries, who formed a large group. During the operation to liberate the city, over 4,000 of them have been neutralised, 1,478 have surrendered, and the remaining group of over 2,000 has been blocked in the industrial area of the Azovstal plant.

In their resistance efforts, the nationalists used almost all residential buildings as fortified emplacements. Armoured vehicles and artillery were placed on ground floors, and snipers took up positions on upper floors. There were separate units armed with ATGMs as well. The residents were brought to the middle floors and basements and used as human shields. It was done in almost every block of flats.

When retreating, the Ukrainian army and the nationalist battalions in Mariupol and other Ukrainian cities were using civilians as a cover. We are aware of four instances when, in order to cover their retreat, they made people leave the basements. The latest incident was literally four days ago, when we were liberating the port area and they made almost everyone leave high-rise buildings so that they could flee leaving behind ruins, including completely destroyed socially important and cultural sites.

While liberating Mariupol, the Russian army and the people's militia units from the DPR took every precaution to save civilian lives. Mr President, as you instructed, humanitarian corridors have been created daily since March 21 to evacuate civilians and foreign nationals.

Servicemen of the Ukrainian Armed Forces and militants from nationalist battalions were encouraged to lay down their arms. Of course, they were guaranteed life, safety and medical help.

We remained in daily communication with Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine [Irina] Vereshchuk with regard to planned humanitarian acts, which included corridors and transport, both ambulances and buses. Occasionally, up to 100 such buses and 25 to 30 ambulances were made available per day.

Foreign diplomatic missions got in touch with us in various ways because their nationals were there. By the way, we have been able to free and evacuate many of them from Mariupol as part of these humanitarian initiatives. We provided official notifications to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, the relevant OSCE structures, the International Committee of the Red Cross and other international organisations stating the time and place of these initiatives. In some instances, we even insisted on their presence to make sure that all the humanitarian rules are complied with to the extent it was possible, considering the constant and never-ending fire coming from the nationalist battalions and the Ukrainian Armed Forces.

Despite the resistance of the fighters and all others, we were able to evacuate 142,711 civilians from Mariupol after you issued instructions to this effect. We freed all hostages at the seaport, including sea crews. Those who took them hostage damaged their communications systems so that they could not get in touch with anyone. The port was mined, and the waterway blocked. I hope that these ships will now be able to leave this port.

As of today, the Russian Army and the Donetsk People’s Republic’s people’s militia control all of Mariupol, reliably blocking Azovstal territory with what remains of the nationalist forces and foreign mercenaries.

Over the past two days, again as per your instructions, we declared a ceasefire between 2 pm and 4 pm, stopped all military action and opened humanitarian corridors to enable civilians who may be at Azovstal to leave.

We prepared about 90 buses for them, and 25 ambulances. Of course, considering all the distortions we face, we installed Russian Aerospace Forces cameras and received the stream almost in real time here at the command centre. No one left Azovstal. However, other civilians, over 100 of them, were able to leave. This was a major effort for us over the past few days, and we carried it out together with all the relevant international organisations.

The city is now calm, which allows us to begin efforts to restore order, enable people to return to their homes and bring peaceful life back to the city. As for those hiding at Azovstal, we have reliably sealed its perimeter, and need three or four days to complete this effort at Azovstal.

This concludes my report.

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: I believe it would be inadvisable to storm this industrial zone.

I order you to cancel it.

Sergei Shoigu: Yes, sir.

Vladimir Putin: This is the case when we have to prioritise preserving the lives and health of our soldiers and officers. Of course, this is our constant priority, but even more so in this case. There is no need to penetrate these catacombs and crawl under these industrial facilities.

Seal off the industrial zone completely.

Sergei Shoigu: Yes, sir.

Vladimir Putin: You must offer all those who have not laid down their weapons to do so. Russia guarantees them their lives and dignity as per the relevant international legal instruments. All the wounded will get medical assistance.

You successfully completed the combat effort to liberate Mariupol. Let me congratulate you on this occasion, and please convey my congratulations to the troops. I am also asking you to submit proposals on bestowing state decorations on the service personnel who distinguished themselves. Of course, as usual, there will be various decorations, but I want everyone to know that they are all heroes for us and for all of Russia.

In this context, we need to make sure that we fulfil all the social commitments to our service personnel, especially the wounded and the families of our fallen comrades.

However, I believe that this would not be enough. We have to do more and come up with additional support measures, and in some case to consider ways of perpetuating the memory of those of our comrades who displayed heroism and sacrificed their lives so that our people in Donbass live in peace and to enable Russia, our country, to live in peace. These people deserved this by what they did and the way they honoured their oath.

I am asking you to work on this matter within the Defence Ministry, while I will issue the corresponding instructions to the Presidential Executive Office. I will talk to my colleagues in the regions, and they will work with the municipalities across Russia.

Assuming control over Mariupol, a major city in the south of the country, is obviously a success. Congratulations.

Sergei Shoigu: Thank you, Mr President.

Areas Of Ukraine That Russia Is In Process Of Securing

Tass  |  The Russian army during the second stage of the special operation should establish full control over the Donbass. This was stated by Deputy Commander of the Central Military District (CVO), Major General Rustam Minnekayev, at the annual meeting of the Union of Defense Industries of the Sverdlovsk Region.

"From the beginning of the second phase of the special operation, it has already begun, literally two days ago, one of the tasks of the Russian army is to establish full control over the Donbass and southern Ukraine," he said.

The control of the Russian Armed Forces over the Donbass will allow the creation of a land corridor to the Crimea, Minnekaev emphasized.

"This (control over the Donbass - TASS note) will provide a land corridor to the Crimea, as well as influence the vital facilities of the Ukrainian [military forces], Black Sea ports through which agricultural and metallurgical products are delivered to [other] countries," - said the deputy commander.

"Control over the South of Ukraine is another way out to Transnistria, where there are also facts of oppression of the Russian-speaking population. Apparently, we are now at war with the whole world, as it was in the Great Patriotic War, all of Europe, the whole world was against us. And now the same thing, they never liked Russia," he added.

Minnekaev stressed that the technical superiority of the Russian army over the Ukrainian Armed Forces on land, sea and airspace is obvious.

"During strikes, the Russian armed forces do not suffer any losses. This kills the morale of the personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine the most. The technical superiority of the Russian army on land, at sea and in the air has become obvious," he said.

Minnekaev added that the special operation should be "successfully brought to its logical conclusion." He stated that all tasks set will be fulfilled.

“We didn’t start this war, but we will finish it,” Minnekaev said.

Obama Reversed The Smith Mundt Act Prohibiting Goverment From Waging Infowar On U.S. Citizens

stanford  |  In his keynote, Obama reflected on how technology has transformed the way people create and consume media. Digital and social media companies have upended traditional media – from local newspapers to broadcast television, as well as the role these outlets played in society at large.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the American public tuned in to one of three major networks, and while media from those earlier eras had their own set of problems – such as excluding women and people of color – they did provide people with a shared culture, Obama said.

Moreover, these media institutions, with established journalistic best practices for accuracy and accountability, also provided people with similar information: “When it came to the news, at least, citizens across the political spectrum tended to operate using a shared set of facts – what they saw or what they heard from Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley.”

Fast forward to today, where everyone has access to individualized news feeds that are fed by algorithms that reward the loudest and angriest voices (and which technology companies profit from). “You have the sheer proliferation of content, and the splintering of information and audiences,” Obama observed. “That’s made democracy more complicated.”

Facts are competing with opinions, conspiracy theories, and fiction. “For more and more of us, search and social media platforms aren’t just our window into the internet. They serve as our primary source of news and information,” Obama said. “No one tells us that the window is blurred, subject to unseen distortions, and subtle manipulations.”

The splintering of news sources has also made all of us more prone to what psychologists call “confirmation bias,” Obama said. “Inside our personal information bubbles, our assumptions, our blind spots, our prejudices aren’t challenged, they are reinforced and naturally, we’re more likely to react negatively to those consuming different facts and opinions – all of which deepens existing racial and religious and cultural divides.”

But the problem is not just that our brains can’t keep up with the growing amount of information online, Obama argued. “They’re also the result of very specific choices made by the companies that have come to dominate the internet generally, and social media platforms in particular.”

The former president also made clear that he did not think technology was to blame for many of our social ills. Racism, sexism, and misogyny, all predate the internet, but technology has helped amplify them.

“Solving the disinformation problem won’t cure all that ails our democracies or tears at the fabric of our world, but it can help tamp down divisions and let us rebuild the trust and solidarity needed to make our democracy stronger,” Obama said.

He gave examples of how social media has fueled violence and extremism around the world. For example, leaders from countries such as Russia to China, Hungary, the Philippines, and Brazil have harnessed social media platforms to manipulate their populations. “Autocrats like Putin have used these platforms as a strategic weapon against democratic countries that they consider a threat,” Obama said.

He also called out emerging technologies such as AI for their potential to sow further discord online. “I’ve already seen demonstrations of deep fake technology that show what looks like me on a screen, saying stuff I did not say. It’s a strange experience people,” Obama said. “Without some standards, implications of this technology – for our elections, for our legal system, for our democracy, for rules of evidence, for our entire social order – are frightening and profound.”

Clinton/Obama Intel Officials Claim That Big Tech Monopolies Are Essential To National Security

greenwald  |  Needless to say, the U.S. security state wants to maintain a stranglehold on political discourse in the U.S. and the world more broadly. They want to be able to impose propagandistic narratives without challenge and advocate for militarism without dissent. To accomplish that, they need a small handful of corporations which are subservient to them to hold in their hands as much concentrated power over the internet as possible.

If a free and fair competitive market were to arise whereby social media platforms more devoted to free speech could fairly compete with Google and Facebook— as the various pending bills in Congress are partially designed to foster — then that new diversity of influence, that diffusion of power, would genuinely threaten the ability of the CIA and the Pentagon and the White House to police political discourse and suppress dissent from their policies and assertions. By contrast, by maintaining all power in the hands of the small coterie of tech monopolies which control the internet and which have long proven their loyalty to the U.S. security state, the ability of the U.S. national security state to maintain a closed propaganda system around questions of war and militarism is guaranteed.

In this new letter, these national security operatives barely bother to hide their intention to exploit the strong animosity toward Russia that they have cultivated, and the accompanying intense emotions from the ubiquitous, unprecedented media coverage of the war in Ukraine, to prop up their goals. Over and over, they cite the grave Russian threat — a theme they have been disseminating and manufacturing since the Russiagate fraud of 2016 — to manipulate Americans to support the preservation of Big Tech's concentrated power, and to imply that anyone seeking to limit Big Tech power or make the market more competitive is a threat to U.S. national security:

This is a pivotal moment in modern history. There is a battle brewing between authoritarianism and democracy, and the former is using all the tools at its disposal, including a broad disinformation campaign and the threat of cyber-attacks, to bring about a change in the global order. We must confront these global challenges. . . . U.S. technology platforms have given the world the chance to see the real story of the Russian military’s horrific human rights abuses in Ukraine. . . . At the same time, President Putin and his regime have sought to twist facts in order to show Russia as a liberator instead of an aggressor. . . .

The Russian government is seeking to alter the information landscape by blocking Russian citizens from receiving content that would show the true facts on the ground. .. . . . Indeed, it is telling that among the Kremlin’s first actions of the war was blocking U.S. platforms in Russia. Putin knows that U.S. digital platforms can provide Russian citizens valuable views and facts about the war that he tries to distort through lies and disinformation. U.S. technology platforms have already taken concrete steps to shine a light on Russia’s actions to brutalize Ukraine. . . . Providing timely and accurate on-the-ground information – and disrupting the scourge of disinformation from Russian state media – is essential for allowing the world (including the Russian people) to see the human toll of Russia’s aggression. . . . [T]he United States is facing an extraordinary threat from Russian cyber-attacks . . .

In the face of these growing threats, U.S. policymakers must not inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to counter increasing disinformation and cybersecurity risks, particularly as the West continues to rely on the scale and reach of these firms to push back on the Kremlin . . . . Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the test. The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure that the safety of its citizens and the narrative of events continues to be shaped by facts, not by foreign adversaries.

It is hardly controversial or novel to observe that the U.S. security state always wants and needs a hated foreign enemy precisely because it allows them to claim whatever powers and whatever budgets they want in the name of stopping that foreign villain. And every war and every new enemy ushers in new authoritarian powers and the trampling of civil liberties: both the First War on Terror, justified by 9/11, and the New Domestic War on Terror, justified by 1/6, should have taught us that lesson permanently. Usually, though, U.S. security state propagandists are a bit more subtle about how they manipulate anger and fear of foreign villains to manipulate public opinion for their own authoritarian ends.

Perhaps because of their current desperation about the support these bills have attracted, they are now just nakedly and shamelessly trying to channel the anger and hatred that they have successfully stoked toward Russia to demand that Big Tech not be weakened, regulated or restricted in any way. The cynical exploitation could hardly be more overt: if you hate Putin the way any loyal and patriotic American should, then you must devote yourself to full preservation of the power of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon.

It should go without saying that these life-long security state operatives do not care in the slightest about the dangers of "disinformation.” Indeed — as evidenced by the fact that most of them generated one Russiagate fraud after the next during...

military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex

consortiumnews  |  Every silicon fragment in the valley connects Facebook as a direct extension of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)’s LifeLog project, a Pentagon attempt to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence.” Facebook launched its website exactly on the same day – Feb. 4, 2004 – that DARPA and the Pentagon shuttered LifeLog.

No explanation by DARPA was ever provided. The MIT’s David Karger, at the time, remarked, “I am sure that such research will continue to be funded under some other title. I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of such a key research area.”

Of course a smokin’ gun directly connecting Facebook to DARPA will never be allowed to surface. But occasionally some key players speak out, such as Douglas Gage, none other than LifeLog’s conceptualizer: “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point (…) We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked.”

So Facebook has absolutely nothing to do with journalism. Not to mention pontificating over a journalist’s work, or assuming it’s entitled to cancel him or her. Facebook is an “ecosystem” built to sell private data at a huge profit, offering a public service as a private enterprise, but most of all sharing the accumulated data of its billions of users with the U.S. national security state.

The resulting algorithmic stupidity, also shared by Twitter – incapable of recognizing nuance, metaphor, irony, critical thinking – is perfectly integrated into what former C.I.A. analyst Ray McGovern brilliantly coined as the MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank complex).

In the U.S., at least the odd expert on monopoly power identified this neo-Orwellian push as accelerating “the collapse of journalism and democracy.”

Facebook “fact-checking professional journalists” does not even qualify as pathetic. Otherwise Facebook – and not analysts like McGovern – would have debunked Russiagate. It would not routinely cancel Palestinian journalists and analysts. It would not disable the account of University of Tehran professor Mohammad Marandi – who was actually born in the U.S.

I received quite a few messages stating that being canceled by Facebook – and now by Twitter – is a badge of honor. Well, everything is impermanent (Buddhism) and everything flows (Daoism). So being deleted – twice – by an algorithm qualifies at best as a cosmic joke.

I Trust Big Tech And These Former "Intelligence Community" Luminaries

technet  |  Open Letter from Former Defense, Intelligence, Homeland Security, and Cyber Officials Calling for National Security Review of Congressional Tech Legislation

April 18, 2022

This is a pivotal moment in modern history. There is a battle brewing between authoritarianism and democracy, and the former is using all the tools at its disposal, including a broad disinformation campaign and the threat of cyber-attacks, to bring about a change in the global order. We must confront these global challenges.

U.S. technology platforms have given the world the chance to see the real story of the Russian military’s horrific human rights abuses in Ukraine, including the atrocities committed in Bucha, and the incredible bravery of the Ukrainian people who continue to stand their ground. Social media platforms are filled with messages of support for Ukraine and fundraising campaigns to help Ukrainian refugees.

At the same time, President Putin and his regime have sought to twist facts in order to show Russia as a liberator instead of an aggressor. When reporting and images of the atrocities in Bucha began to circulate, along with evidence and testimony pointing to Russian forces as the perpetrators, the Kremlin was quick to label the claims as “fake news.” The Russian government is seeking to alter the information landscape by blocking Russian citizens from receiving content that would show the true facts on the ground – and it has already received buy-in from other like-minded states, such as China, whose social media platform TikTok continues to abide by Moscow’s rules of “digital authoritarianism.” Indeed, it is telling that among the Kremlin’s first actions of the war was blocking U.S. platforms in Russia. Putin knows that U.S. digital platforms can provide Russian citizens valuable views and facts about the war that he tries to distort through lies and disinformation.

U.S. technology platforms have already taken concrete steps to shine a light on Russia’s actions to brutalize Ukraine. Through their efforts, the world knows what is truly happening in cities from Mariupol to Kiev, undistorted by manipulation from Moscow. Providing timely and accurate on-the-ground information – and disrupting the scourge of disinformation from Russian state media – is essential for allowing the world (including the Russian people) to see the human toll of Russia’s aggression and is increasingly integral to U.S. diplomatic and national security efforts. It is our belief that these efforts will play a part in helping to end this war.

Meanwhile, cybersecurity threats from authoritarian regimes are also on the rise. As President Biden recently announced, the United States is facing an extraordinary threat from Russian cyber-attacks, and the private sector “must accelerate efforts to lock their digital doors.” In response to this heightened threat environment, U.S. technology companies have accelerated their partnership with the U.S. government and its allies to improve our collective defense. Both in public and behind the scenes, these companies have rolled out integrated cyber defenses, rapidly fused threat intelligence across products and services, and moved quickly to block malicious actors on their platforms. This partnership has resulted in the detection and disruption of a series of significant security threats from Russia and Belarus.

In the face of these growing threats, U.S. policymakers must not inadvertently hamper the ability of U.S. technology platforms to counter increasing disinformation and cybersecurity risks, particularly as the West continues to rely on the scale and reach of these firms to push back on the Kremlin. But recently proposed congressional legislation would unintentionally curtail the ability of these platforms to target disinformation efforts and safeguard the security of their users in the U.S. and globally. Legislation from both the House and Senate requiring non-discriminatory access for all “business users” (broadly defined to include foreign rivals) on U.S. digital platforms would provide an open door for foreign adversaries to gain access to the software and hardware of American technology companies. Unfettered access to software and hardware could result in major cyber threats, misinformation, access to data of U.S. persons, and intellectual property theft. Other provisions in this legislation would damage the capability of U.S. technology companies to roll out integrated security tools to adequately screen for nefarious apps and malicious actors, weakening security measures currently embedded in device and platform operating systems. Our national security greatly benefits from the capacity of these platforms to detect and act against these types of risks and, therefore, must not be unintentionally impeded.

We call on the congressional committees with national security jurisdiction – including the Armed Services Committees, Intelligence Committees, and Homeland Security Committees in both the House and Senate – to conduct a review of any legislation that could hinder America’s key technology companies in the fight against cyber and national security risks emanating from Russia’s and China’s growing digital authoritarianism. Such a review would ensure that legislative proposals do not enhance our adversaries’ capabilities. It is imperative that the United States avoid the pitfalls of its key allies and partners, such as the European Union (EU), whose Digital Markets Act (DMA) passed without any consideration of national security repercussions – despite repeated concerns from the Biden administration, including over potential cybersecurity risks. There were also bipartisan congressional fears that the DMA would benefit “powerful state-owned and subsidized Chinese and Russian companies,” which could have “negative impacts on internet users’ privacy, security, and free speech.” Even in light of these security concerns, the EU’s refusal to undertake a national security assessment led to none of them being addressed. The U.S. government must not make this same mistake.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marks the start of a new chapter in global history, one in which the ideals of democracy will be put to the test. The United States will need to rely on the power of its technology sector to ensure that the safety of its citizens and the narrative of events continues to be shaped by facts, not by foreign adversaries.

Sincerely,

James R. Clapper
Former Director of National Intelligence

Jane Harman
Former U.S. Representative from California
Former Ranking Member, House Intelligence Committee

Jeh C. Johnson
Former Secretary of Homeland Security†

Michael J. Morell
Former Acting Director and Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency

Leon E. Panetta
Former Secretary of Defense
Former Director, Central Intelligence Agency

Admiral Michael S. Rogers
Former Commander, U.S. Cyber Command
Former Director, National Security Agency 

Frances F. Townsend
Former Assistant to the President for Counterterrorism and Homeland Security

Why Elon Musk Will Be Prevented From Acquiring Twitter

CTH  |  The metaphorical Jack had a great idea, open a coffee shop where the beverages were free and use internal advertising as the income subsidy to operate the business.  Crowds came for the free coffee, comfy couches, fellowship, conversation and enjoyment.

It didn’t matter where Jack got the coffee, how he paid for it, or didn’t, or what product advertising the customers would be exposed to while there.  Few people thought about such things.  Curiously, it didn’t matter what size the crowd was; in the backroom of Jack’s Coffee Shop they were able to generate massive amounts of never-ending free coffee at extreme scales.

I predict essentially identical censorship/deplatforming policies across all layers of the legacy Internet stack. Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients. With only rare exceptions. The pressure is intense.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) April 16, 2022

Over time, using the justification of parking lot capacity and township regulations, not everyone would be able to park and enter.  Guards were placed at the entrance to pre-screen customers. A debate began.

Alternative coffee shops opened around town.  It was entirely possible to duplicate Jacks Coffee Shop, yet no one could duplicate the business model for the free coffee.  Indeed, there was something very unique about Jack’s Coffee Shop.  Thus, some underlying suspicions were raised:

The only way Twitter, with 217 million users, could exist as a viable platform is if they had access to tech systems of incredible scale and performance, and those systems were essentially free or very cheap.  The only entity that could possibly provide that level of capacity and scale is the United States Government – combined with a bottomless bank account.  A public-private partnership.

If my hunch is correct, Elon Musk is poised to expose the well-kept secret that most social media platforms are operating on U.S. government tech infrastructure and indirect subsidy.  Let that sink in.

The U.S. technology system, the assembled massive system of connected databases and server networks, is the operating infrastructure that offsets the cost of Twitter to run their own servers and database.  The backbone of Twitter is the United States government.

FREE COFFEE:

♦ June 2013: […] “Cloud computing is one of the core components of the strategy to help the IC discover, access and share critical information in an era of seemingly infinite data.” … “A test scenario described by GAO in its June 2013 bid protest opinion suggests the CIA sought to compare how the solutions presented by IBM and Amazon Web Services (AWS) could crunch massive data sets, commonly referred to as big data.” … “Solutions had to provide a “hosting environment for applications which process vast amounts of information in parallel on large clusters (thousands of nodes) of commodity hardware” using a platform called MapReduce. Through MapReduce, clusters were provisioned for computation and segmentation. Test runs assumed clusters were large enough to process 100 terabytes of raw input data. AWS’ solution received superior marks from CIA procurement officials”… (MORE)

♦ November 2013: […] “Twitter closed its first day of trading on Nov. 7, 2013, at $44.90 a share. In the years since then, it briefly traded above $70, but more recently, it has struggled.”

Jack’s free coffee shop has been for sale, but there’s no viable business model in the private sector.  No one has wanted to purchase Twitter – it is simply unsustainable; the data processing costs exceed the capacity of the platform to generate revenue – until now….

 

 

Unintended Irony Of The Bezos Post Pantshitting About Musk's Bid To Own Twitter

WaPo  |  “What we need is a First Amendment-respecting process in which the government doesn’t dictate content but does cause there to be an acceptable behavioral code,” Wheeler said.

Even professionals who think that social media is a net good say that Twitter as Musk envisions it would be terrible for users and investors. The past few years have spawned any number of Twitter knockoffs catering to those who feel muzzled by the original, including Gab and Parler, but none has taken off in the mainstream.

That is not an accident, said Alicia Wanless, director of the Partnership for Countering Influence Operations at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace in Washington. People want basic rules in the same way they would avoid a nightclub that turns a blind eye to casual violence.

“Musk can buy Twitter and try to take it back to some nostalgic lost Eden of the early days of the Internet, but platforms with the least community standards, like Gab, hardly rank because it isn’t a good business,” Wanless said.

Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has helped protect global rights activists from government hacking and ordinary people from domestic stalking, said she “would be concerned about the human rights and personal safety impacts of any single person having complete control over Twitter’s policies.”

She added, “I am particularly concerned about the impact of complete ownership by a person who has repeatedly demonstrated that he does not understand the realities of content moderation at scale.”

Citing Musk supporting the idea for allowing anything legal, Galperin said: “Twitter’s content moderation practices leave a lot to be desired, but they tried the policies that Musk seems to favor more than a decade ago, and it did not work.”

A pullback in moderation would disproportionately harm women, minorities and anyone out of favor with the establishment, civil rights advocates said. “Without rules of the road, we are going to be put in harm’s way,” said Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice group Color of Change. “Our protections cannot be up to the whims of billionaires.”

Alex Stamos, the former Facebook chief security officer who called out Russian disinformation on that platform during the 2016 election, said Musk has a notion of Twitter as a public square for free expression that is divorced from the reality of many individuals and failed to acknowledge that it would give more power to the most powerful.

Without moderation, Stamos said, “anybody who expresses an opinion ends up with every form of casual insult ranging to death and rape threats. That is the baseline of the Internet. If you want people to be able to interact, you need to have basic rules.”

Speaking Of Toxic White Women...,

greenwald  |  Even when one marvels, as one must, at all these impressive displays of cynical elite emotional manipulation and self-victimization, there is absolutely nobody who exploits it better than Taylor Lorenz. Raised in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, educated at Greenwich High School and lovely private boarding schools in the Swiss Alps, then graduating from the leafy private liberal arts Hobart and William Smith Colleges in bucolic upstate New York, Lorenz developed an intense and unyielding obsession with TikTok teenagers and their TikTok houses. This interest in the lives of online teenage culture was cultivated as she approached middle age, and she parlayed this unique interest into stints as a star front-page reporter with the two most powerful newspapers in the U.S.: The New York Times, which she quit two months ago, and The Washington Post, where she is now a star columnist.

It is almost impossible to envision a single individual in whom power, privilege and elite prerogative reside more abundantly than Taylor Lorenz. Using the metrics of elite liberal culture, the word “privilege” was practically invented for her: a rich straight white woman from a wealthy family raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and educated in actual Swiss boarding schools who now writes about people's lives, often casually destroying those lives, on the front pages of the most powerful East Coast newspapers on the planet. And yet, in the eyes of her fellow media and political elites, there is virtually no person more victimized, more deserving of your sympathy and attention, more vulnerable, marginalized and abused than she.

That is because — like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and Labour MPs and columnists from The Independent and The Guardian and The New York Times who pioneered these paths of elite victimhood before her — Taylor Lorenz must sometimes hear criticisms of her work and her views. Virtually alone among journalists — who are famously universally beloved and never subjected to any form of real abuse: as Julian Assange will be happy to tell you if you can visit him in his high-security prison cell in the UK, or as these Sri Lankan journalists will explain from their hospital beds after being physically brutalized by the police for covering an anti-government protest on Thursday — Lorenz hears criticisms of her work, sometimes in the form of very angry and even profane or threatening tweets from anonymous people online. This not only means that she deserves your sympathy and concern but, more importantly, that you should heap scorn and recrimination on those who criticize her work because they are responsible for the trauma she endures. Most of all, you must never criticize her publicly for fear of what you might unleash against her.

In other words, Lorenz — like all employees of large media corporations or powerful establishment politicians in Washington and London — is and always should be completely free to continue to publish articles or social media posts that destroy the reputations of powerless people, often with outright lies. But you must never criticize her because she suffers from PTSD and other trauma as a result of the mean tweets that are unleashed by her critics. If you believe that is some sort of straw man exaggeration of what political and media elites are trying to do — create a shield of immunity around them while they retain the right to target, attack, insult, malign and destroy anyone they want — then it means you did not see the Emmy-worthy performances of Lorenz and various NBC News personalities on Friday afternoon during their five-minute segment on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press Daily designed to fortify this warped, inverted standard of morality and power.

The NBC segment was ostensibly designed to "cover” a “study” from January published by the Brookings Institutions and conducted by "NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation.” This study purported to forensically analyze — and I am not joking — the increase in criticisms of Taylor Lorenz as the result of a tweet I posted criticizing her (re-cast in elite parlance as “attacking” and "targeting” her), as well as a television segment that aired on Tucker Carlson's Fox program that also criticized the NYT reporter. You will never guess what the study revealed: namely, our criticism of her was responsible for a torrent of violent abuse, misogynistic rage, and traumatizing brutality against the corporate journalist:

Our analysis used large-scale quantitative data to assess how the public conversation surrounding these journalists changed in the aftermath of being targeted by prominent media personalities. The research findings showed sharp increases in harmful speech after the journalists were targeted by Carlson and Greenwald….After Carlson targeted Lorenz in a segment on his Fox News show, we found that one in two tweets mentioning Lorenz contained either toxic or insulting language….In Figure 2, we plot the 24-hour moving average of tweets before and after Greenwald targeted Lorenz. The figure shows that after Greenwald’s attack, the likelihood that tweets mentioning Lorenz would contain harmful speech increased by 144%, peaking on Aug. 15, 2021, two days after he targeted Lorenz.

Now, permit me to pause to acknowledge an important concession. The three academic scholars who are the authors of this groundbreaking study on online abuse of powerful elites are absolute experts in marginalization, victimhood and abuse. They have the lived experience of it. Indeed, nobody has suffered worse deprivations than they, so one should be extremely deferential in treating their pronouncements with the respect they deserve. Zeve Sanderson is a graduate of Brown University and the Masters’ Program of New York University and is now the Founding Executive Director at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics. The other two have degrees from New York University and George Washington University and are also now employed studying “online extremism” at NYU, one of the country's most expensive private universities residing in the heart of Manhattan. So they clearly know marginalization and victimhood when they see it.

The on-screen title of the NBC segment was “1 in 3 Women Under 35 Experience Online Attacks.” This was an extremely odd title since they interviewed two journalists who recounted their online trauma, neither of whom fall into that category. Though Lorenz is often infantilized by her media supporters as some teenager or very young adult — a natural assumption, I suppose, given her obsession with teenaged TikTok houses and other adolescent online paraphernalia — in fact her age is expressed at anywhere in the range from 36 to 43 years old depending on her mood of the day.

The other featured journalist alongside her was Kate Sosin, who does not identify as a woman at all but rather “a proud trans person” who uses the pronouns “they/them"; by referring to Sosin repeatedly as a woman and using the pronouns “she” and “her” to reference their work, NBC repeatedly misgendered the journalist. Anyway, one would think, or at least hope, that if NBC is going to broadcast a report on “women under the age of 35 [who] have experienced harassment online,” they could find journalists who actually fall into that group and not misgender a journalist who is already complaining about abuse and trauma.

The NBC segment has to be watched in its entirety to be believed. Though the emotional performances are moving and spectacular — no denying that — it is important not to let your tears drown out the actual point they are making. It is a quite sinister and insidious lesson they are preaching. When powerful media elites receive mean and abusive tweets from anonymous and random people on Twitter, it is not the fault of those sending those tweets but rather the fault of anyone criticizing their work and their journalism. The only moral conclusion is clear: one should refrain from criticizing employees of media corporations lest one be responsible for unleashing traumatizing abuse at them. Marvel at this performative elite victimhood by all the actors involved:

We Live In The Toxic Hen-House That White Women Have "Created"...,

newyorker  |  In 2013, when people still nursed high hopes for the salvific effects of the Internet and cancellation was a fate reserved for poorly rated TV shows, a private citizen with a hundred and seventy Twitter followers was loitering in Heathrow Airport, waiting for a flight to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa,” she dashed off before boarding. “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” By the time she landed, eleven hours later, her ill-advised missive had gone disastrously viral. She stumbled off the plane to discover that a multitude of online detractors had weighed in on her character. Now she was a globally known racist.

The woman, Justine Sacco, was one of the first high-profile casualties of public shaming in the digital era, and she suffered all the consequences that have since become routine: job loss, wide-scale condemnation, and a public identity subsumed by a very public sin. Still, in the wake of subsequent disasters, her story is almost quaint. How pleasant it is to recall a simpler, kinder time when an online mobbing was an occurrence so unusual that it merited two articles in the Times.

Our social fabric has since frayed considerably. What’s curious about the brutality that fuels Internet shaming frenzies is that in real life—that is, IRL, in the usual online parlance—most of us would hesitate to consign a normal nobody to nationwide notoriety and several years of unemployment. We might even have mustered the charity to read Sacco’s quip as a satirical, if clumsy, sendup of the white privilege and parochialism that give rise to public-health inequalities. (Sacco, as people in her inner circle would have known, was no stranger to either Africa or progressive causes.) Yet the nasty comments went on accumulating, as if of their own accord. “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.” “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail.” “Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!”

It’s an open question whether there is anything redeeming about our transformation into bloodhounds as soon as we log on, and two new investigations into the nature of shame offer contrasting answers. In “How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures” (Princeton), Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, suggests that our tense political climate is the product of poor emotional regulation. In “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation” (Crown), the data-scientist-cum-journalist Cathy O’Neil suggests that shaming is structural: its ubiquity is the fault not of individual vigilantes but, rather, of the many industries that manufacture and exploit mortification for profit.

At the heart of these diverging perspectives is an ambiguity built into the very concept at issue. Shame is an emotion—a person can suffer from its bilious bite, as Sacco did—but it is also a state of affairs. No matter how Sacco felt, her ostracism was an established fact, a thing that happened to her. Is shame fundamentally a feeling or fundamentally a social phenomenon? Should we treat it as a matter of psychology or of politics?

In “How to Do Things with Emotions,” a scholarly plea for a renovated emotional landscape, Flanagan casts his vote for psychology. Troubled by the churlishness of contemporary American politics, he sets out to isolate “emotional habits that are mixed up in our troubles,” by which he means our descent into polarity, chaos, and mutual mistrust. He’s against the more vituperative forms of anger, which he believes are too prevalent, and is in favor of shame, which he regards as all but absent from our ethical repertoire. Shame, in his view, is an unjustly maligned emotion that we might rehabilitate in order to discipline racists and misogynists.

Shame, canonically, is the sinking sentiment that attends deviation from widely endorsed mores, whatever they happen to be. You can be sad or elated for any reason or for no reason, but shame requires a shared social context. The emotion in question arises not because you violated a standard that you set for yourself but because you violated a standard that your milieu (perhaps policed by Twitter) imposes on you. Because shame is a means of enforcing whatever values are operative in a given society, whether it proves salutary hinges on the merits of the moral system in which it is deployed, at least according to Flanagan. He admits that shame has too often been conscripted as a weapon against the oppressed—as when women and queer people have been encouraged to suppress their sexual impulses. Nonetheless, he calls for shame to be enlisted in the service of social justice, as it was when a concerted social-media campaign ejected the Hollywood producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein from power.