Bernays and Propaganda
By Larry Romanoff for the Saker Blog | February 6, 2021
Many years ago, the Jewish-American political commentator Walter Lippmann realised that political ideology could be completely fabricated, using the media to control both presentation and conceptualisation, not only to create deeply-ingrained false beliefs in a population, but also to entirely erase undesirable political ideas from the public mind. This was the beginning of not only the American hysteria for freedom, democracy and patriotism, but of all manufactured political opinion, a process that has been operative ever since. Lippmann created these theories of mass persuasion of the public, using totally fabricated “facts” deeply insinuated into the minds of a gullible public, but there is much more to this story. An Austrian Jew named Edward Louis Bernays, who was the nephew of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, was one of Lippmann’s most precocious students and it was he who put Lippmann’s theories into practice. Bernays is widely known in America as the father of Public Relations, but he would be much more accurately described as the father of American war marketing as well as the father of mass manipulation of the public mind.
Bernays claimed “If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind” it will be possible “to control and regiment the masses according to our will without their knowing about it”. He called this scientific technique of opinion-molding the ‘engineering of consent’, and to accomplish it he merged theories of crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle Sigmund Freud. Bernays regarded society as irrational and dangerous, with a “herd instinct”, and that if the multi-party electoral system (which was fabricated by a group of European elites as a population control mechanism) were to survive and continue to serve those elites, massive manipulation of the public mind was necessary. These elites, “invisible people”, would have, through their influence on government and their control of the media, a monopoly on the power to shape thoughts, values, and responses of the citizenry. His conviction was that this group should flood the public with misinformation and emotionally-loaded propaganda to “engineer” the acquiescence of the masses and thereby rule over them. According to him, this manufactured consent of the masses, creating conformity of opinion molded by the tool of false propaganda, would be vital for the survival of democracy. (1) (1a) (2)
Bernays wrote, “The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” He stated that in America, people are governed, their minds molded, their tastes formed, their ideas suggested, largely by men they have never heard of. He claimed, “This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner. In almost every act of our daily lives we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” (3)
In his main work titled ‘Propaganda’, (4) (4a) which he wrote in 1928, Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy in which individuals were inherently dangerous (to the rapacity of the elites) but could be harnessed and channeled by these same elites for their economic benefit. He wrote further that “No serious sociologist any longer believes that the voice of the people expresses any … wise idea. The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by … those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion. It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and clichés and verbal formulas supplied to them by the leaders. Fortunately, the … politician is able, by the instrument of propaganda, to mold and form the will of the people.” He clearly believed that virtually total control of a population was possible, and perhaps easy to accomplish: “So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented, that (they produce) an irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless.”
And it wasn’t only the public masses that were ‘inherently dangerous’, but a nation’s leaders fit this description as well, therefore also requiring manipulation and control. Bernays realised that if you can influence the leaders of a nation, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you can control the government and the country, and that is precisely where he set his sights. Bernays again: “In some departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power. There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.” He went on to tell us that “The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses.” And in this case, the “few” are the wealthy elites, their even wealthier bankers, and their brethren who control the media, publishing and entertainment industries.
US President Wilson was desperate to fulfill his obligations to his handlers by putting the US into the First World War as they wished, but was having little success with public opinion at home; few Americans wanted to enter the European war. In 1917 Wilson founded what was called The Committee on Public Information, of which Bernays became a star member. It was Bernays’ vast propaganda schemes and his influence in promoting the patently false idea that US entry to the war was primarily aimed at “bringing democracy to all of Europe”, that proved so successful in altering public opinion about the war. Thanks to Edward Bernays, American war marketing was born and would never die.
Until the First World War, these theories of creating an entirely false public opinion based on misinformation, then manipulating this for population control, were still only theories, but the astounding success of propaganda by Bernays and his group during the war laid bare the possibilities of perpetually controlling the public mind on all matters. The “shrewd” designers of Bernays’ “invisible government” developed a standard technique for what was essentially propaganda and mind control, or at least opinion control, and infiltrated it throughout the US government, its departments and agencies, and its leaders and politicians. Coincident with this, they practiced infecting the leaders of every identifiable group – fraternal, religious, commercial, patriotic, social – and encouraging these men to likewise infect their supporters.
Bernays was apparently stunned by the outstanding success of his democracy slogan and hate campaign in swaying public opinion in favor of war, and so immediately began to apply his model to peacetime enterprises. “In applying his uncle’s Freudian theories to deal with public conceptions, Bernays realised that provoking a fear of communism and then manipulating the public’s emotions toward it, could be a sure recipe for success in the widespread engineering of popular opinion and control of the population. This theory was so powerful that it became a weapon of its own during the cold war.” The term ‘propaganda’ had acquired a poor reputation so Bernays created and promoted the term ‘Public Relations’, but of course his processes were no such thing. Bernays’ PR ethic involved psychological manipulation and control of the public mind through cleverly-devised – and thoroughly false – propaganda.
Bernays carries the blame for more than American entry into the two world wars, having been instrumental in paving the way for the US cannibalisation and military colonisation of much of the world, and for the US installing and supporting the dozens of brutal military dictatorships around the world. His first international project was helping to engineer the US overthrow of the popular elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala. At the time, the Rockefellers’ United Fruit Company and various US elites and international financiers owned most of Guatemala including 70% of all the arable land, the communications facilities, the only railroad and shipping port, and controlled most exports. When Arbenz commenced expropriations and land redistribution, Bernays developed a massive propaganda campaign that colored Arbenz as communist, a terrorist, an enemy to democracy, a blot on humanity, and much more, to the extent that American public opinion supported an outrageous travesty and one of the most brutal violations of human rights in US history. Bernays’ template has been used about 70 times with US invasions of that many nations, which is one source of the vast disconnect between what the American people believe their government has done and what it has actually done. As a side note, Guatemala appealed to the United Nations to stop the Americans’ massive interference in their country, a plea that was sympathetically received by UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold who proved troublesome for the US. He would do so again a few years later, and would be assassinated by the CIA for his trouble.
I discussed earlier the black and white mentality that pervades America. Much of this is supported by the witch-hunting versions of Christianity that Americans have embraced, but much of the blame must be laid on Bernays’ propaganda methods. Bernays himself asserted that propaganda could produce rapid and strong emotional responses in the public, but that the range of these responses was limited because the emotional loading inherent in his propaganda would create a kind of binary mentality, eventually forcing the population into a programmed black and white world – which is precisely what we see in the US today. This isn’t difficult to understand. In a discussion of a landscaping option for our garden, we could have a range of dispassionate responses from antipathy to adoration, but when Bernays flooded the public with fabricated tales of Germans killing babies, the range of potential responses was not dispassionate but rather entirely emotional and would be limited to either abhorrence or perhaps a blocking of the information. In a sense, our emotional switch will be forced into either an ‘on’ or ‘off’ position, with no other reasonable choices. We see this in debates on subjects like global warming, where positions do not correspond to educational or employment circumstances, nor to experience, but tend to be strongly emotional responses along ideological and political lines with precisely the kind of binary mentality Bernays predicted.
It is interesting to note that the manipulators eventually became the manipulated. Wilson, in his eagerness to manipulate public opinion in favor of war, failed to realise he was himself being manipulated by his handlers, by these same elite propagandists whose war ambitions he was fulfilling, as well as other schemes they had already planted in his mind. The puppeteer became the puppet, and the practice became permanent. The elite few, as Bernays called them, realised early on the potential for control of governments, and in every subsequent US administration the president and his White House staff, the politicians, the leaders of the military and intelligence agencies, all fell prey to this same disease of shrewd manipulation. Roosevelt’s “intense desire for war” (5) (6) (7) in 1939 was the result of this same infection process and, once infected, he of course approved of the infection of the entire American population. George Bush with Iraq and Obama with Libya and Syria are not different. Walter Lippmann and Edward Bernays succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.
Bernays was very correct in stating that a society’s ability to participate in a democracy was dependent on how well-informed the society was, but Americans fail to appreciate that it is ignorance and not knowledge or education that protects the existence of multi-party political systems. That is why American leaders, controlled by the same “invisible government” and with a fully-compliant elite-owned media, have intentionally misrepresented their current policies and actions to the public, while their “elite few” specialised in massive historical revisionism, especially American history in the world and the effects of that history on other nations. By keeping Americans ignorant and uninformed, their minds filled with foolish and false myths, and forever distracted by irrelevancies, American leaders and their puppet-masters have used Bernays’ theories to control public opinion and beliefs with lies, religion, patriotism and emotional propaganda. It was very much an “engineered ignorance” created by a continuing program of misinformation, manipulation and deception, a shrewdly-planned subversion of the American public.
The almost overwhelming political-religious ideological fog permeating America today is due to generations of institutionalized deception and propaganda, and is the direct cause of much of the renowned ignorance of the American people. Their capitalist ideology as well, is rooted in economic misconceptions and false propaganda, with the result that almost no Americans today have any understanding of the real (and largely criminal) reasons for their nation’s economic success. The astonishing extent of the binary polarisation of politics and government is another example, yet few Americans have any understanding of their condition. As one author noted, “The wealthy in America have created an inherently imbalanced system that is exploitable by the wealthy and they are working through the use of propaganda and misinformation to convince Americans that the system is just, or, if anything, unfairly biased toward the poor.” And again, “The economic system that America has developed is dependent on the exploitation of foreign countries and the acquisition of foreign resources, which is why (the US) pursues a strategy of global preeminence.” He went on to state that the foreign policy of the American Right-Wing has been developed through extensive propaganda and exaggeration of foreign threats in order to maintain the conditions for public support and to justify the suppression of dissent.
I have written before that no Right-Wing government could survive in the full light of day with all truths exposed, because most of these truths are bitterly anti-social and designed only to create a flow of a nation’s wealth to the relatively few members of the elites and financiers. In order to function at all, a Right-Wing government like that in the US must be increasingly secretive and rely ever more heavily on Bernays and on his propaganda in order to produce in the population both his engineered consent and engineered ignorance, without which a democracy could not survive. This is so true that after World War II, the US military heavily restricted media control in occupied Germany and Japan because it recognized that the media could easily educate citizens to the dangers of the American presence both at home and in Europe. This veil of secrecy has been carried to an extent that the American and international elites have created what one writer called a massive framework of lies that functions as an arena within which the desired propaganda ideas are presented to the American people as information, but where the reality is very different from that in which American leadership functions. The same writer stated so perfectly, “Within this framework of lies the world appears to be a simplistic place of good and evil. The feeling of Americans that we are the most successful people on earth, and that America is the most successful country, is used to support the idea that America’s policies are inherently altruistic because our culture tells us that success is the measure of goodness. What is actually the case, though, is that America is successful precisely because American policy is not altruistic.”
The next essay in this series will outline in detail the beginnings – and the devastating results – of Bernays’ initial efforts.
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 28 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English-language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West.
Revoking CGTN’s Licence is Attack on Freedom of Speech, Part of Broader UK-China Row
By Ekaterina Blinova – Sputnik – 06.02.2021
On 4 February, the Office of Communications, the UK government-approved regulatory body commonly known as Ofcom, announced that it had withdrawn the licence for China Global Television Network (CGTN) to broadcast in the UK.
China Global Television Network has been banned by Ofcom in the UK on the pretext that Star China Media Limited (SCML), the licence-holder for the broadcaster, did not have editorial responsibility for the latter’s output; and that an entity called China Global Television Network Corporation (CGTNC), which exercises general control over the broadcaster, cannot hold the licence since it is controlled by the Chinese government.
On 5 February, the Information Department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) of pushing “fake news” in its 29 January coverage of the People’s Republic’s tackling the pandemic. According to the ministry’s statement, the BBC video linked COVID-19 with politics and hyped up topics concerning the origins of the virus. Beijing urged the BBC to offer public apologies to China, adding that it “reserves the right to take further measures“. In response, the BBC said it stood by the story, rejecting the accusations of “fake news or ideological bias”.
Freedom of Speech is Under Attack
The revocation of licence for CGTN seems surprising given that the regulator did not mention any complaint regarding the content provided by the broadcaster, according to Earl Rasmussen, executive vice-president of Eurasia Centre. When it comes to CGTN’s links to the Chinese Communist Party, one should bear in mind that the BBC has an obvious connection with the British government, the scholar adds.
Indeed, according to the BBC website, four of the non-executive members are specifically appointed as members for each of the nations of the UK, and “the chairman and the non-executive members for the nations are appointed by HM The Queen on the recommendation of ministers while the other members of the Board are appointed by the BBC through the Board’s Nominations Committee”.
So, when one talks about one’s editorial independence, one can hardly say that the BBC is “independent” in this respect, says Andy Vermaut, a Belgian human rights activist and political commentator. He suggests that the UK is “preparing a new cold war, where China and the Chinese voice in society is cut short and another dimensional voice is not allowed”, adding that “this is diametrically opposed to the British model which supposedly promotes freedom of the press”.
“What channel and country will be next?” Vermaut asks.Although London could regard CGTN’s narrative as “pretty unpleasant” it’s unclear why the UK decided to ban it “because after all, this was a satellite station”, according to Andrew Tettenborn, professor of Law at Swansea University.
“I believe this is politically motivated and a move to steer the narrative that is presented to the public, essentially a form of censorship to silence dissident or countering voices,” Rasmussen says. “In a free and open society it is important that we are able to obtain differing perspectives and to promote a diversity of thought. However, the UK has now lost the perspective and voice of the world’s largest economy and one of the most globally influential countries. It is a sad day for the freedom of the press, freedom of speech and democracy.”The trend of limiting “the spectrum of conversation” goes beyond Ofcom’s actions, warns Gordon Dimmack, an independent media reporter: “Media freedoms in the UK and worldwide have been constricted ever more so over the past few years, and I expect that to continue”, he adds in an apparent reference to the US Big Tech wiping out accounts of former President Donald Trump and his ardent supporters in the wake of the Capitol Hill riots, and suppression earlier of The New York Post’s reporting of the supposed foreign business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter.
Revocation of CGTN’s Licence is Part of a Broader Trend
Ofcom’s move is yet another sign of deteriorating relations between London and Beijing, deems Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London.
“I think the UK is aligned with America on a relatively soft target because it’s kind of saying that it’s going to do something like America did with Xinhua and other news agencies about 18 months ago,” the professor says. “This is not a kind of huge move because the CGTN wasn’t a big player. It’s not important for Britain. It’s a way that Britain wants to show solidarity with America. And also the ruling Conservative Party in Britain shows that they’re trying to be tough on China without any hugely consequential outcomes at the moment”.Although the Johnson government previously indicated that it was willing to enhance UK-China ties in the post-Brexit era, tensions between the two countries have escalated over the past few years. Thus, No 10 abruptly reversed its plans to use 5G Huawei equipment in its next-generation wireless networks because of pressure from Washington. The UK also joined the US-led chorus of nations who pinned the blame for the pandemic spread on Beijing and questioned the coronavirus’s origins.
To complicate matters even further, in 2020 the UK offered a path to citizenship for around 3 million Hong Kongers with British National (Overseas) status, accusing the People’s Republic of breaking the terms of the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration after Beijing formally adopted a new security law in Hong Kong. Once the British scheme came into force in January 2021, China declared that it would no longer recognise the passports of British national overseas citizens as a travel or ID document, and “reserves the right to take further actions”.
China is Facing Growing Challenges from Western & Indo-Pacific States
Beijing is unlikely to ignore Ofcom’s insult and may take it out on the BBC, believes Jeff J. Brown, editor of China Rising Radio Sinoland: “Beijing could possibly react by reducing the number of its staff in-country, but would be unlikely to kick them out”, he suggests.
Citing the Chinese Foreign Ministry statement accusing the BBC of political bias, Kerry Brown suggests that this move could be seen as a backlash for stripping CGTN of its broadcasting licence.
“One way China will hit back is by basically attacking the credibility of the BBC,” he says. “The BBC has been a big problem for China for many decades. I think they’re basically escalating their kind of language towards the BBC. One of the issues is that obviously China is very sensitive about this responsibility for the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak and has said that it’s been unfairly blamed and it was kind of not willing to share information”.Though it would appear that Beijing sees the UK now “as easier to attack because it’s not in the EU” and “a more isolated target”, China is now facing a growing challenge from a number of states, aside from the EU, including the US, Australia and others, according to the professor.
On 22 November, the UK’s influential conservative think tank Policy Exchange issued a report calling upon British allies and partners to team up in order to confront China’s rise and advocating the British naval build up in the South China Sea along with the US forces. According to the think tank, the report “reflects a broad consensus of views on Britain’s role in the Indo-Pacific region” voiced by former political and military leaders of the UK, Canada, the US, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea, India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia.
“I don’t think that [China’s] argument with the UK is necessarily going to escalate, but I don’t think it’s going to improve”, Brown says. “I think that the relationship is now in a period of long-term negativity. And I don’t think that that’s going to change for some while. I think this is the new normal”.
Western pundits believed post-Maidan Ukraine would serve as an ‘example’ for Russia – in reality, it’s become a cautionary tale
By Paul Robinson | RT | February 6, 2021
Many Russian liberals and foreign pundits saw Ukraine’s 2014 ‘Maidan’ as an event that would inspire change in Moscow. Today, as an increasingly dysfunctional Kiev clamps down on free speech, it looks more like a cautionary tale.
In May 2014, newly elected Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko promised that he would rapidly bring peace to his country. “The anti-terrorist operation cannot and should not last two or three months. It should and will last hours,” he said.
Nearly 60,000 hours later, the war into which the badly named “anti-terrorist operation” morphed is still going on. Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky similarly promised to bring the fighting to an end. “My main goal… is that I want to end the war. This is my mission within these five years,” he told journalists. But he has been equally unsuccessful.
Zelensky resoundingly defeated Poroshenko in the 2019 presidential election, in which the incumbent won a plurality of votes only in the far west of the country. By portraying himself as a candidate not only of peace, but also of national unity, Zelensky was able to attract the votes of a large number of Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the south and east of the country who had been alienated by Poroshenko’s increasingly nationalistic tone.
Unfortunately, since then Zelensky has betrayed those voters time after time.
Not only has he failed to take any of the steps required to bring the war to an end – most notably, the concessions demanded in the 2015 Minsk II agreements – but his government has also further suppressed the language rights of Ukrainians and is now clamping down on the opposition media.
In January 2020, liberal Russian pundits lined up to praise Zelensky’s new year’s speech. Zelensky was said to have promoted an image of national unity, seeking to overcome linguistic and other differences which had been accentuated by his predecessor’s nationalist policies. “It doesn’t matter what your street is called as long as it is clean and asphalted,” said Zelensky, in a line which seemed to suggest that his government would bring an end to the habit of changing street names from those of communist heroes to those of nationalist icons like Stepan Bandera.
In fact, it hasn’t. Not only has Zelensky failed to provide clean and asphalted streets, but it’s since become clear that what he really meant was not that he would bring an end to forcible Ukrainization, but that Russian speakers should just shut up and stop complaining about it, since, after all, none of that stuff actually “matters.”
Thus, Zelensky has done nothing to reverse the 2019 law on official languages, which sharply restricts the use of Russian. Most notably, on January 16 a new rule came into effect which obliges all service providers (shops, restaurants, etc.) to offer their services in Ukrainian by default. Meanwhile, censorship in Ukraine has reached new levels of silliness, prohibiting for instance a book about the Vikings by an American author because it referred to ancient Kievan Rus’ as “Russia.”
Now Zelensky has gone even further, banning three television stations owned by opposition politician Taras Kozak, on the grounds that they are spreading Russian disinformation. Zelensky claims that he supports freedom of speech but not “propaganda financed by the aggressors.” “These media have become one of the tools in the war against Ukraine, so they are blocked in order to protect national security,” said Zelensky’s spokesperson Yuliia Mendel.
The fact that the ban comes at a moment when Zelensky’s popularity is plummeting, and when Kozak’s party Opposition Platform – For Life is leading in national opinion polls may be entirely coincidental. But then again it may not. The move smacks of political desperation.
It is also, of course, deeply undemocratic in character. Had former president Viktor Yanukovich, who was overthrown in the February 2014 Maidan revolution, ever attempted such a thing, Ukrainian liberals and their Western allies would have cried huge screams of outrage. Now, however, they are silent, or even supportive. The US Embassy in Kiev, for instance, issued a statement that it backed the measure as designed “to counter Russia’s malign influence.”
The US response reveals the shallowness of Western assertions that in backing the Maidan revolution and subsequent governments they are supporting democracy, human rights, and a liberal order. In reality, geopolitics seems to be the primary concern. As long as Ukraine remains resolutely anti-Russia, a blind eye will be turned to nearly any and all abuses of democratic principles.
And here’s where the situation becomes rather sad. In the immediate aftermath of the Maidan revolution, it was said that Vladimir Putin’s response was driven by fears that Western-style democracy in Ukraine would provide a positive model which would incite a similar revolution in Russia.
A typical analysis was that of Paul D’Anieri, professor of public policy at the University of California, Riverside, who wrote in 2015 that “the prospect was that Ukraine would, with the aid of the EU, begin turning itself around. If so, it could become an attractive model for Russians, and a very different model than the one Putin has been insisting is the only one available.”
This line continues to find supporters. For instance, in a gushing article for Al Jazeera, journalist Leonid Ragozin remarked that Zelensky’s 2020 new year’s speech showed that “Ukraine may finally be moving towards fulfilling the Kremlin‘s biggest nightmare – becoming a role model for progressive politics and democracy for Russians to look up to.”
Ragozin has it back to front, for the very opposite would appear to be the case. Commenting on recent protests in Moscow, Ollie Carroll, Moscow correspondent of the British newspaper, the Independent, asked why Russians weren’t reacting with the same sense of indignation as Ukrainians had when Yanukovich’s police attacked demonstrators in Kiev six-and-a-half years ago. Carroll implied that this meant that there was something defective about Russians’ moral values.
In reality, the answer could simply be that they’ve looked at Ukraine and decided that it isn’t a good example to follow.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history, and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.
Bill Would Force Social Media Users To Secretly Report Suspicious People To Law Enforcement
MassPrivateI | February 4, 2021
Senator Joe Manchin wants to bring DHS’s spy on your neighbors “If You See, Something Say Something” program to social media, blogs, websites, and much more. Manchin’s bill, the “See Something, Say Something Online Act” would essentially turn social media users into Federal spies by forcing them to report suspicious people to law enforcement.
Just how bad is this bill?
This bill would essentially force anyone on social media to report suspicious “transmissions” to law enforcement.
“Known Suspicious Transmission.—The term ‘‘known suspicious transmission’’ is any suspicious transmission that an interactive computer service should have reasonably known to have occurred or have been notified of by a director, officer, employ, agent, interactive computer service user, or State or Federal law enforcement agency.”
Major Crime —The term ‘‘major crime’’ means a Federal criminal offense that is a crime of violence (as defined 13 in section 16 of title 18, United States Code); relating to domestic or international terrorism (as those terms are defined in section 16 2331 of title 18, United States Code)
What exactly is a known suspicious transmission or major crime?
“Suspicious Transmission is defined as any post, private message, comment, tag, transaction, or any other user-generated content or transmission that government officials later determine commits, facilitates, incites, promotes, or otherwise assists the commission of a major crime. Major crimes are defined as anything involving violence, domestic, or international terrorism, or a serious drug offense.”
How could social media users, bloggers, web forum moderators, web conferencing users etc., know that a comment left or uttered by someone would later lead to them committing a major crime?
The See Something, Say Something Online Act would force social media users into red flagging every person’s comments just in case someone commits a major crime in the future.
This bill would effectively destroy the First Amendment as we know it, dispelling any vestiges of America still being a free country.
Social media users would be forced to submit a Suspicious Transmission Activity Report (STAR) on suspicious individuals within 30 days.
“In General.—If a provider of an interactive computer service detects a suspicious transmission, the interactive computer service, including any director, officer, employee, agent, or representative of such provider, shall submit to the Department a STAR describing the suspicious transmission in accordance with this section.”
As Reason warned, the See Something, Say Something Online Act would put reporting on your fellow American on steroids. It would create a glut of frivolous reports, including many that are politically motivated, or otherwise disingenuous.
Social media users and law enforcement would keep detailed personal information, including metadata of suspicious people for five years.
“Each STAR submitted under this section shall contain, at a minimum— (1) the name, location, and other such identification information as submitted by the user to the provider of the interactive computer service; (2) the date and nature of the post, message, comment, tag, transaction, or other user-generated content or transmission detected for suspicious activity such as time, origin, and destination; and (3) any relevant text, information, and metadata related to the suspicious transmission.”
“Retention Of Records —Each provider of an interactive computer service shall— (A) maintain a copy of any STAR submitted under this section and the original record equivalent of any supporting documentation for the 5-year period beginning on the date on which the STAR was submitted. (B) make all supporting documentation available to the Department and any appropriate law enforcement agencies upon request.”
No one can tell a person that they have been flagged as suspicious
“Non-Disclosure—Except as otherwise prescribed by the Attorney General, no provider of an interactive computer service, or officer, director, employee, or agent of such a provider, subject to an order under subsection (a) may disclose the existence of, or terms of, the order to any person.”
Social media users could face prosecution for not reporting suspicious people
Imagine someone leaving a comment on social media like the police suck or calling someone a bitch, twit or twat and then they go on to commit a crime in the future. Would anyone like to guess what might happen next?
Every social media user who refused to file a STAR report on a suspicious person would open themselves up to prosecution or a lawsuit.
“Compliance—Any provider of an interactive computer service that fails to report a known suspicious transmission shall not be immune from civil or criminal liability for such transmission under section 230(c) of the Communications Act of 1934 (47 U.S.C. 230(c)).”
Where does one begin when it comes to describing just how bad this bill is?
Forcing social media users to essentially submit STAR reports on people they deem as suspicious opens up a Pandora’s box of problems.
Social media users who are forced into reporting on people could flag everyone’s comments to guard against being prosecuted or sued. This bill, if passed as it is written, would have a devastating effect on the civil rights and freedoms of every American.
The Southern Poverty Law Center’s New 2020 Hate Map Is Fake News
By Eric Striker – National Justice – February 3, 2021
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) seems to be enjoying a small resurgence of attention from the mainstream media since the January 6th Capitol protests.
Various scandals, both financial and moral, have largely discredited the SPLC across the political spectrum. Most of its most competent and high profile members like Richard Cohen, Heidi Beirich and Rhonda Brownstein have left the organization, while their “hate group” designations are largely dismissed as meaningless outside of very small circles of Antifa activists and tech censors.
Recently, it updated its infamous “Hate Map” for 2020. The map claims that there are 838 active “hate groups” operating in the United States as we speak.
Despite all the mockery the SPLC has endured throughout the years, its clear that they are impervious to criticism, even from liberal groups, about their blatant lack of interest in facts and low professional standards.
The “Hate Groups” That Don’t Exist
Setting aside the debate over what constitutes a “hate group,” the vast majority of organizations listed state-by-state are either religious congregations, online publications and e-shops, or in hundreds of cases, non-existent and dishonestly catalogued.
For example, the SPLC claims the National Reformation Party is an active “white nationalist” group currently operating in seven states. The only sign that they even exist is a single website, which on the very front of its page clearly states “Race is a social construct having no biological basis” — an opinion that at minimum precludes them from being classed as “white nationalist.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg. A skinhead crew called the Vinlander’s Social Club (VSC) and its supporter faction, Firm 22, are listed on the 2020 map as having 11 chapters altogether. A simple search on Wikipedia reveals that VSC was officially disbanded in 2007, with its founder publicly condemning “racism.”
Then there’s White Aryan Resistance, which has for decades been composed of a website that hosted Tom Metzger’s radio program. Metzger is deceased.
How about the American Identity Movement (AIM), which they say is currently engaging in “hate” in 10 states. The organization was officially shut down months ago and there is no sign it ever had much of a presence to begin with.
The Base (5), AtomWaffen Division (6), Micetrap Records (1), Soldiers of Odin (6), Fraternal Order of Alt-Knights (6), and countless others are defunct, in some cases for years.
The most ridiculous entry on the list is the National Socialist German Workers Party. Just when we thought that the NSDAP was defeated in 1945, the SPLC reminds us that they in fact have a surviving chapter in Lincoln, Nebraska. Another page on the SPLC’s website claims the NSDAP’s Nebraska Gauleiter is Gary Lauck, who in truth runs a historical book store that sells translated writings by Third Reich authors. Lauck’s online shop itself is listed as a separate “hate group” in the state, just one county over.
The vast majority of non-religious groups on the map that do exist are book publishing houses like Arktos and Antelope Hill Books, personal blogs and podcasts belonging to individuals, or newspapers and news sites. The seemingly large, multi-state presence of the National Socialist Movement (NSM) and various Klan outfits should be taken with a massive grain of salt.
SPLC’s Lists Entire Religions as Hate Groups
The decision to include traditional interpretations of Catholicism, Protestantism, and folk religion is another trick used to pump numbers up.
According to the SPLC, traditionalist Catholics — nine entries overall (mostly just websites and publications) — are a hate group. If we take this logic at face value, every single Catholic who ever lived before the Second Vatican Council in 1962 was a member of a hate organization. Protestants who hold beliefs that dissent from modern “woke” factions are also included on the list.
A glaring double standard is evident in the decision to include adherents of British Israelism (Christian Identity) and Black Israelites on the list. These two groups believe they are the chosen people of the Old Testament, and live by a literal interpretation of its values. If blacks and whites are guilty of hate for preaching this doctrine, why aren’t adherents of Judaism also listed for hate?
Finally, the category of “Neo-Volkisch” is entered 32 times. The word appears to be a loaded, made up phrase to refer to those who pray to the old Gods or practice Asatru. The main culprit is the Asatru Folk Assembly, a 501(c)(3) religious organization that does not engage in political activity.
While other branded groups like the Nation of Islam engage in harsh discourse about white people, it isn’t any more extreme than what Charles Blow regularly writes in New York Times editorials or what SPLC’s more extreme employees believe. NOI’s main offense appears to be its stance on traditional family values and willingness to critique the supposed black-Jewish relationship.
The SPLC’s map is a low-effort piece of disinformation that is transparently and deliberately dishonest.
In spite of all the criticism they have received over their hate list, they are doubling down on a scam intended to provide ammo for leftist propaganda, as well as to extract donations from wealthy consumers of their fake news.
The establishment wants a Reality Czar in order to crush dissent, not unite us around objective truth
By Michael McCaffrey | RT | February 3, 2021
The mainstream media and ruling elite really hate conspiracy theories and misinformation – except when they don’t.
On February 2, which ironically enough is Groundhog Day here in the US, the New York Times published an article titled ‘How The Biden Administration Can Help Solve Our Reality Crisis’.
It seems a very bad sign that America is now relying on a geriatric Washington insider whose own perception of reality has been called in to question numerous times to solve a “reality crisis”.
One of the suggestions was that Biden should create a “Reality Czar” to oversee the dismantling of “disinformation” and the surveillance of “conspiracy theorists”.
In the article, writer Kevin Roose spoke with ‘experts’ who offered suggestions about how to unify Americans around “reality” by stamping out “conspiracy theories” and “misinformation”.
That sounds like a great idea – I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
The problem with a ‘reality czar’ is that America is a post-reality nation. Our culture has gone so far to the extreme with regard to embracing subjective experience over objective reality that some blowhard bureaucrat is not going to be able to tip the scales back towards the rational.
And, of course, that is the point. The Biden administration doesn’t want to return America to objective reality, they want Americans to embrace the establishment’s reality – and those are two very different things.
The establishment reality is the neo-liberal, corporate controlled, military-industrial-complex reality that loathes being held to account for its continuous misdeeds and misinformation.
The establishment reality demands we accept the absurdly incomplete official story regarding the spate of assassinations in the ’60s (JFK, MLK, RFK) while refusing to declassify and un-redact the millions of government files on those topics it won’t let us see.
The establishment reality lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and gave us the hell of the Vietnam War.
The establishment reality lied to us about Iran-Contra and the death squads in Latin America. It also lied about its complicity in the drug trade while it manufactured a War on Drugs.
The establishment reality refused to declassify documents about 9/11 and to investigate the funding for that attack. It also unleashed George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s ‘Dark Side’, which included the War on Terror, torture, massive surveillance, Gitmo, rendition and the Patriot Act.
The establishment reality was the one that told us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and gave us the Iraq War, and continues to give us the war in Yemen and the carnage in Libya and across the globe.
It is often said that daylight is the best disinfectant, but we are continuously kept in the dark, and the establishment, regardless of which party is in power, is a gangrenous limb whose lies and disinformation are much more toxic to America and the world than anything some QAnon clowns can conjure in their fever dreams.
It is pretty rich that the New York Times is running this article calling for a reality czar and bemoaning disinformation, as it has long aided and abetted the establishment in its concealing of truth and distorting of objective reality.
Whether it be Walter Duranty and his lies for Stalin, or Judith Miller and her lies for Bush, the Times has proven over and over again that it isn’t a news organisation, but a praetorian guard meant to protect the tyrants, oligarchs and aristocrats from the masses.
Am I the only one who remembers the Russiagate hysteria? Stories of dastardly Rooskies hacking into power grids and voting booths, and using microwave weapons to attack Americans have been commonplace in the Times and across the mainstream media, and yet those ‘conspiracy theories’ were not only accepted but embraced. The establishment’s hatred of conspiracy theories is particularly amusing in light of what transpired over the past four years.
Would the new Reality Czar hold the Times accountable for those idiotic stories? Would MSNBC be chastised for Rachel Maddow’s conspiratorial ramblings? Would CNN be reprimanded for its “mostly peaceful protests” disinformation?
Would the Reality Czar target the scientists and medical experts who publicly proclaimed that it was OK to gather in large groups during the pandemic to protest for Black Lives Matter but not to protest against lockdown?
How about those radical trans activists who distort and contort both science and reality?
Would the Reality Czar target the new White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki, especially considering her laughably ridiculous press conference from 2015, at which, with a straight face, she stated that the US had a “long-standing” policy against backing coups?
Of course not.
Like a paranoid schizophrenic, our political and media elite is constantly trying to convince people that its own devious delusions are the one true reality.
The Reality Czar would not be required to actually quash misinformation and conspiracy theories – only the misinformation and conspiracy theories the establishment doesn’t like.
As Orwell told us, “Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past.” The establishment wants to control the present, the past, the future and, most of all, you. And a Reality Czar is just the beginning.
The ‘reality is that the ruling elite are pushing the notion of rampant right-wing domestic terrorists and the danger of conspiracy theories in an attempt to conceal their crimes and stifle dissent, not to help objective “reality” flourish.
Jewish Organization Behind Tech Censorship Funded Study Saying It’s A Figment Of Your Imagination
By Eric Striker | National Justice | February 4, 2021
A New York University study released this week claiming that Twitter and Facebook do not censor the “political right” has been widely mocked and lambasted as a symbol of the conflict of interests and lack of credibility in American academia.
The most Orwellian aspect of this story is that the paper was financed by tech billionaire Craig Newmark, who is Jewish and a leading member of the Anti-Defamation League’s Silicon Valley speech suppression lobby, the Center for Technology and Society (CTS).
The CTS specializes in two things, the first is to aid eager-to-be-used Jewish tech moguls in their quest to censor ideas they perceive threatening to Jewish interests (preserving domestic liberalism and Israel against populist challenges are their main priorities), and the second is to intimidate those who don’t want to play ball, like former free speech advocate Jack Dorsey, into doing their bidding.
CTS concentrates Jewish legal, political, technological, financial and media to shut down dissent. Besides Newmark, its advisory board includes formidable figures such as Shawn Henry, a former assistant director at the FBI, Steve Huffman, CEO of Reddit, Guy Rosen, product VP at Facebook, and Eli Pariser, the president and co-founder of Democratic Party activist powerhouses MoveOn.org and Avaaz.org.
The tyrants at CTS have so far achieved impressive results. The ADL was the major force behind the banning of Donald Trump, the destruction of Parler, and the long-term project to radically transform the internet from its original mission to be a public square of free debate into an American version of North Korea’s internet.
In cases like Gab, who the ADL has been unable to shut down, they are diligently working to get the Department of Justice to put its defiant CEO Andrew Torba in prison.
The ADL’s campaign of repression is so extreme that authors in Jewish newspapers, who broadly support what they’re doing, are asking them to cool off, “So it’s hardly surprising that Greenblatt has already declared ADL’s support for impeaching Trump a second time. That’s a position a lot of Americans—and, no doubt, the majority of American Jews—agree with, and not all of them are partisan Democrats like Greenblatt. But the question here is: What in the world is a group whose purpose is to monitor and advocate against anti-Semitism doing involving itself in the debate about impeachment?”
As for Newmark, his total lack of respect for ethics, facts and scholarship don’t end at manufacturing fake studies. The organization social media companies have tasked with supposedly fact checking “disinformation,” the Poynter Institute, is also Newmark’s pet project.
In other words, when Tucker Carlson’s producers received an ominous email warning them to stop spreading “disinformation” attached to an NYU study claiming to debunk them, the Jews behind the tech censorship campaign paid for a bogus study claiming tech censorship doesn’t exist that the fact-checking think-tank they also fund will deem “disinformation” to disagree with.
The debate over free speech in America is worthless until people work up the courage to talk about the ADL and the Jewish community’s complete lack of respect for fundamental American principals and the rights of non-Jews.
Claims of Silicon Valley bias are ‘disinformation’, say researchers citing disgraced partisan ‘experts’ and Big Tech itself
By Nebojsa Malic | RT | February 2, 2021
Silicon Valley wants you to know that even thinking they might be biased against conservatives is ‘disinformation,’ and cite a paper informed by censorious busybodies, partisan hacks and their own executives to prove it.
Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio approvingly quoted the Washington Post story about a report arguing that the “claim of anti-conservative animus on the part of social media companies is itself a form of disinformation: a falsehood with no reliable evidence to support it.”
Nothing to see here, folks, just a former press secretary for Democrat Kamala Harris (it’s in his bio) retweeting a newspaper that openly endorsed the Biden-Harris ticket saying that Democrats are right and Republicans are wrong, right?
Before the “fact checkers” declare that actually, Pacilio was a spokesman for Harris in 2011-2014, when she was California’s attorney general – the point is that he doesn’t bother hiding his political allegiance, and neither does the Post. But it would be wrong to judge a report solely by the people who endorse it, so let’s take a look at it, shall we?
Authored by Paul M. Barrett, deputy director of Stern Center for Business and Human Rights at New York University (NYU) and research fellow J. Grant Sims, the 28-page paper is a regurgitation of talking points by mainstream media, “disinformation researchers” advocating for censorship under the guise of ‘Russiagate,’ and Big Tech companies themselves. Looking at their 74 endnotes, one finds multiple mentions of mainstream media outlets, but also citations of the Democrat propaganda shop Media Matters, the German Marshall Fund, and even the Biden-Harris campaign.
Any study of social media censorship that doesn’t address the New York Post getting locked out by Twitter and suppressed by Facebook over the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in the run-up to the 2020 election is a farce. This report mentions it exactly once – in a “conservatives pounce” way, no less.
Describing the NY Post story as “questionable” and “apparently based on stolen emails,” the researchers claim it was a case of “reasonable decisions wrapped in mystifying processes.” Their conclusion mirrors the (footnoted) Washington Post editorial, literally headlined “Twitter and Facebook were right to suppress a Biden smear. But they should tell us why they did.” No bias here, everyone!
In other words, they literally want increased censorship on social media platforms, justified by the conservatives supposedly “falsely” claiming they’re being censored.
To no one’s surprise, the researchers conclude that platforms need a “content overseer” executive who would report directly to the top, and “do a better job of protecting users and society at large from harmful content.” They also want the Biden administration to either set up a new agency for digital oversight or give more power to existing ones, and reform Section 230 – the legal shield protecting platforms from lawsuits over content – to make it conditional on their censorship, or as they put it, “acceptance of a range of new responsibilities related to policing content.”
Now comes the best part. Among the people the authors thanked for their “time and insight” are representatives of Google, Twitter, and Facebook; two people from NewsGuard, a few Big Tech apologists from the neoliberal and neoconservative circles, a former Obama White House tech policy advisor – identified here by his new gig at Harvard Kennedy School – and Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory.
DiResta has made herself quite a career at Stanford, producing alarmist reports of what Russia “might” do to harm American democracy or something, but she started out as research director at a shop called New Knowledge. This group of “tech specialists who lean Democratic,” to use a New York Times understatement, was literally caught running a false flag “Russian bot” operation on Twitter in 2017, during the US Senate special election in Alabama, in order to elect a Democrat.
Her inclusion is just the cherry on top of the giant hypocrisy cake that is the Barrett-Sims paper. It’s worse than merely factually wrong: it’s an exercise in gaslighting, projection and breath-taking dishonesty, it relies on self-serving and dishonest sources, and literally advocates for censorship. Whatever it takes to protect Our Democracy from “disinformation,” I guess.
Once the story of that broke – in December 2018, too late to change anything – New Knowledge quietly rebranded as Yonder, and that was it. No accountability. Instead of being disqualified as partisan hacks, the Senate Intelligence Committee doubled down on “insights” from New Knowledge/Yonder to insist there was “Russian meddling” in the 2016 election. DiResta simply moved to Stanford and kept doing the same thing.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist, blogger and translator, who wrote a regular column for Antiwar.com from 2000 to 2015, and is now senior writer at RT. Follow him on Telegram @TheNebulator and on Twitter @NebojsaMalic
New York Times Calls For Biden to Appoint “Reality Czar” to Fight “Disinformation”
RT | February 2, 2021
Striving to silence voices with which the mainstream media disagrees, the New York Times has urged President Joe Biden to appoint a “reality czar” to lead the fight against “disinformation and domestic extremism.”
And yes, George Orwell fans, America’s supposed newspaper of record used the phrase “reality czar” in describing the task-force leader that several “experts” recommended would be needed to take charge of the cross-agency “strategic response” to those odious people who say things deemed false by the government. This would be equivalent to the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s ‘1984’, and the New York Times’ ‘experts’ see the secretary of truth, or reality czar, turning loose the tools of Big Brother to crack down on those conspiracy theorists who have created “the reality crisis.”
Of course, Roose’s experts also said Biden’s administration would need to be given peeks into those “black-box algorithms” at Twitter, Facebook, etc. to “open the hood on social media” and properly investigate reality offenders.
“It sounds a little dystopian, I’ll grant,” Times technology columnist Kevin Roose conceded on Tuesday, “but let’s hear them out.” He went on to say that the “tip-of-the-spear” task force could hold regular meetings with social media platforms and demand “structural changes,” such as violating the privacy of their customers under special government exemptions.
The targets of such scrutiny would, of course, include purveyors of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Roose’s other examples of “collective delusions” included the “baseless theory” that Covid-19 was manufactured in a Chinese lab.
In lieu of having a reality czar installed already, it’s not clear where the Times got the official ruling that the Chinese lab theory is baseless. Just last month, the US State Department said it had new information suggesting that the pandemic could have emerged from a lab in Wuhan, China, where evidence claimed to show researchers became sick with coronavirus-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before the first identified case of Covid-19 was reported in Wuhan. China has vehemently refuted such allegations, reminding that it was the first country to identify and report its cases to the world in what they say was likely one of multiple simultaneous outbreaks of the new disease.
The call for a reality czar comes amid assertions by media outlets and Democrat politicians that the US has a domestic terrorism crisis, rooted largely in white supremacy and unhinged support for former President Donald Trump. CNN has campaigned for its largest competitor, Fox News, to be forced off the air for reporting falsehoods.
Some observers suggested that the reality task force should start by responding to the falsehoods reported by the mainstream media, including false allegations that Trump’s campaign colluded with the Russian government to steal the 2016 presidential election.
Free-speech advocates said the Times’ call for a reality czar was predictable. “Ah, the Ministry of Truth,” UK journalist Raheem Kassam said. “I’ve been waiting for this one.”
“People who spent four years ranting about Russians taking over the government and now ranting about a coup want to appoint themselves to explain reality to the rest of us,” one Twitter user said.
See also:
Libertarian Terrorists?
By Ron Paul | February 1, 2021
The Department of Homeland Security issued on Wednesday a nationwide terror alert lasting until April 30. The alert warns of potential terrorist attacks from Americans who are “ideologically motivated” and have “objections to the exercise of government authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”
The language used in this alert suggests that millions of Americans are potential terrorists. Second Amendment supporting, antiwar, anti-tax, anti-politics, anti-militarization, pro-life, and anti-Federal Reserve activists certainly have “objections to the exercise of government authority.” They are certainly viewed by the political class and its handmaidens in big tech and the mainstream media as ideological extremists. Anyone who gets his news from sources other than mainstream media or big tech, or who uses certain “unapproved” social media platforms, is considered to have had his grievances “fueled by false narratives.” For something to be considered a false narrative, it need only contradict the “official” narrative.
The “domestic terrorist” alert is the latest sign that activities on January 6 on Capitol Hill, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, are being used to advance a long-standing anti-liberty agenda. Legislation expanding the federal government’s authority to use its surveillance and other unconstitutional powers against “domestic terrorists” is likely to soon be considered by Congress. Just as the PATRIOT Act was written years before 2001, this legislation was written long before January 6. The bill’s proponents are simply taking advantage of the hysteria following the so-called insurrection to push the bill onto the congressional agenda.
Former CIA Director John Brennan recently singled out libertarians as among the people the government should go after. This is not the first time libertarians have been smeared. In 2009, a federally-funded fusion center identified people who supported my presidential campaign, my Campaign for Liberty, or certain Libertarian and Constitution parties candidates as potentially violent extremists.
The idea that libertarianism creates terrorists is absurd. Libertarians support the non-aggression principle, so they reject using force to advance their political goals. They rely instead on peaceful persuasion.
Libertarianism is being attacked because it does not support just reforming a few government policies. Instead, it presents a formidable intellectual challenge to the entire welfare-warfare state.
The ultimate goal of those pushing for a crackdown on “domestic terrorism” is to make people unwilling to even consider “radical” ideas — to make people so afraid of certain ideas that they refuse to even give those ideas a fair hearing.
Progressives who are tempted to support what is being promoted as a crackdown on right-wing violence should consider the history of government harassment of progressive movements and leaders such as Martin Luther King, Jr. What do they think a future right-wing authoritarian would do if given power to go after “ideological extremists”?
All Americans who cherish the Bill of Rights should come together to stop this latest crackdown on liberty. My Campaign for Liberty will be mobilizing Americans to stop passage of any domestic terrorism legislation, while my Institute for Peace and Prosperity and my Liberty Report will provide Americas with the most up-to-date information about the continuing attempts to smear those who speak the truth about government lies.
(You can watch the Ron Paul Liberty Report live on YouTube Monday-Friday at noon, eastern time.)
Copyright © 2021 by RonPaul Institute.
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Mutually Assured Delusion (MAD)
By Judith Curry | Climate Etc. | November 5, 2013
Groupthink: A pattern of thought charaterized by self-deception, forced manufacture of consent, and conformity to group values and ethics.
Groupthink: Collective Delusions in Organizations and Markets, by Roland Benabou, published in the Review of Economic Studies. Benabou also has a talk (ppt slides) on this subject.
First, a definition of groupthink (from the ppt slides):
Janis (1972)’s eight symptoms [of groupthink]:
- illusion of invulnerability
- collective rationalization
- belief in inherent morality
- stereotyped views of out-groups
- direct pressure on dissenters
- self-censorship
- illusion of unanimity
- self-appointed mind guards
Sound like any groups that we know? … continue
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