America may escape this fate, given the traditionally ornery nature of its people when it comes to their liberties being screwed with, especially by the government. A hive mind they are not, but the Bourgault’s of this world have been trying hard to make it that way. Trump’s election and his attacks on all this are merely the start of a fight that’s going to be bitter and long, and the American people have to win or they’re going to find themselves living in “The Perfect Dictatorship”.

In 2024 I wrote a post, The MSM and The Perfect Dictatorship, about how complicit the American MSM had been in working with the US State to promote or suppress news, depending on whether that news complied with or opposed US government policy.

I started with a reference to the famous Mexican TV interview in 1991 with Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel literature laureate from Peru, who told viewers that they were living under “The Perfect Dictatorship” – the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional in Spanish, or PRI) had held uninterrupted power in the country for 71 years. He broke an unwritten rule, merely by pointing out what everyone in Mexico knew, and the interview had a hell of an impact then and for years and even decades later. He also pointed out that the PRI had recruited intellectuals who were all too willing to prostitute themselves in support of this.

That last is an important point because what happened in America over the last few years occurred under both President Trump and President Biden. The difference being that with Trump the MSM sided with Academia and the Public Sector where it opposed Trump’s policies, whereas under Biden the whole system moved in one direction on almost every policy you care to name.

This is what journalist Matt Taibbi was getting at with his article two years ago, The Single-Opinion Cult, where he argued that all this had been enabled by gradually narrowing down opinions on both the Left and the Right, over many years:

I was attracted to liberalism as a young person precisely because it didn’t want to ban things. Every liberal morality play in the seventies, eighties and nineties featured a finger-wagging moralist…Hollywood made self-congratulating feature films about nearly every one of those speech clashes, from The People vs. Larry Flynt to Dirty Pictures (starring James Woods, about the Cincinnati episode!) to Parental Advisory.

You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who’s standing center stage and advocating, at the top of his lungs, that which you would spend a lifetime opposing…

That last quote is from Rob Reiner’s The American President. But all that was a long time ago:

As far back as the spring of 2017, when Google introduced “Project Owl,” a new tool designed to “surface more authoritative content,” outlets like the World Socialist Web Site, Alternet, Truthdig, Democracy Now!, and Consortium News reported dramatic drops in audience. Wikileaks traffic plummeted….The next big event was the removal of Alex Jones from Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify. No fan of Jones, I was struck by how quickly critics moved to looking around for the next targets. Rob Reiner, the “acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil” auteur, said on MSNBC, “You have Fox, Breitbart, Sinclair, and Alex Jones, which has now been taken off of Facebook, thank God…”

He looks at Tucker Carlson’s removal from Fox, and how this made Right Wing media more homogeneous – but that the constant policing of content in blue media accomplished the same thing. Apparently American Prospect ran an article on Carlson that was critical of him but explained his ratings success, and which was so ferociously attacked by Lefty critics that it was replaced by one that was “the usual wire-to-wire bloodcurdling diatribe against Carlson as a “neofascist” “threat to democracy.”. He also looks at Glenn Greenwald getting the boot from The Intercept (which he helped found) simply because he had the “wrong” take on the Hunter Biden laptop story in 2020, i.e. it might help Trump win.

It was once considered healthy for the press to play to mass audiences and position itself as a skeptical thorn in the side of officialdom. There is no institution like that left in American life. What we have instead is an increasingly pissed-off population that needs to look about eighty results down in every Google search to find its point of view represented. Who thinks that situation is going to hold?

But it’s more than just the MSM cleansing itself, it’s also enlisting those other groups in wiping out alternative opinions:

The problem is that the leftists created the infrastructure of a new truth using the three Cs, credentialism, crisis and censorship, to eliminate debate and the marketplace of ideas.

  • Credentialism has experts, activists, academics, members of leftist think-tanks and non-profits, wrongly described as non-partisan.
  • Crisis is declared accompanied by dire warnings that questioning their manufactured truth will cost more lives.
  • Censorship is then enabled via internet monopolies, allied with the media and politicians, to suppress disagreement with the experts as misinformation.

What used to be propaganda, activists in expert drag, has morphed into full progressive fascism that is out to impose its truth on you.

National Review saw the same phenomenon in the more narrow world of political elections, with the MSM treatment of Kamala Harris in 2024, American Life under Liberal Conformism:

Liberal groupthink is the most important factor in the general-opinion environment and has been for all my life. But now, because liberal groupthink is subject to sudden eruptive enthusiasms and insanity-inducing reversals, American life proceeds with a sense that the laws of physics don’t really apply. There’s a creepy unsettledness to life in America. And it’s because journalists are lobotomizing themselves in the name of their favorite cause, the Democratic Party.

The examples from that year alone being:

  • Joe Biden’s incapacity was a right-wing psyop inflicted on the gullible by unscrupulous conservatives using deceptively edited videos.
  • Kamala Harris was never a border czar; that’s right-wing disinformation now. All previous references to her being the border czar, an unofficial title and real role given to her by Biden…have been duly erased.
  • How about a round of applause for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and the astounding unity of the Democrat Party! We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Plus the MSM memory holing of the initial Democrat Party reactions in early 2020 to Trump’s shutdown of flights from China, with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer in the lead to denounce xenophobia – before they went full pro-lockdown. As well as switching stances on crowds and “social distancing” as soon as the BLM protests erupted in mid-2020.

The irony here is that this group-think doesn’t help the Left in the long term. Even before the 2024 disaster, Harris was a typical 00-10’s Democrat in using Tony Blair’s “Tough on crime. Tough on the causes of crime” scam in her California political life – but then got crushed in 2020 when she tried to run in the very different environment of “Defund The Police”. Trying to follow such fundamental changes on the Left has always been one of the many problems of the Left:

One morning The Daily Worker followed Pravda and described Nazis as true friends of the working class; the next, nothing too strong could be said against them. Crucially, and as Orwell dramatized in Nineteen Eighty-Four, there was never an admission that any change had taken place.

NR also saw the connections to those other groups:

It’s clear that liberal opinion conformity is driven by something more than the pressures of social media and the way they hypercharge opinion-sharing and make it obvious where the wind is blowing. It is driven by the unprecedented levels of cynicism, cowardice, and insecurity of the liberal opinion-forming class itself. This is a generation of people who have had the least amount of moral formation in our history. With them incumbent, we no longer have sense-making institutions; we have a nonsense-infected mob that destroys the reputations of all the institutions in which its members are nominally stationed.

So far it’s only the MSM that’s really taken damage, but as Trump takes a sledgehammer to American university Federal funding, the lack of push-back from the public is remarkable. In fact the majority seem to support those actions by Trump, which has come as a shock to the American Left, even though it shouldn’t in the wake of the events of recent years.

That connection between academia and the MSM has been strengthened by two generations of journalists emerging from universities speaking the language of Queer Theory, Critical Race Theory and De-Colonialisation. But there also been the nastiness of something called “Media Literacy” courses and majors for students who will never become journalists but who will read them. Mike Benz (a former State Department official) explains it here (6m):

When you hear the words ‘media literacy’, you fixate on the word ‘literacy’ and you think they’re talking about underserved, underprivileged inner city schools with kids who can’t read….That is not what it is at all. Media literacy says, if you don’t read the right media sources, official media sources, official state-backed media, or government sources, or regime compliant media, then you are illiterate. You are media illiterate and you need to get your mind right.
…
So media literacy is just regime media installation and it is about institutional embedding of censorship organs within K-12 schools [Teaching it is now compulsory in California and Illinois schools], within higher Ed. And then at the capacity building side, by tons and tons of government money propping this up.
…
Media literacy is literally about training you to be stupid, to be dumb. The whole, underlying presupposition of the field [] is that if you do critical thinking, you will become a heretic, you will become a wrong thinker, a dissident, a heterodox person.

Another prop in crafting Taibbi’s “Single Opinion Cult”.

The curriculums for media literacy programs are about how not to do your own research. I’m not joking. You can look all this up. For example the SIFT method is one of these … And it just says when you have a research topic and you wanna look something up for school,[…] in your own private time… don’t think independently. Sift through the top ten results of a Google search and Wikipedia and Wikipedia-approved sources.
…
That’s actually only a tiny part of it. It’s the civil society capacity building… to destroy alternative media. That’s just mandatory government money to a censorship mercenary army in charge of your kids…. They’re training a generation of censorship professionals tied to the teat of government-backed censorship operations.

In this shorter video (1m), he describes how this degree major (also called “computational linguistics”) catapults them into jobs with Big Tech. The censorship run by Google, Facebook, and pre-Musk Twitter, is not just the random feelings of workers or management; it’s academic theory made real.

One aspect of what he’s talking about has already been uncovered by DOGE (USAID’s Small Doses Of Grift and Corruption). Since I wrote that original post, of which the MSM was only a seemingly small part of USAID’s corruption, much more has emerged about that. Taibbi again:

USAID has pushed nearly half a billion dollars ($472.6m) through a secretive US government financed NGO, “Internews Network” (IN), which has “worked with” 4,291 media outlets, producing in one year 4,799 hours of broadcasts reaching up to 778 million people and “training” over 9000 journalists (2023 figures). IN has also supported social media censorship initiatives… Bourgault’s IN bio and those of its other key people and board members have been recently scrubbed from its website but remain accessible at http://archive.org. Records show the board being co-chaired by Democrat securocrat Richard J. Kessler and Simone Otus Coxe, wife of NVIDIA billionaire Trench Coxe, both major Democratic donors. 

No! Really?

Bourgault also used to work for USAID and when speaking at the WEF event in 2024, she argued that global advertisers should prioritise spending ad dollars on “good news.” In other words, this would pressure companies to spend exclusively on corporate media outlets that promote state propaganda while ensuring they slash ad spending on alternative media websites that don’t. Red State and other such alternative media fledglings have written about how they get strangled by such tactics if they dare to write stories challenging the narratives on climate change, Covid, trans issues and so forth.

As law professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame wrote: “Everyone in the field knows this. They demonetized me over politics as well.“

Jeanne Bourgault, is perfect for the role: “Bourgault is an expert on the role of information and media in developing, conflict and post-conflict, and fragile countries”

Like the USA?

Her history is yet another example of the webs these people craft to support each other in their aims., in this case what Taibbi rightly called the Industrial Censorship Complex.

The building located at “876 7th St Arcata, CA” is an awfully nondescript place to be funneling so much money. IN’s funding has doubled since 2016, and the funding charts are wild. There’s a ton of other stuff at that link, including Mike Benz again as he describes the new language of censorship:

When the CEO of USAID’s Internews pressured advertisers to create exclusion lists to only fund approved news sources, she was carrying out USAID’s formal policy goal to have USAID partners do “advertiser outreach” to “redirect funding”

After the specific revelations about USAID funding Politico and the BBC with taxpayer funds, the former in particular felt squeezed, and if all this reminds you of China, that’s not a coincidence, as was observed years ago:

Pay attention to what’s happening in China. The fate of America’s political freedom is now intertwined with the fate of the long suffering Chinese. Rich and powerful people in the West do not look upon Chinese social control as a bug but as a desirable feature to be imported and deployed here. On the same day Chinese citizens risked their lives to protest censorship, Jeff Wise, writing for the Intelligencer, published yet another piece exploring ways to suppress the First Amendment to prevent political opponents from disputing official narratives.

In addition to the decision against Google there’s been more good news today, Rubio Shuts Down Controversial State Department Office:

Today I am announcing the closure of the State Department’s Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (R/FIMI), formerly known as the Global Engagement Center (GEC).  Under the previous administration, this office, which cost taxpayers more than $50 million per year, spent millions of dollars to actively silence and censor the voices of Americans they were supposed to be serving.  This is antithetical to the very principals we should be upholding and inconceivable it was taking place in America.

Read the whole thing to see how a “Strategic Counter Terrorism Communications” group aimed at Al Qaeda, morphed into the GEC and then the FIMI aimed at American’s and led by Democrat partisans like Rick Stengel:

In 2019, Stengel directly equated President Trump’s campaign with foreign and terrorist propaganda, writing, ‘Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS.’ That same year, Stengel wrote an entire article about ‘why America needs a hate speech law.’
…
In 2020, a coronavirus from a Chinese lab swept the globe, and GEC popped up with a report warning that a ‘Russian disinformation apparatus’ was behind public speculation that the virus was an ‘engineered bioweapon’ or that it existed due to ‘research conducted at the Wuhan institute.’ GEC tarred not only specific claims as foreign propaganda but also specific users. It created lists of thousands of accounts… These lists were sent to social media companies for ‘review,’ but nobody was fooled — the purpose of this was to pressure private companies in the direction of more censorship and less free speech. 

America may escape this fate, given the traditionally ornery nature of its people when it comes to their liberties being screwed with, especially by the government. A hive mind they are not, but the Bourgault’s of this world have been trying hard to make it that way. Trump’s election and his attacks on all this are merely the start of a fight that’s going to be bitter and long, and the American people have to win or they’re going to find themselves living in “The Perfect Dictatorship”.