Yves here. This important post fills out the picture of how extensive censorship became under the Biden Administration. I hope you’ll circulate his piece widely, since it demonstrates the campaign went well beyond social media and included disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches. What is remarkable is Urie’s evidence of a dramatic shift in search results after the dissolution of the Biden State Department censorship program. This indirectly confirms that Google’s change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives.
If that isn’t troubling enough, be sure to read to the end of the post about the threats made personally to Rob.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
In December, 2024, a Federal entity called the Global Engagement Center (GEC)— an offshoot of the US State Department tasked with censoring legal political speech on the internet, was closed after Congress stopped funding it. Within a day or two of this occurring, the internet as I haven’t seen it in four years suddenly reappeared. Hundreds of my articles that couldn’t be found under any arrangement of search terms over the prior four years have since reappeared.
Within hours of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, a decade of my writing on politics and economics was erased from the internet. Articles that had been distributed around the globe could no longer be found under any arrangement of search terms. To the alleged purpose of the GEC of ‘combatting disinformation,’ no one has ever accused me of spreading disinformation. Much of what I have written provided evidence of duplicity from official sources.
The timing is important here. The US State Department was run by Secretary of State Antony Blinken for all four years of the Biden administration. Upon entering office, Biden immediately began making preparations for war with Russia, including shutting down Russian-language news outlets in Ukraine— just as the CIA’s army in Ukraine was launching another round of ethnic cleansing against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine.
I had written about energy geopolitics from the time that the US assumed control of the Ukrainian state in a US-led coup there in 2014. Readers are invited to listen to the linked phone call (above) from 2014 between US Undersecretary for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador to the UK, Geoffrey Pyatt, and decide for yourselves. The political yeas and nays that they discuss in the call all became official policy in Ukraine in subsequent years.
Biden & Co. can dispute these characterizations, but not the facts that underly them. The intercepted phone call between Nuland and Pyatt hasn’t been denied by the US. The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) maps linked to above illustrate the ethnic cleansing that was underway— by the US and Ukraine, when Russia launched its SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022. The OSCE is allied with NATO, not Russia.
For those who missed it, this (paragraph above) is what I wrote about the genesis of the conflict in real time in 2022— after covering the back-and-forth since 2014. While the American left spent the war years repeating the CIA talking point that ‘Russia has already lost,’ I covered the international state of play. If you don’t know about this, it may be because I couldn’t get published in the left press, and through state censorship, no longer had a readership outside of it.
That I was censored wasn’t a surprise to me. I had written about the internal logic of state control over the prior decade. While the (classical) liberal view of censorship is that it impedes the free exchange of ideas, thereby reducing the aggregate wellbeing of society, Biden & Co. relied on the opposite logic. They argued that the exchange of ideas is only ‘free’ when views that are politically inconvenient for it are kept from public view.
Within hours of Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, 99% of the 200+ essays that I had written over the prior decade disappeared from the internet, along with 99% of the digital evidence that I ever existed. Little of what I had written, and none of what I was then writing, could be found via searches no matter how precise and / or detailed the search terms. For what I imagine were political reasons, after a decade of writing near-weekly essays, I had been disappeared.
The alleged rationale for this censorship was ‘to combat disinformation.’ Having followed Joe Biden’s political career since the early 1980s, the man was never known for having a firm grasp on the reality that most of the rest of us share. Much of what Biden said regarding the Covid-19 pandemic was not only untrue, but deeply harmful. Telling people that the mRNA vaccines prevented both illness and transmission— both untrue, put millions of lives at risk.
More to the point, the US had only recently been lied into a military catastrophe in Iraq by agencies of the Federal government. Biden had been the Democrats’ point person in selling the war to Congressional Democrats. He did so by claiming that Iraq possessed WMDs. This was a lie. I told anyone within earshot that this was a lie at the time. The press accounts of the ‘evidence’ were either wanting or implausible. Subsequent history supports my view.
With respect to ‘spreading disinformation,’ I have had my facts challenged (to my knowledge) a total of four times in fourteen years of public writing. The first was over the civilian death count of the Iraq war. The Lancet’s account— the one that I put forward, is the only honest effort to count the war dead. No ‘raw count’— the count being claimed to be true, has ever ended up being accurate. Despite their intuitive appeal, raw counts are by definition the lowest possible count of war dead, not the most likely count.
(I used high level statistics professionally for two-point-five decades and wrote a book placing the theories that support it in historical and philosophical context).
The second charge (of having a fact wrong) involved the automaker bailouts (2008 – 2009). The press framing had suggested that the bailouts were limited. But the details of how the bailout money had been distributed told a different story. The press accounts were put to me as fact. I sent back the actual distribution of the bailout money, which proved my case. The critic apologized and put it to me that I was correct.
While I don’t recall the specifics of the third challenge, it was quickly resolved without requiring any correction from me. The fourth incident was recent. I knowingly took a public source at face value in order to broaden the information set that I was drawing from, and their information was incorrect. When I was made aware that the information was incorrect, I educated myself as to what the correct information was, wrote it up, and distributed the correction.
Had anyone from the Biden administration or the GEC (see above) challenged me on facts, I would have responded with evidence. But without being made aware of the charge of disinformation, there is no way to respond. In fact, what is frightening about the ‘censorship workers’ (of whom I am aware) is that unless they heard something on CNN or read it in the New York Times, it is considered disinformation. This, even after the CNN / Times’ Iraq WMD and Russiagate frauds.
The PMC (professional-managerial class) press only began admitting holes in the Iraq WMD and Russiagate stories after journalists accused of having their facts wrong had ‘the facts’ accumulate in their corner to the point where they could no longer be denied. It was the establishment press that spread disinformation and the independent press that corrected it— usually after spending lifetimes in the journalistic wilderness being accused of representing the interests of nefarious foreign actors.
When former US president Woodrow Wilson ran into public resistance to US involvement in WWI, he created a department of official lies to lie Americans in to supporting the effort. Plausible consequences of WWI include the Russian Revolution and WWII. And unless Donald Trump makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East, WWIII can be added to the list. The point: the US and the world would have been far better off if WWI had been stopped before it was started.
The US war in Vietnam was posed in the Cold War terms of ‘communism versus freedom,’ when it was in fact a nationalist struggle to oust Western imperial invaders, first the French, and then the US, from Vietnam. In a now disappeared quote, LBJ stated in the mid-1960s that ‘he couldn’t end the war (Vietnam) because his friends were making too much money from it.’ Much as the German conglomerate IG Farben produced the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi extermination camps, Dow Chemical manufactured the Agent Orange used to poison Vietnam. Just business?
In 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration wanted a war against former US ally and CIA asset Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The administration hired a DC public relations firm to craft the fraudulent testimony that was then presented by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. The weeping child lied that she had seen the Iraqis ‘toss babies out of incubators’ to die on the floor. Bush subsequently slaughtered upwards of 200,000 Iraqi conscripts (‘highway of death’) after they had surrendered.
George W. Bush followed his father to craft the Iraq WMD fraud by which American propagandists sold the Bush administration’s fabrication that Iraq possessed WMDs. As I wrote at the time, there existed a reasonable predicate for this lie. As Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, George H.W. Bush had given American WMDs to Iraq. As the war was winding down, some of Poppy Bush’s weapons were found. Fox News dutifully spent months with fraudulent ‘WMDs found’ headlines glaring to craft the dueling realities that fuel American party politics.
Before he launched the current war against Russia, Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point person in Ukraine during the US-led coup there in 2014. Following the coup, Biden brought his family there to loot the place, much as the Clintonites had looted Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Democrats (and ‘the left’) chose to demonize Trump rather than addressing the charges against Biden. With Trump’s re-inauguration taking place as I write this, the strategy didn’t serve the Democrats well.
Having done quite a bit of mathematical programming over the years, I sensed quickly that I was being censored as the GEC was firing up. What surprised me, but shouldn’t have, is that the American and world history that I had linked to as source material was also being systematically disappeared from the internet. At one point in 2021 – 2022, the only way that I could re-find relevant history was to already have the links. Using the same search terms as used before never yielded the same, or even useful, results no matter how many times I tried.
The seemingly benign practice of ‘ranking’ internet search results by the credibility of the sources left the same establishment press that had mis, dis, or mal defined it when given the opportunity to define truth. Even the ‘coming clean’ events like the New York Times’ article on the CIA in Ukraine admitted only known facts and even then, ‘explained’ them through imagined motives rather than actual history. The Times piece is stunningly awful.
The Times reporter/disinformation censor worldview that only what they believe is true is widely prevalent amongst the American PMC. The logic of this view was put to me by a friend. My friend gets his news from CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. In discussing events in Ukraine, his standard response was ‘I never heard of that.’ The obvious reply: if I got my information from those sources alone, I wouldn’t know much that is true about the world either.
This ‘incredible sunshine of the spotless mind’ view, whereby the less that someone knows, the more power they are given to determine public policy, is the corporate model applied to government. CEOs fancy themselves as managers and deal makers, not content experts. Marketing ‘truth’ is a constrained optimization problem around what will best sell a product. American political discourse follows this corporate model as low-quality rhetoric.
The politics of my friend are clear from his conception of journalistic truth. The sources that he trusts have lost their audiences due to serial fabrications about Iraq’s WMDs and Russiagate. My friend is a member of the bourgeois cult that still does not understand that it has lost its legitimacy. Where this gets interesting is that this bourgeois (PMC) cult is a reasonable proxy for the interests of the oligarchs.
It was another two years until the Twitter Files were made public. Initially treated as a culture war phenomenon, what they revealed was a widespread and deeply intrusive censorship regime by agents and agencies of the Federal government. With all of the talk about ‘defending democracy,’ the Biden administration crushed pluralism when and where it could. Logically, censorship can only be imposed by those with the power to impose it.
As one who was called a communist for opposing the US war in Vietnam, a Saddam sympathizer (and a terrorist) for opposing two US wars in Iraq, a Putin puppet for opposing the current US war against Russia in Ukraine, and an antisemite for opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the trail of official lies points to the US government being the most prolific purveyor of lies related to US foreign policy. This would seem fertile territory for actual inquiry into ‘disinformation.’
While ‘enshittification’ is a good general descriptor for what doesn’t work in the modern world, intention to enshittify hasn’t tended to be the explanation for it. Prior to 2016 or thereabouts, the internet yielded results that, taken together, provided reasonable approximations of the facts. Particularly after 2021, the internet search results that I got seemed increasingly intended to mislead.
By defaulting to the establishment press in search results— the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, misleading ‘official’ accounts represent a preponderance of what I now see in internet searches. Question: how likely are these outfits to correct their serial and copious lies? And how could these same entities that had been played for fools by the Bushies regarding WMDs in Iraq be so easily rolled only a few years later with Russiagate? (Answer: they are de facto state media).
The common factor that ties Iraq WMD lies to Russiagate is US foreign policy. The PMC press earned credibility over the last century by having reporters in far flung locations that reported from the field. Starting in the 1980s, and picking up steam with the shift to the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, large news organization used cost-cutting to reduce their overseas presence.
One result has been the elevation of ‘access journalism.’ In the run-up to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, reporter Judith Miller, of the New York Times, was played by Bush’s Vice-President, Dick Cheney. Cheney was Miller’s source for a major story that she dutifully reported in the Times. Cheney then went on Meet the Press to cite the Times story, meaning himself, as independent evidence in support of the Bush administrations’ lies related to Iraq WMDs.
By retreating from overseas reporting while increasing reliance on domestic sources for information regarding US foreign policy, the American press shifted from reporting foreign policy from a variety of perspectives to reporting it from the perspective of powerful Americans with geopolitical agendas. This isn’t to overstate the case. The New York Times was considered a tool of the CIA and the US foreign policy establishment when I was protesting the Vietnam war as a child in 1969.
It was the sudden reappearance of the internet a few weeks ago that prompted this recollection. It rendered apparent what I had sensed, but could not provide proof of— that the Federal government had not only censored me while denying that it was doing so, but had rendered my ability to conduct basic research on the internet unviable. I can still enter searches. But the results seem intended to mislead.
Once the internet began to reappear, I wasn’t sure what was I was seeing (still not). All of a sudden, essays that I had written a decade before appeared during routine searches. Essays that— based on the information that was available to me, had only been read by a few dozen people, had in fact been distributed outside of the US, sometimes to substantial audiences. But all that I saw was / is a few dozen readers.
Not only was I being censored, but I was also being gaslit as to the reach of my essays. (The reach is tiny, but it isn’t the conspicuous waste of time that the evidence available to me was suggesting). As best I can tell, I had made it through the Trump years without being censored. The censorship that I encountered was conducted by the Biden administration.
Following Biden’s 2020 victory, I STFU for two years to allow him time to fail without help from me. Biden failed in the manner, and to the extent, that I predicted before the 2020 election. The bet here is that history will judge the man quite harshly. Few of my Democrat friends know his actual legacy. If the path to solving problems is to first understand them, the Democrats are in for a hard reckoning.
I started writing about events in Ukraine in 2014, having, to my own view, captured the economic nature of the emerging US conflict with Russia. Without relitigating it here, there is little that I have written about the conflict recently that is different in tenor and tone from what I wrote then. It is the details that have been updated. And I didn’t create the details. I just wrote about them.
Nevertheless, and I will not reveal details here due to the ongoing nature of the threat, around mid-2022 it was made clear to me that I would either cease and desist my political activities or onerous consequences would follow. The nature of the threat was the delivery of information that only Federal agencies or contractors could reasonably have had regarding actions that they had already taken. It wasn’t my wellbeing that was threatened. The threat was to harm people I care about.
Graph: part of what is surprising here is the symmetry between Democrats and Republicans regarding the viability of the American political system. With 60% of adults proclaiming that the American political system has been broken for decades, welcome to my world. This result makes my work absolutely ordinary, not radical. Source: nytimes.com.
What made the threat particularly creepy was that a list of the people who are important to me accompanied it. Being a former volunteer firefighter, the decision to put my own life at risk to save others has already been put to the test. It is a risk that I have been willing to take. So, imagine the current conundrum. This is being put forth as information, not a complaint.
I have no idea if the changes that I am seeing are visible to others. The tech ‘model’ of customization has produced a dystopian hellscape whereby critical comparison is impossible because there is no common basis by which to compare. This is reification of the individualist ontology of Western commerce. Good luck fixing the effect without first addressing the cause.
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… i will not reveal details here due to the ongoing nature of the threat, around mid-2022 it was made clear to me that I would either cease and desist my political activities or onerous consequences would follow…What made the threat particularly creepy was that a list of the people who are important to me accompanied it.
These fascist/corporate creeps are psychopaths that have no moral scruples. New respect for Rob Urie, who I first read on “Counterpunch” when that source was still, for me, credible. When YS writes about “disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches.” I couldn’t help thinking about Mothers of Plaza de Mayo which seems to be the trajectory the “Collective West is on.
That.Google’s change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives should be enough to launch a thousand 1st Amendment law suits, but in this new environment of the national security state, I think most “activist” are prone to keep their head low, and on their shoulder.
Of course some people at Google know where all the “bodies are buried”.
Maybe they will come forward and document this as they return to the early Google “don’t do evil” directive.
It wasn’t my wellbeing that was threatened. The threat was to harm people I care about.
I can totally relate to that one– it is very true and certainly is a tactic utilized by various government entities throughout the US (and beyond): I have witnessed being used this first-hand and was later subjected to it myself.
In my case, my response was to neutralize or eliminate the immediate threat, which is what I’ve been trained to do. However, I discussed some of this with my then soon-to-be ex over a cellphone. Oops.
Another agency stepped in only hours later and put the kabosh on my plans (in no uncertain terms), which only left flight as the viable option: unless you’re a psychopath and view “loved-ones” as expendible, what else can you do? It was a very costly experience, but could have end far worse.
Second comment: USAID and NED were active in Ukraine since at least the late 1990s, both of which are now more widely understood to be CIA fronts, and they each had a hand in the Orange Revolution of 2004– the coup of 2014 wasn’t out-of-the-blue, as the groundwork for it was being laid over a decade prior.
Thanks for this piece, it was informative and helpful.
In the ’80s I lived in the DC area, working as a freelance violinist. The accurate dates and details I don’t now recall, but sometime in the middle 80s there occurred a multi-day event celebrating pre-classical (presumably Baroque) Ukrainian liturgical music, with a number of concerts, scholarly symposia, etc. My awareness of the international resonance of this was zilch, but I did sense a somewhat unsettling political undercurrent that nobody discussed or explained to hired hands like me. I have in mind to try to retrieve some information about this, if I can. As I recall, the choral works were not sung in Old Church Slavonic. Perhaps the nature of this ‘festival’ and the identity of its organizers can be unearthed.
“We don’t tell you what to think, but what to think about.”
A lot has been said about Hollywood’s copaganda and glorification of war, but your comment got me thinking about why high-rolling political movers and shakers sponser the arts.
If I recall correctly, Shostakovich was aired by our local public radio station tbroughout the day after the 2004 elections, or maybe 2000– I’m not certain of the date, but I believe that it was opus 47 from Symphony 5. The story that I was told about this piece is a sequal to the one told here:
https://www.riphil.org/blog/the-story-behind-shostakovich-s-symphony-no-5
I was told by my formerly Soviet Russian jewish professor (University of Moscow, no less) that in a nazi extermination camp, jews were made to dance upon the jewish graves which they had dug to the tune of Opus 47.
How’s that for a sense of humor?
“Within hours of Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, 99% of the 200+ essays that I had written over the prior decade disappeared from the internet, along with 99% of the digital evidence that I ever existed. Little of what I had written, and none of what I was then writing, could be found via searches no matter how precise and / or detailed the search terms. For what I imagine were political reasons, after a decade of writing near-weekly essays, I had been disappeared.”
– Is there any currently repository to read what exactly was deleted?
I think he means that it became impossible for readers to find his essays, not that the actual web pages were deleted.
Yes, if you are delisted from search engines, it’s as if you didn’t exist.
THere are a number of small earch engines around, the list of which I have lost,. Are any likely to help?
I have noticed that Opera and Yandex often return things that I don’t find with Chrome or Firefox.
Try Gibiru
And now Opera is getting bad. I find myself increasingly using Brave and Presearch.
Yep, using Brave for about a year now – quite effective.
Naive question: is using a search engine how most people find information about political topics? Versus already having bookmarks for a few somewhat trusted link aggregators (like this site) that they scan to see if a topic comes up in a more detailed treatment? Politics seems so prone to bias in reporting that using a search engine would be likely to get you only the most popular consensus news sources (like Fox or CNN) unless you were willing to go quite a few pages deep in the result list.
But I’m old (and got on the internet in 1993), so maybe my way (having hundreds of bookmarked websites) is not how anybody in step with modern times is doing it.
Your way is good if you already know the websites in question. But if you don’t know where to start reading about an issue or who to ask for recommendations, I think a lot of people would start with the search engines.
Also means there’s a high probability he’d been added to a list long before B’s inauguration. / ;)
Many sites are saved at the Internet Archive (archive DOT org), but the rub is that you generally need an exact URL.
The archive can do searches of metadata, but when I try “Rob Urie” there are far too few results.
It’s been sad to watch Counterpunch quality degrade over the years, especially so during the last 4. I used to find so much to like on there. Now I can glean one or two decent articles a week at best. So much of what passes for radical journalism on there is just American navel-gazing lacking any sort or perspective of the larger world outside an decreasingly important US of A. That, and way too much Trump Derangement Syndrome echo-chambering.
Seconded–CP is, in my view, a creature of Operation Mockingbird ++ that has take over the formerly “left” landscape in interesting ways. Whether it is HuffPost, Salon, the Nation, all of them are, at the end of the day, pro-establishment. They supported Biden and Harris and therefore are not on the left. The left I knew opposed censorship this “left” favors it. That’s one reason I voted for Trump in hopes he’d upend all this crap–we’ll just have to see how it goes.
Idk. After the 2016 election many many good websites were suddenly faced with a mafia-like situation: ” Nice website ya got there. Be a shame if all your advertisers went away.”
I saw it happen to many, many good sites. The one’s that are left seem to have lost some of their earlier sparkle. I guess a protracted fight to stay in business, a fight with the hidden hand algos can wear ya down. It seemed like a more covert from of de-banking a business if they didn’t comply with the officially approved narratives,
As people get more nervous about their economic circumstances, I believe they become more establishment.
And the PMC and aspiring PMC are nervous about the USA economy as their personal balance sheets and prospects are in trouble.
Yes, people are properly afraid to avoid dissent–it can be fatal for careers. For those of us who worked when the US was a relatively free society all these mechanisms are hard for us to understand.
Some of us used to turn to Counterpunch in the way we now turn to sites like this one. I don’t read it much any more but S.Clair’s stance seems to be that he is keeping it going out of loyalty to what it was and so he is entitled to make it what he wants it to be. Which is different from what the late Cockburn would be doing. Cockburn would certainly be making fun of Trump. TDS not at all.
Thanks for the above but all of it is info that those who care to know could have found out. I don’t use Google at all now and regard search engines as good sources for uncontroversial information, not the real dope.
Here’s suggesting that the truth of our new century will fully come out and that line of ex-presidents on Monday will be known as historic monsters. We used to think Reagan was bad but his successors take the cake.
this is a correct statement,
“Few of my Democrat friends know his actual legacy. If the path to solving problems is to first understand them, the Democrats are in for a hard reckoning.”
but it should state that few democrats know jimmy carters legacy, that greased the skids for bill clinton, the one who really set america down this disastrous path”
also +100,
” We used to think Reagan was bad but his successors take the cake.”
Yes recent history has certainly taught us why Counterpunch was such a great media outlet over the years….Alexander Cockburn.
When Ken Silverstein left there was no change, but once Cockburn died and Jeffrey St Clair became the sole owner it quickly went downhill. After the 2016 election Counterpunch became no different than MSNBC.
I remember when AOC came onto the scene and Silverstein and St Clair were talking her up as the next Che Guevara! Nowadays they mostly only allow people with severe TDS to write articles for them, although occasionally they will have someone with some sense write something but of course in that case its never really something about politics or the economy.
Perhaps having lost their star attraction they felt the need to find some funders more amenable to the current approach. I don’t think we need to spend too much time second guessing this or for that matter defending Trump. Derangement we should definitely be against IMO. For one thing it’s boring and predictable.
Just wow. It’s worse than I imagined
Thanks.
Thanks for this, Rob. I followed your essays at least since 2014, and was delighted when you reappeared here on NC.
The fear of threats to loved ones is pervasive in the US. My son naively joined the PMC in Inner Pentagonia, gained security clearances, and sired/adopted four children. I have consequently STFU for years, hiding behind a pseudonym here on NC. This is how one-party police states maintain control.
The genius of the USian system is reflected in the poll you publish above. Everybody agrees the system is broken, but Teams Dem and Repub ceremonially blame each other while ‘Independents’ cower in the wings.
I don’t think most people understand at all what is going on or what has happened. The dissatisfaction is vague and unfocused as is most of the US populace. It is hard to parse out what is true and false. For me it is simple, I assume that every mainstream outlet is lying including “leftist” publications like Counterpunch or The Nation–I’ve caught both of them (and others) out many times so I no longer read them. It’s all Mockingbirds all the way down with the old media.
If you want an interesting perspective you might look at a brief video called “Shatter the Swarm”. This is a IndiAm (aka Dr. Shiva) that ran for President. He’s highly sensored but you should be able to find the video through TruthFreedomHealth.com. This video provides a lightning summary on the factions working to eliminate our autonomy.
Thanks, will check it out.
Yup, Dr. Shiva. The Swarm…he has some, finer, points.
Please do not overlook Rob Urie’s description of the U.S. ethos, pretty much since 2000, with further deterioration after the attack on the World Trade Center in September 2001. I’d also argue that the earlier major step into the abyss was the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1991, which meant that the West believed its “triumph,” no longer had to fear revolution, and could then squander any peace dividend.
To quote the description of this ethos: “This ‘incredible sunshine of the spotless mind’ view, whereby the less that someone knows, the more power they are given to determine public policy, is the corporate model applied to government. CEOs fancy themselves as managers and deal makers, not content experts. Marketing ‘truth’ is a constrained optimization problem around what will best sell a product. American political discourse follows this corporate model as low-quality rhetoric.”
This explains Trump’s mystic view that he’s going to “manage” America into being great again. The assumption that business models apply across all culture is embedded into the Republican Party, particularly after the end of Poppy Bush’s term, and isn’t only Trumpery. This business model also explains the recent spasms in U.S. Protestantism toward even flimsier doctrines in well-managed and well-marketed fundi and mega-churches. And the corporate model injected “bean counters” into publishing, the foundations, and arts organizations, which leads to stagnancy in culture and a human-resources model of artistry: The endless flavor of the week rather than promoting real careers for real artists.
In brief: This is an enlightening essay. Thanks. The description at the end of veiled threats from the powerful reminds us that the U.S. mono-party state is incapable of dismantling the oppressive law-enforcement / surveillance state.
But the twin-partyopoly won’t collapse because there is so much left to loot.
Not to be left out of current fashion, unfortunately, the EU Commission is now thoroughly degraded by the same ethos. Van der Leyen. Borrell. Kallas. Authoritarians all. Closer to my Undisclosed Region, I see the malicious / feckless Matteo Salvini.
To your and Rob’s point about the current ethos. Trump was talking the other day about BRICS, and how the “S” stood for Spain. He seemed quite convinced.
Jesus wept.
Rob Urie’s account of what Team Biden did to him and others makes Biden’s recent warning regarding the dangers of govt censorship most especially vomit inducing. And Biden himself is too far gone mentally to even remotely understand this. I was shocked to the point of disbelief when Dems decided to make Biden President some 4+ yrs ago. I couldn’t believe Dem leaders had become that mentally incompetent to select Biden. But that did. Amazing.
There would be much to write from German perspective.
Just 2 cases:
A German language conversation between 2 authors who suffered serious backlash over their work on the war is this from December 2024. Unfortunately I still cannot find German subs (shouldn’t YT create them automatically?)
Endless War – Suicide of Europe? | Ulrike Guérot & Patrik Baab
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NXyhrD1uRI
For those who understand the language – they will find many of Urie’s points above.
The 2 participants are Ulrike Guérot and Patrik Baab. Guérot in fact started as very pro-Delors-EU and even pro-Wolfgang Schäuble intern before she became professor and in her mid-30s got a call to Washington D.C. as an Associate Prof. for EU studies at Paul H. Nitze School at John Hopkins
CV
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrike_Gu%C3%A9rot
The most interesting part of the interview conveys how she met and argued with Wolfowitz, Fiona Hill, Bob Kagan et al. on a regular basis teaching at Hopkins. She also was part of Marshall Fund action, the Open Society or COFR. So Guérot knows all the crazy people personally.
(At one point she states that a Claudia Major was her intern in the early 2000s. The same lady who today on the other side of this culture war is whipping up the public and especially Bundestag calling to arms and destroying Russia. A mad and dangerous woman.)
Guérot was thus one of the high profile academics very fond of a strong EU and very naive in doing so, not yet understanding then that Kagan and Co. would bring about the destruction of her beloved EU.
2 years ago then came the scandal. Based on ridiculous charges of plagiarism the University of Bonn that had just hired her suspended her (due to student complaints!). Causing ripple effects for her entire career. She eventually left Bonn and retired from the public for over a year. Guérot still believes in the EU´s potential for being truly “good” but is aware that it might be too late.
The reason her being a massive critic of the EU and the US and a truth-teller on the true nature of “Project Ukraine”, supported by her intimate knowledge of the US apparatus. They did not like that woman around any longer of course. She wrote books about this, essays, gave interviews and speeches and was all over the place calling the elite to its senses. And she enlightened the broad public about all this. Leaving her Ivory Tower.
She has recovered a bit I believe and has created or is about to create a Foundation to gather support against this new suicidal path of Germany and the EU on both sides of the Atlantic. She stated that to win over people like Joe Rogan e.g. would be desireable.
Patrik Baab was a long-time journalist and correspondent with German state broadcasting. He visited Donbas, wrote a book, did what he had always done for 40 years+ but now was got kicked out of the system. The college where he was teaching after he had left broadcasting to work more freely wanted not only get rid of him, they wanted his entitlement for pensions annulled.
Which would have destroyed his future livelihood. This being pushed by people he knew, colleagues, college staff. Him writing the truth made them hate Baab. An outlaw over night.
There was a court case over the illegal college firing of Baab which of course ended in Baab’s favour.
To fire a teacher because he has written an excellent bestselling non-fiction book about Donbas and the war – (I can only recommend it to German readers) – is unheard of. So far.
https://www.buchkomplizen.de/auf-beiden-seiten-der-front.html
In fact even the book shops took his book out of the windows – as the only title among the top 20. He since has 0 contact to his former fellow journalists.
And these things happen all over the place. The unreported cases of self-censorship must be many Thousands. Considering the amplification of views via internet makes the repercussions of suppression even worse.
However as Germany is concerned I doubt anything will change seriously. The intuitive nature of online presensce and “online learning” and the lack of education through MSM is so overwhelming. I see no reason for any improvement.
In fact nobody knows that the entire info space is being censored.
The only level of threats I have not heard of yet are the ones Urie mentions in the end. I guess that’s because 1) the deep state here is too “unprofessional” 2) I have not talked to people of Palestine solidarity. There I am pretty sure the stories would surpass the level of what I have described by far.
To support Russia is easier than Palestine. That tells you everything about the true nature of “fascism” in the age of “post-fascism” (ie. post-1945).
Ulrike Guérot can be heard in English on the great Neutrality Studies channel.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LyiAJ9s_Dlk
Thank you Mr. Urie for this report and all your important work.
thanks, appreciate the link
yes and it fact the role of German ruling class is central, even more important than the initial American acts. Because without Germany USA can’t do much in EU and with EU. Germany plays a low profile but important role against Russia.
Ukraine projet is a Drang nach Osten 2.0.
It feels like continuation of Hans Glokbe and Reinhard Gehlen. At the time of the “Euromaïdan” comedy, Steinmeier (current federal president) was the man in charge, low profile but a key role in German policies (which means too EU) since the times he ran BND (when USA launched Iraq war).
It is Germany that has pushed the EU-wide censorship.
What escapes me is the dominant lack of collective awareness inside German society despite the History of the country.
Welcome back Rob. You certainly were one of the journalists who kept me well informed of events in Ukraine form 2014 on. Back when I too found Counterpunch to be a credible source.
Thank you for this Rob. As you point out, although the mainstream press has long been “de facto state media,” there used to be cracks where the work of actual investigative reporters could appear, especially at crucial times in our history. This no longer seems to be the case. And I’ve practically given up on open internet searches these days. Instead, I usually go through the painstaking process to going to individual sites I trust and putting information together myself. At least we can still do that – at present.
I’m not optimistic that Trump and his current tech buddies will change our censorship regime; they’ll probably just adjust the targets some. But I really appreciate the battles waged by yourself and outlets like this one. Thanks again.
Wow, like wow. I knew that the censorship was bad but not so fine-tuned as to delete individual people and all their work. So if the Democrats get back in again, will they be doing this once more? Maybe Trump should organize some truth and reconciliation panels to humiliate the Democrats and make everybody aware of just who they are and what they did.
“censorship was bad but not so fine-tuned as to delete individual people…” The political/economic class is so fine-tuned, so precise, that they’ve been able to delete entire peoples. The Palestinians head the list of people whose lives are of no importance, so well, take them away to be burned alive. The interests of America’s ruling classes are best served by their elimination. And, Shh, don’t trouble yourself to waste a single word on them, or maybe, if you do say something, or write something, then you become a problem, and America has found many, many ways to deal with you. Like in the old Twilight Zone show, Anthony can simply place you in the cornfield.
Thanks for sharing Rob–great article, and chilling
I’ve always found your articles to be excellent and am glad you have landed at NC
I too am a former Counterpunch reader/donor who fled
What is a good piece about the Biden legacy, for a semi-open-minded person?
Most of my friends and coworkers are Democrats, and my own, small, slow pursuit of the truth has made me a heretic in their eyes. They think I’m crazy, or misguided, yet most are surprisingly polite considering the gulf that has come to separate our thinking. Being a Democrat is their shield against the admittedly broken political system, so one cannot criticize that without triggering a massive defensive reaction. How, then, can we find some common ground?
Some of these Democrat friends are quite bright, and would read an essay or two before engaging in a discussion. The problem is that most pieces put them off before they get started, with adversarial language, insufficient support for controversial assertions, partisan point of view, or general lack of persuasive power. Of course when a partisan reads opposition material, they look for the first good reason to stop and declare it nonsense. It takes real craftsmanship to lure them in, keep them engaged, and leave them with no excuse to reject it. Does anyone know of such a piece about Biden? Most everything these days is written to buttress people’s existing views, not to persuade them towards new ones.
The ray of hope in my life is the young people. The Democrat problem, in my experience, is the increasingly aged partisans. Perhaps it is like the physics of the last century, where progress was made one funeral at a time. In the meantime I continue to try to bridge the gap, thankless task though it is.
I’ve noticed that people with college, particularly post-grad, degrees are not trained in the basics of intellectual discourse and dialectic and, as intellectuals (so they think), their emotional maturity is fairly weak and thus get angry when challenged due to lack of confidence and self-restraint. My own background enabled to fulfill the dictum of F. Scott Fitzgerald who said “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Later, I discovered that this is a spiritual practice that actually stills the mind (it’s part of Zen training). Now, it’s a habit though I still pontificate like anyone else most of the time.
The current intellectual climate in the USA and the West in general (what happened to the Brits?) is stunningly by historical standards. I used to be able to have far reaching conversations about all kinds of things with college grads back in the day. Now, they think they know everything and get angry when I point out they don’t (and neither do I). I like to always point out the tale of the Blind Men and the Elephant and young people often look puzzled.
Well said, thank you.
I went back up to check and see. My guess, the PMC friends I know wouldn’t get past the second paragraph. Soon as you accuse the dems of anything bad they are done. Can’t hear it, won’t believe it. End of story. Well, maybe not, they would call me a loon for believing it (they didn’t believe anything about the Twitter files).
I have no doubts this happened, not only to him, but many others. The real shame is only 30-50 percent of the people would believe it.
The vast majority of people I knew in high-school and college had no interest whatever in learning per se, they were just looking for a diploma. This was true regardless of class background. People who actually want to know about anything beyond what they need for everyday life are few and far between. Class has little to do with it.
>>most pieces put them off before they get started, with adversarial language, insufficient support for controversial assertions,
I had this experience way, way back when I recommended Michael Parenti books, especially The Sword and the Dollar.
I found Parenti’s arguments persuasive and then read further about some of the events he discussed, and found he had described them accurately.
But people weren’t interested in doing further reading and so they said he made a lot of sweeping accusations and didn’t back them up.
But if he had backed his assertions up with mountains of evidence they would have said the books were too big a commitment to read. [[Insert shrugging emoji.]]
Kudos to Urie!
The Cheney – Butler – Cheney process looks like a mirror image of the Pelosi Wrap-up Smear. Now, what to name it?
That would be Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi to you pal. ;-)
Shouldn’t that be Speaker d’ Omerta Nancy (Ice Cream Queen) Pelosi?
Echoing all the other comments here – thank you so much, Rob, for your body of work over the years. I was always excited to read your essays at CP and that remains the case at NC. Thanks for being brave in the face of intimidation, please keep doing what you do – it really matters.
I have read of other people relating the same story. They were shocked that – once they dissented from the official narrative – they disappeared from the ‘net. When it was impossible due to their notoriety to “completely disappear them,” their biographies had been re-written to demonize them or minimize their stature and accomplishments.
Not only that, it all happened overnight. And it happened to internationally recognized individuals who were – overnight – smeared or minimized on an international level.
The victims were left in a state of shock over the speed and thoroughness of the campaign against them.
“It all happened overnight.” is perfect. Get ready for an AI serious boost to this. Remember Occupy Wall Street and how, surprisingly, the cops “took down” many protests, all around the country at the same time, on the same day. How did they coordinate? How did they know?
Reading Matt Taibbi and his colleagues on Twitter left me thinking that Elon Musk only showed them how the system worked to suppress Republican voices. I do not think Rob Urie is a Republican. I also don’t think they went after only him.
I’m glad his content can searched for again but am curious as to whether his social media is still being suppressed. Mine sure is and I’m a nobody. My ‘read only mode’ suspension also came with ‘rate limiting’ which kicks in whenever I make more than a few searches (like trying to figure out which Rob Urie on X is the Rob Urie I’m looking for).
Here’s the link to his Substack. Found it via Brave and it was about the 8th post down. Just like Jack Nicholson said “He’s back!”.
OK, there is no link. Was that just a mistake, or was it scrubbed? /s
I put “Rob Urie Substack” into Google and it was the first result.
Does it matter where you are searching *from* (i.e. not the USA)? I never know how these things work.
So an interesting thing about the Google Search API GitHub dump, has to do with authorship. SEO experts deep dived the various APIs that Google accidentally published for their internal search systems, and it was revealed that Google has the capability to adjust the search ranking score for content based upon the authorship of content. I forget if there was a setting to penalize content that might be from a particular author, but it wouldn’t surprise me. The dump also revealed that, contrary to Google’s official messaging, they do apply an overall score to a domain name, and that then affects the ranking of pages on that site, new or otherwise.
Of course Google might have some other system that straight up just applies a blacklist directly, but it might interact with the above capabilities to achieve this outcome.
(Originally, Page Rank was based entirely on the value of back links, the original signal that content is valuable and worthwhile, but we’re a long ways away from that.)
Geoff Pyatt is among several State Dept. senior officials asked to resign by the Trump administration. He has resigned as Assistant Secretary of State for Energy.
Sometimes it’s just one day at a time. One down, endless to go.
Geoffrey R. Pyatt’s term ended on January 20, 2025.
Geoffrey R. Pyatt, a career member of the Foreign Service, class of Career Ambassador, was sworn in as Assistant Secretary for Energy Resources on September 19, 2022.
Ambassador Pyatt served as U.S. Ambassador to Greece from 2016 to 2022 and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine from 2013 to 2016.
If you think about it, as few hundred thousand soldiers had died after the cluster fuck of Ukraine by its securities guarantors US,UK and Russia after the well done job of Victoria Nuland and US Ambassador to Ukraine Geofrey R. Pyatt, we may ask Oliver Stone (Ukraine on Fire ; Directed by, Igor Lopatonok ; Written by, Vanessa Dean ; Produced by, Igor Lopatonok ; Starring. Oliver Stone · Vladimir Putin · Victor Yanukovich ) to be the director of the replay for Ukraine 2025, 11 years later, with “what can be, unburdened by what has been.” (Copyright Kamala Harris)
Is there anyone collecting instances and examples of threats like those Rob has received, and other politically motivated targeting? Including e.g. the likes that Craig Murray received. And of course Gonzalo Lira.
I would class the specific threat Rob received as being on the more sinister and risky – for those making the threat! – end of the scale, due to the risk of significant consequences if those making the threats were identified.
There should be a project for collecting and documenting in detail, all such instances of such threats and their likely sources, and seeking to establish whistleblowers for identifying the source of these threats – as I’m sure there are plenty more Snowden’s yet to come forth in intelligence agencies and contractors.
Being in a part of the world (Northern Ireland) where that kind of sinister duplicity on the part of intelligence services is a still-emerging historical reality (and arguably a present one still; I’d be totally unsurprised, would even expect, to be on a list or two – despite having little notable about me), I can see the extreme political damage it can create for the perpetrators, and their desperate attempts to keep it under wraps.
Just like the migration to TikTok or Red Door, people need to immigrate to Yandex for search.
I just searched “Israeli murder in Palestine” and got two completely different results from Google (which BTW I almost never use).
An Unz result came up second. Jacobin was first. HRW, Electronic Intifada, Middleeast Eye and Press TV were on the first page.
No MSM results except a FB link.
You’re using the wrong search engine. DuckDuckGo uses Google.
One of the weirdest things about US mainstream discourse is all the passive voice, and yet even Rob falls into the trap such as:
>>It was another two years until the Twitter Files were made public. Initially treated as a culture war phenomenon,
Treated that way by whom??? A lot of people took it as vindication and crowed about it. Even more people were unaware it happened.
MSMbrain has just bored its way into all of our heads.
Rob, what follows is a framework which may explain, in a somewhat broader sense, what happened to you over the past 4 years.
After World War II ended, free speech became a key instrument of American foreign policy statecraft. It helped to pry open other countries by running money and ideas to political dissidents, particularly in socialist or communist-run countries in order to engender instability and ultimately regime change, to support U.S. interests.
What was created between 1948 and say Brexit and then the 2016 election of Trump, was a quite dominant free speech foreign policy apparatus/complex (NGOs, non-profits, university centers, journalists, judges, intelligence agencies, etc.) that enabled our State Dept. to flood foreign countries with our concept of free speech along with voices like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.
However, by 2016 with the election of Trump, it became clear that the internet and social media were fast becoming instruments of the populist/Maga right both here and in much of Europe. The Free Speech apparatus then gave way to a censorship foreign policy apparatus not only abroad but within the U.S. itself (which you and many, many others individually experienced between 2021 and 2024.
Mike Benz, of the Foundation of Freedom Online, spent the last 8 years documenting this new censorship eco-system. He was a key individual in explaining much of this to Matt Taibbi
This is not Orwellian. This is Orwell.
“One of the notices carried a printed list of the members of the Chess Committee, of whom Syme had been one. It looked almost exactly as it had looked before — nothing had been crossed out — but it was one name shorter. It was enough. Syme had ceased to exist: he had never existed.”
I also have experienced censorship, likely due to political or ideological motivations. All my past and future reviews on Amazon were canceled without any appeal possible or explanation other than “content”. My content has always been civil, though critical and thoughtful in an academic sense. Coming from the liberal left, I suspect the woke crowd, who are as well known as the CIA for their bigotry and cancel culture. Others suspect as algorithm, as I posted about 50 high quality book reviews in one year but the lack of appeal suggests a more nefarious motive.
yet more proof that the Biden regime was the most vile, repressive US presidency arguably since the beginning. He took depravity to all new levels. May he and all his enablers rot in hell. Those who campaigned for him as the lesser of two evils should politely sit politics out for all time.
I use Brave browser and Brave search engine. They are admittedly not as comprehensive as Yandex. What comments do NCers have on Brave? What are the pros and cons of switching to Yandex?
Rob and Yves,
Thanks for including this piece. Most people do not realize how much the ‘deep state’ is involved in shaping the thinking and behavior of people. More articles like these will open their eyes (hopefully).
Found this on Telegram:
“Werewolf: Dmitry Davidoff’s Blueprint for Informational Warfare
What if I told you that a simple party game, invented by Russian sociologist Dmitry Davidoff in 1986, holds the blueprint for understanding propaganda, manipulation, and the dark art of disinformation? Welcome to “Werewolf”, a chilling microcosm of how those who control secrets and the narrative, hold ultimate power.
Here’s the setup: players are divided into villagers and werewolves. The catch? Only the werewolves know each other’s identities. Each “night,” the werewolves eliminate a player, while during the “day,” everyone debates and votes on who to execute based on suspicion. The villagers are blind, relying on gut instincts and incomplete information, while the werewolves thrive on deception, paranoia, and manipulation.
From Davidoff’s Classroom to Modern Informational Warfare
Dmitry Davidoff originally designed Werewolf as a social experiment to study group dynamics and decision-making under pressure. What he inadvertently created was a mirror to the chaos of modern hybrid warfare. In the game, the werewolves almost always win, and that’s no coincidence, it’s a perfect demonstration of how controlling information shapes reality.
• The Misinformation Advantage: The werewolves, like today’s propagandists, hold all the cards. They know the truth while the villagers (the masses) are left groping in the dark. This asymmetry is the foundation of disinformation campaigns, from fake news to deepfakes to manufactured consent.
• Divide and Rule: Werewolves thrive by turning villagers against each other, creating chaos where clarity should reign. In the real world, this is the standard operating procedure for empires, intelligence agencies, and media conglomerates seeking to destabilize opposition.
• Weaponized Doubt: The villagers’ reliance on trust is their downfall. Like the general public, they’re manipulated by emotional appeals, false accusations, and cleverly seeded lies. The werewolves’ strength isn’t brute force, it’s controlling perception.
❗️Dmitry Davidoff didn’t just create a game, he built a warning. Werewolf shows how easy it is for the manipulators; the werewolves, the elites, the disinformation architects to dominate when the masses are fragmented and blind to the truth. In a world of shadow wars, TikTok bans, and AI-driven propaganda, this game doesn’t just reflect reality, but predicts it. The villagers tear each other apart while the real culprits laugh in the shadows. Sound familiar?
So, the next time you play Werewolf, remember: it’s more than a game. It’s a masterclass in how the ignorant are ruled by the informed. Davidoff gave us the rules of modern informational warfare. The question is, will we learn from it?
– Gerry Nolan”