Control And Silencing Dissenting Speech

Here Is The Missing Manual For Defending Yourself Against Deplatforming And Cancel Culture

Submitted by Mark Jeftovic of Guerrilla-Capitalism; co-founder & CEO, easyDNS Technologies Inc. and author of Unassailable: Protect Yourself From Deplatform Attacks and Cancel Culture

Things are moving quickly.

In the old adage “Never let a crisis go to waste”, governments everywhere are using the pandemic opportunity to:

• Rule by decree
• Stifle freedoms guaranteed under various rights and charters
• Enact mandatory surveillance
• Silence dissenting speech

Their enablers in this are the mainstream media and Big Tech, who have formed an ideological simpatico to form and control public opinion. You may have heard the expression Overton Window, which defines the allowable spectrum of opinion and the limits beyond which public discourse is not permissible. When the institutional scaffolding of a system begins to buckle, and when the credibility of traditional sources of mainstream news go into secular decline, the Overton Window constricts.

Of the Government / Mainstream Media / Big Tech triumvirate, only Big Tech is on the ascendency. It seeks to carve out an indispensable role of one manner or another in the next world order which has been emerging for over a decade, and is now accelerating amid the pandemic.

The components of The Triumvirate do understand viscerally, what has been known by those who seek to retain power since Edward Bernays wrote his blueprints for controlling the public mind back in 1920s (those were “Propaganda”, “Public Relations” and “Crystallizing Public Opinion“)

Not to put too fine a point on it,

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.

Now, what is still more important, to the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities.

In departments of our daily life, in which we imagine ourselves free agents, we are ruled by dictators exercising great power”.

— Propaganda, Chapter 3: The New Propagandists

The narrative must be controlled, it must be shaped and deviations from it must be curtailed and marginalized. As I say in my book, Unassailable (now free, see below),

“The ramifications of successfully asserting one [narrative] trajectory over any other challengers may never be fully grasped by the public at large.”

This occurs through repeated accusations of  the “conspiracy theory” monicker, or blaming everything that goes wrong on Russian meddling, white nationalists and the like. It even looks like narrative enforcers even go so far as to cherry pick the most absurd elements and participants out of a given area of concern and amplify those, so as to “poison the well’, so to speak against an entire stream of debate around a given concern:

“One of the most favored propaganda tactics of establishment elites and [those] they employ … is to relabel or redefine an opponent before they can solidly define themselves. In other words, elites [and their media] will seek to “brand” you (just as corporations use branding) in the minds of the masses so that they can take away your ability to define yourself as anything else.” (emphasis added)

— Brandon Smith, Alt-Market.