In 2022, one has to be utterly naive to believe that Silicon Valley behaves in an independent manner from the political process. In fact, Silicon Valley often acts as the private enforces of the US Deep State.
This is most apparent when it comes to foreign policy discourses that challenges the Globalist American Empire’s discourse.
With the Russo-Ukrainian conflict underway, the corporate media has worked to create a monolithic narrative on this conflict. It has to go the Marvel Comic route of portraying Russia as the villain and Ukraine as the victim, while the US and its NATO allies are the heroes. That’s how low geopolitical analysis has fallen these days.
Thankfully, there’s an alternative media ecosystem that has emerged to challenge this cartoon narrative. From Antiwar.com to Moon of Alabama, various websites have popped up to offer a unique perspective on this conflict. Namely, a perspective that blames the West for creating this security dilemma.
One website that has done an excellent job in exposing the Globalist America Empire and its satrapies, is MintPress News. For the “grievous crime” of giving an alternate take to the Russo-Ukrainian war, Mnar Adley and Alan MacLeod of MintPress have had their PayPal accounts blocked. As anti-war journalist Caitlin Johnstone noted, Caleb Maupin, a journalist critical of the American empire, also has his Paypal account blocked.
MacLeod recently published an article titled “An Intellectual No-Fly Zone: Online Censorship of Ukraine Dissent Is Becoming the New Norm” that highlighted the many ways Silicon Valley behemoths are suppressing dissenting views of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. On top of that, several YouTube videos that have gone against the uniparty line on Ukraine have been demonetized.
Paypal has traditionally been used by dissidents and independent journalists who want their work crowdfunded.
We have to remember that many of these journalists can’t make a traditional living like their mainstream counterparts who rely on traditional corporate media and wealthy sponsors to make a living.
MintPress News Executive Director Mnar Adley told Johnstone the following about PayPal’s decision to ban her:
Paypal banning myself and MintPress is blatant censorship of dissenting journalists & outlets. For the past decade MintPress has been unapologetically working as a watchdog journalism outlet to expose the profiteers of the permanent war state from the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Sudan to Apartheid Israel’s occupation of Palestine and Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen to regime change operations in Syria, Ukraine and Venezuela where US weapons have flooded these nations to plunge them into devastating civil wars.
In the era of a declining US empire, censorship has become the last resort of an unpopular regime and its forever wars to make the truth disappear and critical thinking all but dead. With the war in Ukraine raging on, we’ve entered war time and Big Tech giants, including Paypal, are working hand in hand with the New Cold War architects themselves to sanction dissenting journalists. If you read the board of any of these tech giants from Google, Twitter, Facebook and Paypal, they read like a rogues’ gallery of war mongers and their agenda is clear: To control the free flow of information and target the bank accounts of anyone who dares question the official narrative of the Pentagon or State Department.
Adley added:
It is outrageous to be told that tech giants, which are run by those who directly profit from the New Cold war including the crisis in Ukraine, could limit any journalist’s ability to fund their work. Can you imagine if this was the norm in Russia, China or Iran? Our media would be screaming about free speech and first amendment rights. Yet, when we do it’s ok because it’s under the guise of fighting ‘Russian propaganda’.
We’re living in an intellectual No-Fly Zone where online censorship of dissenting journalism has become the new norm. The US sanctions regime that is trying to starve Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Cuba and Iran and over 25% of the world’s population is now targeting its own citizens with its maximum pressure campaign so we are forced to toe the official government line in order to survive as a journalist in alternative media today.
The MintPress News Executive Director concluded with the following statement:
No matter the war waged against us, we refuse to be backed into a corner and bullied by tech giants who have a deep relationship with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and who work hand in hand with NATO that profit off the blood of millions of people around the world. The only way forward is for people to unite on a broader front of non-partisanship and fund our own media because there are more of us than there are of them.”
Maupin’s case is rather interesting. He is a speaker and journalist who has built a reputation for challenging the Globalist American Empire. Johnstone observed that his personal Twitter account has been “branded ‘Russia state-affiliated media’ by the US state-affiliated platform.
“Why should something as basic as cash transactions be subject to political censorship?” inquired Maupin when Johnstone reached out to him. “The economic war on independent countries is turning into a war on free speech. Writers and journalists must be able to eat.”
The ruling class in the West has been compelled to get creative in the way they censor people. The 1984-style of censoring people by sending jackbooted goons to their house can elicit strong institutional pushback — Supreme Court or other legislative bodies that deem such behavior as unconstitutional — or even backlash from a vast swathe of the populace that still clings on to a strong pro-civil liberty culture. In turn, the Deep State has had to employ Big Tech actors as private enforcers of their norms.
The same dynamic is at play with financial platforms. By cutting off people from their funds, these financial entities are effectively censoring the work of many journalists who rely on the patronage of their subscribers to continue their work. This mode of censorship will continue to be the Western norm until the West “Elects a New People” and by bringing in enough alien migrants to politically transform the country, thereby making it easier to assault foundation American freedoms such as free speech.
Until then, privatized censorship will be the norm in the so-called Land of the Free. Indeed, we are navigating in dangerous waters. Without free speech in a time of geopolitical unrest, the ruling class will have a much easier time in getting the population to support misguided military expeditions abroad.
But this time around, such confrontations will be of the highest stakes, as they will have the US face off against nuclear-armed peer competitors
Now, more than ever, we need independent media voices to help prevent the US from sleepwalking into a conflict that has the possibility of going nuclear.
