The Week That Was

 

At the tender age of 58, and having worked in mass media across several continents and languages pretty much all my life, I must confess that this past week was likely the most unusual I have experienced.  Keep in mind that I became politically aware in 1972, during the second Nixon campaign, and sat for hours in the summer of 1974, absorbing the Watergate hearings.

The week began with an amazing two-and-a-half hour live discussion with Catherine Austin Fitts and Joseph P. Farrell, examining the Q Phenomenon.  If you have not heard this video and listening to two vast intellects bring sweeping wisdom and experience to bear on an issue, then this conversation should be on your to-do list.

Not only did I marvel at the information the two guests brought to bear, but I was also enamored of the technology we employed to do it.  Having grown up with black-and-white TeeVee, reel-to-reel audio tape, and only three networks, plus having set up trans-global live streams back in the Dark Ages, the fact that I could point-and-click my way to a live interview with participants almost perfectly 120 degrees separated across the globe, in three time zones, four hemispheres, and literally two different days, boggled my mind.

We take so much for granted, especially when it comes to the power we have sitting on our tables and desks, and even in the palms of our hands.

When I was 18, I backpacked around the world.  It took a year and a half, and I lived in, visited, or barely escaped from I think it was 42 countries.  If I wanted to get a message home, I had to buy postcards and stamps, set off an afternoon in a cafe, then find a post office to drop off the results.  If I wanted to call home, in most countries I had to find a telegraph office, schedule a time, then sit in a tiny booth with a meter counting off the cost as I spoke. I also had to speak, wait for the sound to reach the other end, wait for the reply to reach me, and then answer - up to several seconds between sentences.  One can imagine the fun that became as questions and answers quickly started overlapping.  The typical 3-minute call cost $5-$10, depending on where I was.

But I digress.

Within hours of the live stream, every Q commentator I knew of vanished from YouTube.  I'm not talking about locked accounts or blocked videos, I mean Unpersonned - saved or embedded videos, comments, years worth of people's hard work gone with the flip of a switch.

Imagine living the Caveman Days, when I grew up, and going to the library to find that every encyclopaedia ever printed had suddenly vanished, and even the cards had been removed from the card catalog - for the Younglings, card catalogs were the Google of the ancient analog world.

I may have my disagreements with the Qniverse, but to vanish people's entire channels, some with incredible amounts of work put into them that, in many cases, predated or was tangential to their Q work, is unforgivable.

The blog you are reading right now is over 10 years old, with over 1,000 articles averaging 800 words each, and many with hours of hunting and linking sources and resources.  If it vanished without a trace in the next hour, I would be crushed if not livid (fortunately I regularly back it up).

This mass Unpersonning is nothing short of digital book burning.  It is exactly equal to what totalitarian regimes have done for centuries, to hide unfavorable information.  If you need to know who the Enemy is, look no further, and if you agree with it, then you ARE the enemy.  There is no justification for this kind of censorship.  The only crime those people committed was publishing ideas and opinions that threatened or embarrassed the Ruling Elite.  That kind of speech is the very definition of the Right to Free Speech.

While all of the above was going on, the Hunter Biden story began breaking.  I use the Continuous aspect of the verb, because I am quite sure we have only just started to see this one bear fruit.

This time, it was Tweezer and Farcebook who stepped up to the censorship plate.  Both entities blocked access to the New York Post story - for our protection, of course.  A story with severe political implications about the doings of a presidential candidate in an election year put out by one of the longest operations and most widely circulated news sources in America was blocked.

Let's pause for a moment to consider those facts.

One cannot overstate the implications here.  This is unprecedented in American history.  This is burying Teapot Dome, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, all in one.  And what the heck, let's throw New York Times v. Sullivan on top for good measure.  The scope and scale of this censorship is unimaginable to me.  If it occurred in any other country or with any other political wing than the American left, the howls would be deafening - and has been in the deep past, like when I was a kid.

I am not really sure what is more disturbing to me - the censorship or the fact that public corporations are acting as State entities.  I can't call it Orwellian, because he couldn't envision a world run by corporations.  In fact, I am hard=pressed to think of a dystopian novel in which non-State entities are the true evil.  At least with State power, the Laws are a process and everyone can see the usurpation of power in process.  The insidious nature of corporate control and the hidden Board Room debates over Terms & Conditions is opaque to even the most arduous investigations.

What is more frightening, these corporations are legal "persons," with a "corporate viel" that grants virtual immunity to the officers and agents within them.  Since the corporate persons cannot be jailed, about the worst that can happen is a stiff fine, for which the actual perpetrators are not liable, and from which the officers, directors and shareholders are protected.

Combine the above with the immunity these corporations have enjoyed since the mid-1990s under Section 230 of the Communications Act, and they are free to do what no American administration would ever dare to do - not from any idealistic fear of Constitutional limits, but from the virulent political blowback.

We see this not only in the realm of communications, but in the broad immunity pharmaceutical companies have almost globally against liability from vaccines, another issue that will soon raise its ugly head.

If one were a conspiracy theorist, one might see all this as part of some Grand Design to circumvent legal protections, while delivering copious profits to political shareholders, who in many cases enjoy deep ties to the regulatory agencies that oversee their activities.

So glad I'm not a conspiracy theorist.

Regardless of whether this is all by design, it is certainly the result of decades of public apathy.  We are all guilty of having delegated our responsibilities and failure to closely manage our servants and employees at every level.  We happily chased our geegaws and lounged on our pit groups in our houses we no longer own, while driving to corporate-drone jobs in cars we no longer own, while allowing our governments to farm out their responsibilities to private interests so they could reap financial rewards.

And here we are.

Now we all must face a choice, and fast.

Do we continue to allow ourselves and that of anyone we care about to be leached away at an ever-increasing pace?  Or do we put the popcorn down, roll ourselves off the rented pit group in our rented houses and pay the price for our lack of diligence?

The choice is crystal clear.  We surrender ownership of everything, including our very bodies and the dialog between our ears, for which we will receive non-stop entertainment until the day we realize it's all gone.  Or we - us, here, now - decide that we will pay the price for our sloth by shedding sweat, blood and tears to regain what we surrendered of our birthright.

Make no mistake.  There is no middle ground.  Any hole unplugged will allow the swarm to come back in even greater numbers.  This isn't a game.  We don't get to save our position and reset if we are wrong.  We don't get multiple lives and there aren't enough coins in existence to buy another chance.

This is the time, and we are the generation who must make this choice for all generations to come.  Freedom is not a thing that is possesses, it is a process - a series of decisions - that is undertaken in every individual and in every generation.

And that's the week that was.