Above, that’s Vijaya Gadde, who until she was fired by Elon Musk, was Twitter’s lead censor — and, as it turns out, a government suck-up. You have probably seen by now The Intercept’s jaw-dropping report about how the US Government has been collaborating with Big Tech to monitor and shape what Americans are allowed to talk about. I won’t quote the report at length here, but here’s the gist:

Note this part especially, from the report:

Got that? If you have a dissenting opinion on the lab-leak theory, on vaccines, on Critical Race Theory, on Afghanistan, or on Ukraine, then the Feds may be interested in you.

Check out this Twitter thread by Bill Roggio, editor of Long War Journal.

Same deal with Covid, and with racialist anti-Asian and anti-white policies implemented by elites, supposedly for our own good. What “inaccurate information” about “racial justice” does the US Government believes is a threat to the security of the homeland? Diversity is our strength, and if you doubt it, the Eye of Sauron notes your lack of faith and commitment to fighting racism. I’m reminded of this C.S. Lewis quote Paul Kingsnorth cites in his latest newsletter:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

You will notice if you read The Intercept’s report — and note well that The Intercept is a left-wing website — is how eager these tech companies were for the government to intrude:

Elon Musk fired Vijaya Gadde as one of his first acts after buying Twitter. Why do you think that these people were eager for the government to increase its monitoring of the media? Because they trust these state actors to enforce a progressive-friendly narrative. This is what it means when the Deep State has been captured by the Left.

I cannot say it often enough: this is what the people who came to America to escape Communism are warning us about in Live Not By Lies! Excerpt from the book:

What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

Or, protecting the homeland from badthinkers among its people. And for the record, I would find this every bit as repulsive and frightening if the Deep State were right-wing. Wouldn’t you?

The right-wing government of George W. Bush misled us all into the Iraq quagmire — and, as Bill Roggio says, lied to us to keep us in Afghanistan. The left-wing Obama government did the same thing about Afghanistan. Do you really trust Washington — left or right — to tell it straight to the American people about Ukraine? Whatever you think about US involvement in the Ukraine war, it ought to scare you that the US Government believes that it’s in the interest of “homeland security” to monitor and correct “disinformation” about US policy there.

Look, it’s very hard to know what’s true and what’s not anymore. Peter Savodnik had a good piece recently about how the mainstream media runs interference for John Fetterman, the disabled Democratic candidate for US Senate. Most of us are well aware how the mainstream media police the boundaries of discourse constantly to protect its sacred cows. Jonathan Chait, the liberal columnist for New York magazine, admitted in his latest piece that the Left hurts itself with this. Excerpt:

The motive for many progressives to follow these stifling conventions was sympathetic. If you believe systemic racism and inequality are the greatest crisis in America, which I do, and you also believe the racism of the Republican Party is far more dangerous than any excesses on the left, which I also do, then you might hesitate to admit to anything that might be used by Republicans to discredit the cause of racial justice. Yet that hesitation allows the most unreasonable people on the left to rope the whole progressive movement into indefensible and self-discrediting positions.

The George Floyd protests are hardly the only subject for which this dynamic has prevailed. Progressives decided that the hypothesis that COVID-19 may have originated in a laboratory rather than zoonotically was “racist” — even though this was a purely scientific question, the evidence was and is murky, and it was easier to imagine racist behavior resulting from a theory blaming COVID on Chinese cultural practices than a theory blaming China’s government. Journalists at mainstream organs followed this convention, essentially turning a scientific question into a political one. When institutions adopt illiberal norms of debate that make it impossible to challenge an accusation of racism or sexism, they open themselves inevitably to abuse.

I believe the cultural pressures that produced these errors are in remission. But they haven’t disappeared. As evidenced by the likes of Scocca and Katz, there remains a deep-seated impulse on the left to defend or deny illiberal norms. They insist the wave of hysterical accusations, overpolicing of language, and empowered outrage mobs were a figment of the critics’ imaginations, or that these things happened but were actually good, or perhaps, somehow, both. As people in these institutions begin to lose their fear of speaking truthfully, we need to honestly confront what happened.

It’s bad enough that progressive journalists do this. But to have those who control social media platforms engage in it, and to encourage involvement of the State in policing discourse? And to have a domestic security arm of the State spreading its bureaucracy into controlling the narrative behind the scenes?

Tyranny. That’s what this is: tyranny.

*****

This article was published by The American Conservative and is reproduced with permission.