A Good Start

I’ve been telling you about the Washington Examiner’s expose of the “Global Disinformation Index,” the UK-based group that circulated secret blacklists of conservative media sites (including this one!) to advertising placement companies, claiming we were spreading “disinformation” to cut off ad revenues and drive us out of business. Well, now that daylight has been shone on their activities (spreading disinformation by falsely accusing people of spreading disinformation), Microsoft’s advertising company Xander announced that it’s suspending its subscription to GDI’s “services.” The accurate term for that would be “a good start.”

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/disinformation-inc-microsoft-xander-conservative-defunded-outlets

But one thing about these sneaky leftist groups is that there’s never just one of them. They are a many-headed hydra. Here’s a report from the Daily Caller about an (again) UK-based “think tank” that poses as a group fighting “extremism, hate and disinformation,” which they seem to define as “mainstream conservative speech.”

https://dailycaller.com/2023/02/13/state-department-think-tank-disinformation/

What makes this one particularly infuriating is that they actually received a grant for their insidious work from the US State Department, to “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda.” That’s right: they’re using our tax money to take away our free speech rights. And they’re doing it by “informing” platforms such as YouTube on their “content moderation” decisions, i.e., who to censor and deplatform.

Just as Democrats always accuse Republicans of what they’re actually doing themselves, these enemies of free speech always adopt names that convey the opposite message. This one laughably calls itself “the Institute for Strategic Dialogue.” I think it’s safe to say that dialogue is the last thing in the world that they want. They seek a media environment that's a 24/7 leftist monologue.

The Daily Caller reports that the State Department and ISD also partnered to create something called the “Strong Cities Network, a United Nations-affiliated initiative that seeks to combat ‘hate, polarization and extremism’ abroad.” It also gets funding from various other leftwing groups, including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (what did I tell you about the names these groups adopt?)

It’s bad enough when you have privately-funded groups working in secret with media platforms to silence millions of people’s legitimate opinions and true news stories inconvenient to official narratives. But the excuse that private company censorship doesn’t violate the First Amendment goes out the window when it’s government-funded. As noted in the article, it’s unconstitutional for government agencies to outsource the violation of the public’s free speech rights to third party entities. When that happens, these entities become de facto arms of the government.

I know the GOP House’s list of things that call for investigation is getting longer than Santa’s “Naughty” list, but this naughty end-run around the First Amendment at taxpayer expense needs to be added to it.

Welcome sign

Another welcome sign that the mass delusion of “wokeness” and cancel culture is finally dissipating: In an interview with the UK’s Radio Times, Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett condemned cancel culture and the idea that works of art and literature from the past should be erased because their creators didn’t live up to current standards of wokeness.

https://www.foxnews.com/media/cate-blanchett-knocks-cancel-culture-discussing-new-movie-warns-repeating-past-mistakes-otherwise

Blanchett said if you refuse to look at a masterpiece like Picasso’s “Guernica” because of the artist’s behavior or to read older books “that are slightly offensive because of what they say in a historical context," then you’re failing to grapple with the ideas of that time and “so, therefore, we are destined to repeat that stuff."

Maybe this is why the people who have worked so hard to erase the real history of the great strides made in civil rights in America think they’re chalking up victories by sowing racial division and bringing back discarded ideas like judging people by their skin color and segregating college campuses. It's entirely possible that they never learned anything from history because they refused to study the real thing, only fantasy propaganda like "The 1619 Project."

I hope she doesn’t get the “cancel culture” attack treatment for daring to speak the truth, but the fact that a top Hollywood actress would even say it is proof that fear of the tiny but vocal mob that champions ignorance and censorship is finally evaporating. I’m happy to say that throughout their reign of error and terror, I never hesitated to repeat one of my favorite quotes from George Santayana, which is the essence of Ms. Blanchett’s argument:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

I JUST WANTED TO SAY: