Anti-imperialist website Mint Press News has had its TikTok account deleted without warning or explanation. This comes after it had previously between de-platformed from PayPal and had its money withheld, with apparent involvement from the US and British governments.
So far I’ve heard crickets from the so-called “left” and from the “free speech absolutists” on the right about this TikTok ban. It’s incredibly depressing that nobody gives a shit about free speech anymore, unless it means free speech for people who think exactly like them.
You shouldn’t have to agree with Mint Press News on any issue to understand how wrong this is. In a free society, everyone gets the opportunity to speak and you get to decide what you do and do not agree with. If people are taking it upon themselves to decide on your behalf, you should be concerned.
As Christopher Hitchens famously said:
“To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful, or who is the harmful speaker? Or to determine in advance what are the harmful consequences going to be, that we know enough about in advance to prevent? To whom would you give this job? To whom are you going to award the task of being the censor?
“To whom you would give the job of deciding for you? Relieve you from the responsibility of hearing what you might have to hear? Do you know anyone? Hands up, do you know anyone to whom you’d give this job? Does anyone have a nominee?”
Imagine being such a child, you think someone should be assigned the role of deciding what information you are and are not exposed to. Imagine thinking the best people to decide are the people who jailed Julian Assange for exposing their war crimes. Imagine accepting that war criminals should be your censors.
If I achieve one thing with my insignificant blog, it’s to remind my readers just how important free speech is (something we used to understand) and how you only empower the establishment when you passively accept their censoring.
Now I don’t know about you, but the moment the government tells me I’m not allowed to read something, that’s exactly what I’m going to read because I want to know what they’re hiding from me.
You might argue a TikTok ban is not government censorship, it’s a private company imposing its rules, but in the case of the Censorship Industrial Complex, the government and corporations go hand in hand. They are parts of the same establishment.
If you doubt this, just look at the Twitter files and the Facebook files which show how the US government pressured these companies to censor information it acknowledged was true.
Do you need to be protected from the truth now? I don’t know about you, but I’m more concerned about the lies of the government, and there is no legal obligation for the government to tell the truth. There are no consequences when they lie. It’s okay for them to lie and it’s not okay for us to tell the truth. Don’t you love living in a free society?
Left wing voices are being picked off, and it’s not just the so-called “hard left” who are being targeted, it’s the “soft left” too.
Dr Julia Grace Patterson, who is not remotely hard left by any stretch of the imagination, has pointed out how much harder it is for progressives to reach their audience now. Same goes for all of us on the left.
“Why is it getting harder and harder for progressive campaigners to speak to people on Twitter? Many of us are losing followers or some of our posts aren’t visible.”
Dr Patterson is the founder of Every Doctor, an organisation founded to fight NHS privatisation, and therefore an enemy of both Labour and the Tories. You don’t have to be one of those scary “hard left” types who are accused of supporting dictators in order to become a target. You just have to give a shit.
We’re being shadow-banned for demanding better and pointing out inconvenient facts. There is no room for people who want positive change on social media. The only positivity that’s allowed is the positivity where you pretend everything’s more or less fine.
Neoliberals are ensuring their critics are disappearing from the internet because they’re losing the argument and the establishment will never accept losing the argument. Once it feels the narrative is slipping from its grasp, it will resort to authoritarian measures to regain control.
If you use Substack Notes, you might be familiar with CJ Hopkins, a satirist who was recently prosecuted in Germany for using a swastika on his book cover. The swastika was not used to promote nazism as you might assume, it was used to mock the government on the cover of his satirical book.
While it’s illegal to use the swastika in Germany to promote nazism, there are many books in Germany with swastikas on their covers. This is because it’s fine to use swastikas when you’re educating people or criticising nazism. It’s just not fine when you’re comparing government officials to nazis. If you were to apply this standard in the US, just think how many Biden supporters would go to jail for comparing Republicans to nazis.
I understand Hopkins has been given the option of paying a €3,600 fine or spending 60 days in prison for political satire. If you’re not concerned about this, I’m afraid you are your own worst enemy.
The Censorship Industrial Complex has sprung up to ensure we don’t see political change across the western world. The billionaires must remain in control, the mass privatisation (looting) must continue, and the so-called left-wing parties must lower the public’s expectations until we accept staying poor forever. It’s the faux left’s role to convince the public it’s unrealistic to want better than austerity. Sir Keir Starmer would be a perfect example of this.
The neoliberal argument relies on easily disprovable lies and every time an anti-establishment voice is censored, it makes neoliberal lies harder to challenge.
A problem on the left is that if someone doesn’t meet our purity test, we don’t speak out. There is this weird thing where unless we’re in full agreement with someone, we accept that censoring them is fine, or at least not serious enough for us to care. This mindset is exactly what is enabling us to be picked off.
I have highlighted three individuals/organisations in this article and guess what? I don’t agree with them on some issues, but that doesn’t matter! It wouldn’t matter if I agreed with them on zero issues. In a free society, everyone has the right to speak, even the people you dislike.
You should always be more concerned about people doing the silencing than you are about the people speaking. History shows us the censors are never on our side.
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