Jim Bovard Talks Censorship Industrial Complex

Who will be considered a ‘national security’ threat next?

We talk a lot about the military industrial complex here but a growing threat to our liberty is the disinformation/misinformation industrial complex, or what our next guest Jim Bovard and others call the Censorship Industrial Complex. 

One could say this began shortly before the 2016 election when the Obama administration began investigating the Donald Trump campaign for links to the Russians. When Trump was elected, the Democrats, including the losing candidate Hillary Clinton, accused the Russians of colluding with Donald Trump to win. Aside from cyberhacking, the Russians were accused of manipulating our own social media to meddle and influence voters in favor of Trump (subsequent research has dispelled the notion that such manipulation even worked).

After an extensive investigation that roiled the country no Russian collusion with Trump was never found. 

The legalities have never quite mattered, as the narrative of collusion combined with Russia’s actual attempts to sway voters by deploying troll farms and fake accounts on social media, plus the usual spycraft that all major powers do by the way, combined for enough justification for agencies within the government — even while Trump was president — to create a massive weaponized apparatus dedicated to ferreting out and punishing what it saw was “foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.” 

In practice, these government entities, often working with quasi-government or government funded non-profit organizations, are monitoring speech on the most controversial highly politicized issues of our day: the war in Ukraine being one of the biggest examples. Also COVID. The attempts to control speech and how it was affecting the 2020 election were reported after the fact by Matt Taibbi and his team in the Twitter Files: reams of accounts and posts pulled down that were deemed Russian propaganda and/or COVID misinformation/disinformation, right down to the eve of the 2020 presidential with the Hunter Biden laptop story being blacked out right before polls opened. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, admitted as much and more recently he fessed up to the pressures he was put under by federal entities during the COVID pandemic.

What we are concerned about here is how the censorship industrial complex can chill domestic media dissent on issues of foreign policy and war. If reporters and analysts are challenging the company line on hyper-partisan issues like the Ukraine War and Israel, how long will it take before they are considered a threat to national security, too?

We talk to longtime author and all-around Big Government critic Jim Bovard. Jim is a regular columnist at the New York Post and published Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty in 2023. Also joining us is author Mike Vlahos, who has done a lot of work on the political and social dynamics that precede Constitutional crisis. 

More from Jim Bovard:

Hillary Clinton, queen of disinformation, issues two-faced call for censorship

Supreme Court’s censorship ruling lets Biden muzzle us online — and meddle in the election

We can’t trust politicized FBI to handle probe of Trump assassination bid