20,000 (Defamation) Leagues Under the Sea

Fail-proofing your police state. Part 2 in a series

A well-designed social credit scoring system will always outperform a top-down police state in a nation that fancies itself a democracy because the target is made a willing participant in his own oppression. Conditioned to fear the unknown because the parasite class lacks the imagination to populate it, we become emotionally invested in their ideology for lack of anything else to look up to. And as the plausibility of the establishment narrative declines, the social costs of publicly doubting it increase exponentially. Dissenters risk not only being labeled criminals and deprived of their freedom, but being labeled insane and deprived of their agency. The Soviets diagnosed such dissenters as suffering with “sluggish schizophrenia” - such poor benighted souls whose unbalanced minds prevented them from recognizing the obvious superiority of Communism! Unlike marginalizing a group by charging its members with a crime, which gives the targets opportunity to argue their case, lob allegations of their own, and potentially seize a beachhead of popular support, defining that group as mentally ill neutralizes any attempt to argue. A criminal defendant who denies the charges against him is pleading not guilty and could be judged innocent; the inmate of a psychiatric ward who denies his diagnosis is said to lack insight into his condition and require a higher dosage of medication.

“living with schizophrenia” or “stuck in airport waiting room with CNN”?

When holding the wrong beliefs is recast as a disease, dissidents are not merely dangerous - they’re sick, requiring isolation, even culling. In 2023, “vaccine hesitancy” - doubting the superiority and benevolence of the corporate-sponsored egregore known as “The Science” - finally received its own code in the International Classification of Diseases, making it a diagnosable illness recognized across the massive global medical bureaucracy. No less than the United Nations has waged war upon it, deploying not only the WHO (which took up arms against the concept years ago) but a clown-car of doxxers and trolls called Team Halo. While these were supposed to be doctors and scientists who’d traded in their white coats for black hats in selfless service to the Almighty Narrative, many are actually doctor impersonators - engaged in the sort of psychopathic behavior that was once considered a mental illness rather than civic virtue. But as with the medieval Inquisition it resembles, the ends are said to justify the means, and it is paramount that the heretic’s message be discredited before it reaches the ears of the faithful. The messenger must be riddled with bullets, literal or metaphorical, before he has a chance to deliver the message.

Team Halo takes brigading into the real world, enacting a 21st-century Zersetsung campaign against its targets, many of them doctors and nurses who’ve had success treating Covid-19 patients with cheap off-patent drugs, nutritional supplements, and other therapies that don’t involve mainlining spike proteins and lipid nanoparticles. These UN-sponsored gangstalkers mass-report medical practitioners to get them fired or their licenses suspended, barrage their businesses with bad reviews and professional complaints to drive them into bankruptcy, and slime them relentlessly as science-denying bigots of whatever stripe is most convenient to their demographic, siccing #teamhalo’s bot-inflated hordes of followers on their social media accounts so they’re deplatformed before they can even tell the world about the assault. Setting a standard since adopted by execrable Ukraine-war cheerleaders NAFO, whose obsequious toadying to power is matched only by their hatred for anyone who makes them think, Team Halo describes itself as a “rapid-response digital cavalry dedicated to protecting the online safety of healthcare providers and practices.” And by “protecting the safety of,” they mean “repeatedly calling for a ‘public uprising’ against.” It’s basically euthanasia - after all, the vaccine-hesitant are terminally ill with a crippled epistemology that prevents them from feeling the warmth of Big Brother’s love. Team Halo is just trying to put them down before they infect the herd.

The concept has plenty of political equivalents - “election denial” has become the new 25th Amendment, straddling the Goldwater Rule (which prohibits psychiatrists from armchair-diagnosing politicians) and the need to hold the political line amid record low popular support for Our Democracy™. While the narrative managers haven’t quite succeeded in manufacturing consent for outlawing the questioning of election results - once a popular bipartisan pastime, after all - they have successfully convinced the electorate it is conduct unbefitting a member of Congress. Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene was only stripped of her committee assignments for speaking positively of the Stop the Steal protesters in 2021, but her supposedly unhinged bonafides - specifically her support for Israeli credibility-grenade psyop QAnon and her (somewhat exaggerated) “Sandy Hook denialism,” a belief Alex Jones already insisted arose from his own psychosis - allowed her detractors to paint that “election denial” as something more than simply political disagreement. Shutting your opponent out of the major decision-making in Congress for their political views is undemocratic - but shutting them out because they’re a dangerous crazy is just being a responsible legislator. The 300 candidates for 2022’s midterm elections who had described the 2020 presidential vote as “rigged,” “stolen,” or otherwise fraudulent or illegitimate without later begging forgiveness were put on yet another blacklist, and in reality the dragnet was cast even wider, tarring even people who attended conferences headlined by “election deniers” with that ever-broadening brush. This sort of ideological guilt by association is extremely efficient both in socially isolating anyone with heterodox ideas (remember when being photographed with an Infowars employee got you booted off Instagram?) and in laying the groundwork for the imposition of actual legal strictures prohibiting the ideas in question. No one wants to be seen as a crazy person, leaving the affected ideas without public support even if they remain widely held in secret. 

McCarthy's Wet Dream

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Amid this spiral of silence, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that wrongthink itself has quietly been declared a sickness - not just a mental but a social disease. “Information disorder” is the next big plague, with everyone from the United Nations (not just the WHO and UNESCO but the parent organization) down to local TV stations taking up arms against “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and their newest sibling “malinformation.” The term, coined by First Draft’s Claire Wardle (the mind behind “fake news”), is defined with unusual honesty on the website of narrative management think tank the Aspen Institute as a “modern-day crisis of faith in key institutions.” Information disorder is the ruling class’ campaign to pathologize the growing antagonism humanity feels toward the parasites with their blood funnels jammed so deeply into their necks they can scarcely turn their heads, asset-stripping their societies until the bare bones glisten. It asks us not just to ignore our instincts, but to act in direct opposition of them, to stick our heads in the sabre toothed tiger’s maw instead of running at top speed in the opposite direction. Screw Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you will own nothing and be happy. There is no dissent; there is only delusion.

Blurring the line between political wrongthink and criminal insanity was not an accident. Foisting a “new” mental illness on the world isn’t easy even under ordinary circumstances - often it takes years from the inclusion of a “disorder” in the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) for it to filter down through influential psychiatric practices with the help of enterprising drug reps and the journalists they own. Faced with a hopelessly flaccid narrative post-election, the establishment doesn’t have this kind of time, so it summoned the foremost minds in the thought policing sector to the Aspen Institute in 2021 to devise the concept of Information Disorder. The bad ideas they brainstormed form the framework of our modern day social credit score and the blacklists that feed it. CIA alumnus Renee diResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory, whose political consulting firm New Knowledge infamously ran the 2017 “Russian bots” false flag that handed an Alabama Senate seat to the Democrats for the first time in decades, had already advocated for nearly a decade for legislation that “defines and criminalizes foreign propaganda” when she used the Aspen panel to demand a permanent “Center for Excellence” - a Ministry of Truth that would serve as a clearinghouse for academics, nonprofits, media, and of course government to carefully curate desired narratives. While this already existed in the form of the “censorship industrial complex” exposed last year in Missouri v. Biden and outlined in limited hangout form for general audiences in the Twitter Files, it was set up to go public in the form of the Department of Homeland Security’s deservedly-maligned Disinformation Governance Board. Even if the DHS hadn’t run aground on the public’s instinctive revulsion for Nina “Ukronazi Poppins” Jankowicz, however, their execution lacked the plausible deniability the agency and its government collaborators would so desperately have needed to get away with violating the First Amendment, attributing the actual censorship and the demands for such to entities that may or may not be acting on part of Washington, wink wink.

the one infographic missing from the Aspen Institute report

Just as DiResta’s “Election Integrity Project” turned questioning the black-box American electoral system into a hybrid psychiatric diagnosis and federal crime, so did her Virality Project make questioning the most corrupt, politician-bribing industry in the nation a felonious assault on the public health calling into question the sanity of the felon. She even boasts about creating a generalized form of “turnkey tyranny” to be reused endlessly (that syringe emoji in your Twitter profile? Swap it out for a Ukrainian flag!) by “stakeholders,” quietly closing in until it’s impossible to jam that stake home where it belongs. The specter of “harm” as extenuating circumstance is mission-critical - otherwise diResta and her powerful Aspen colleagues merely come across as smug schoolyard bullies telling dissenters to stop hitting themselves while beating them with their own arms. The definition of harm is thus broadened by expanding protected classes, adding to the LGBTQIA alphabet soup, and drawing tenuous links between violence and speech. Enter Rashad Robinson, the human box-checking exercise whose foundation, Color of Change, turned censorship into a racial justice cause while serving as an affirmative-action cutout for the Anti-Defamation League, allowing the thought police to hopscotch from even the most innocuous “conspiracy theory” to accusations of racism and other intersectional bigotries. It was through this sleight-of-hand that (he boasts in his biographical blurb) he got right-wing blowhard Bill O’Reilly deplatformed, by leaning on the bloviator’s advertisers until they couldn’t take it anymore, a tactic he subsequently deployed against Fox News’ Tucker Carlson only for the latter to absorb the blow. Feigning concern for the dissenters about to be diagnosed with an incurably imaginary disorder was Yasmin Green, from Google’s Jigsaw cyber-phrenology program, which classifies you as a hate-criminal for merely talking to the wrong people on social media, and Kate Starbird, the University of Washington researcher who as far back as 2019 was trying to inflict the concept of “malinformation” upon us, struggling in a paper to expand the definition of “disinformation” to include how facts “fit together” to “serve a purpose.”

The Aspen panel briefly acknowledged that online “wrongthink” doesn’t create anti-establishment attitudes - that information disorder is not contagious - only to declare it is the responsibility of the thought police to squelch “‘demand’ for disinformation.” The notion that people, sick of choking down the shit sandwiches they’re served daily by their psychological prison-guards, should demand peanut butter instead is seen as the height of insolence and a risk to the order of the entire Panopticon. How to lower the public’s expectations so that even the poorest official performance could no longer disappoint them? The Inquisitors decided upon “media literacy,” a form of epistemological lobotomy that renders the brain incapable of completing higher-order pattern recognition, defusing the formation and processing of so-called “conspiracy theories.” Social media platforms’ privacy protections are to be circumvented in the name of “academic research,” and that information plugged into AI algorithms in order to predict behavior, map networks, and “ring-vaccinate” populations so as to isolate the spread of wrongthink. “Superspreaders” of disinformation must be tracked across platforms and between identities. If they insist on escaping the sandboxes built for them, their networks should be punished, so as to discourage sharing of their content. Don’t just shoot the messenger, massacre his whole family. “Superspreaders of mis- and disinformation” are to be disciplined with “quicker, more decisive actions and penalties” - like those set out in the draconian RESTRICT Act, which makes the library-record-snooping Dixie-Chicks-censoring police-statelet of the Bush era look positively cuddly by comparison (but more on that in Part 3).

Could an outbreak society-wide of “information disorder,” a mass refusal to swallow a planetary narrative like anthropogenic climate change or perhaps a future War of the Worlds-type “alien” invasion enacted with highly-advanced holographic technology, qualify as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) - the kind that would necessitate the kind of global crackdown whose details are currently being ironed out in the meetings of the WHO's intergovernmental negotiating board as they put together that “pandemic treaty” that has nothing to do with health and everything to do with turning humanity into a slave species? This has presumably been the desired endpoint of the creation of the “infodemic” paradigm to begin with. The narrative managers set their operation on autopilot so long ago that their modern-day successors don’t even know how the old rituals work their magic - just that they do. It is far simpler for them to declare their audience broken and demand they fix themselves or else than to acknowledge the need to improve their own product.

Scalping Tucker

Like any prolonged illness in a country with the world’s most expensive healthcare, a bad case of Information Disorder can leave you not just isolated and reputationally destroyed but also bankrupt. The Aspen Institute’s report explicitly states that it’s okay to take channels like RT or OANN or even Fox News - home of the highest-rated prime time program on television even as it killed its golden goose this week - off air because they target “disaffected populations who have lost faith in evidence-based reality.” Giving audiences what they want is no longer savvy marketing, or even basic commercial logic - it’s predation, according to the preening predators determined to reduce human experience to the narrowest possible range of easily-controllable activity. If the people knew what they wanted, they wouldn’t be watching television.

Similar to Alex Jones’ preposterously large Sandy Hook judgment, which essentially shut down investigating school shootings as a legitimate path of inquiry to any researcher who didn’t shit gold and saw the political performance artist blame his curiosity on psychosis, Fox News’ decision to settle a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems for a whopping $787 million has notified all journalists investigating election fraud that they’d better stop, or they’ll be sorry. Carlson not only never pushed the claim that Dominion had rigged the election - lawyer Sidney Powell, the theory’s chief proponent, had been unable or unwilling to supply proof, so he passed on the story - he was sued by a producer who had, one Abby Grossberg, who blamed her own failure to fact-check Powell’s claims on The Patriarchy and declared Carlson - whom she has never actually met, let alone been harassed by - the latest incarnation of the network’s misogynist demons not quite exorcised with the firings of Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes. Grossberg’s lawsuit conflates Carlson’s political opinions - that January 6 was a false-flag operation to discredit anyone questioning the legitimacy of Biden’s electoral victory, that the war in Ukraine is a proxy war targeting Russia - with his supposed misogyny (there were cutouts of Nancy Pelosi in a bikini!) and antisemitism (an office Christmas tree was labeled a Hanukah bush!), lumping all together in the epistemological naughty corner while accusing the network brass of pressuring her into not just perjuring but actually defaming…herself.

feel sorry for me, or i’ll sue

The apparently-telepathic snitch delivered what even an advertiser boycott could not -Carlson’s ouster - and with that, Fox was welcomed back into the good graces of a media establishment their ideology had never really deviated from anyway. Flawed and shot through with credibility grenades as his program often was, Carlson was nevertheless alone among that establishment in platforming guests who opposed endless war or medical fascism or the parasitism of BlackRock and Vanguard. It is much easier for the media establishment to shoot one messenger they’ve dumped a fortune into demonizing (with help from his neocon baggage and shrill temper), sealing the deal with even the most specious lawsuit, than it would have been for them to address the dangerous ideas that have found voice on his show. Those views, and the hundreds of millions of people who hold them, can once again be safely written off as fringe conspiracy theories, the sooner consigned to the memory hole, the better.

Reclassifying dissent as a mental disorder allows the corporate state to silence those it deems a threat without fretting over the need for First-Amendment workarounds. The targets need not be “crazy” themselves - in Carlson’s case, as establishment cheerleader Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently reminded ginger void Jen Psaki, it was his followers who were the violent loonies waiting for a word from their would-be cult leader. Expect calls for the reeducation of Carlson’s audience lest they stage another “armed insurrection” (Grossberg’s lawsuit all but blames the commentator’s refusal to submit to a Biden victory for the January 6 chaos) and remember to bring their guns this time. If they still have them, that is - while “gun control” as a whole remains a non-starter in the US outside “blue”cities, so-called “red flag” laws barring the mentally ill from owning firearms have bucked that trend due to the public’s erroneous assumption they’ll only be used to keep genuinely dangerous weirdos from shooting up their local elementary school. But the longstanding tendency to tar outspoken enemies of US foreign policy with the “mental illness” brush (how many times have you seen a State Department troll with room-temperature IQ try to salvage a losing argument by telling someone to “take their meds”?) should make it clear that Big Parasite doesn’t plan to stop at the First Amendment in stripping its domestic enemies of their rights.

Framing the problem as one of mental health provides a moral escape hatch to a ruling class equally bent on ruthless oppression and maintaining a progressive façade. New York City, which has tied itself in such knots trying to escape the racist legacy of “stop and frisk” it somehow elected a black cop who hates reading as mayor, recently gave that cop the power to kidnap citizens off the street for simply appearing to be mentally ill - and that’s after New York Governor Kathy Hochul tried to claw back the right to indefinitely incarcerate men, women and children on mere suspicion of having not just Covid-19 but a whole laundry list of supposedly communicable physical illnesses that includes head-scratchers like Lyme disease and toxic shock syndrome. It’s obvious these policies will be used disproportionately against poor and minority populations, but while hauling these people off to Rikers Island would have New Yorkers rioting in the streets, bundling them off to quarancentration camps on Randalls Island (a stone’s throw from Rikers) in a mist of therapeutic language and promises of bespoke redemption arcs for all will get him plaudits from all the respectable vultures. Should an outbreak of “information disorder” threaten the Big Apple, the keepers of the financial cartels’ playground will waste no time arresting anyone who looks too deep in thought.

The Elephant in the Room

There’s something more than a little (National) Socialist about a mayor deploying his goon squad to round up individuals who, while posing no threat to themselves or others, display “unawareness or delusional misapprehension of surroundings or unawareness or delusional misapprehension of physical condition or health” and holding them by force until they can be convinced of the gravity of their “condition.” Perhaps seeking to head off opposition to his technocratic Fourth Reich and its efforts to institutionalize the inconvenient, Mayor Eric Adams signed on last year with the Mayors Summit Against Antisemitism, a (final) solution in search of a problem that calls on city leaders to prioritize the interests of 0.2% of the population while two thirds of the country struggles to keep a roof over its head (thus all but ensuring that residents will grow to resent their Jewish neighbors, spawning the antisemitism the movement needs to justify its existence). Cities are instructed first to redefine “antisemitism” according to an obscure NGO called the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, then to “enforce a zero tolerance policy” against it. With New York in the throes of a crime wave, Adams only has eyes for “hate speech,” fantasizing to anyone who will listen about imposing European-style penalties on the social media platforms whose leniency with wrongthink he blames for the rise in brutal broad-daylight assaults.

you can tell these guys are big into TikTok

Implementing such a policy remains easier said than done and deeply questionable morally, given the open-ended nature of “antisemitism” as defined by the IHRA. No longer merely denoting hatred of Jews, the concept has been expanded to shelter the state of Israel, its supporters both Jewish and non-, their property, the industries they work in, their “community institutions and religious facilities,” and any attributes that might potentially describe any of the above, favorably or otherwise. Funded indirectly by the American taxpayer, the Israeli lobby has turned “antisemitism” into an epistemological Iron Dome, deflecting a broad spectrum of legitimate criticism using the Jewish population - many of whom do not identify as zionists or support Israeli apartheid - as human shields. Criticism of Israel that does not also rope in other countries as co-defendants, the use of certain stereotypes or “negative character traits” to describe both Jews and non-Jews, and comparisons between contemporary Israeli policy and that of the Nazis (no matter how accurate) are explicitly forbidden. Other statements can be added at will if a Jewish person is tangentially involved. Abby Grossberg’s lawyer in her suit against Tucker Carlson declared it “antisemitic” that his producer had jokingly labeled a Christmas tree a “Hanukah bush.” CNN has declared Spotify’s #1 podcaster Joe Rogan “antisemitic” because he said Jews like money (does anyone not?). That such a nebulous concept should retain the power to destroy careers would be laughable if it had not been adopted by 39 countries, including the US and UK, as of this writing, and if it was not currently under consideration by the United Nations. In certain circles, the scarlet “A” is all it takes to turn one’s life’s work to dust - especially if it has no basis in fact, as British Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn discovered when he tried to apologize for an offense he had not committed. Half the states in the US require government contractors to sign what is essentially a loyalty oath promising not to boycott the state of Israel, and several states have gone further, exploiting this supposedly voluntary loophole to create unconstitutional but media-approved blacklists.

The lead drafter of the IHRA definition of antisemitism has long since disavowed it, horrified at how his work has been used for the past two decades to silence constitutionally-protected speech critical of a cornucopia of atrocities from Israeli trafficking of Palestinian organs to Big Pharma’s profiteering off the ongoing Covid-19 genocide. Should he raise his voice in defense of any of those his words have indirectly silenced, he, too, will be dismissed as antisemitic. What was once the unearned privilege of the Israeli lobby - the ability to declare certain facts anathema without addressing their veracity - has been claimed by an ever-broader section of the establishment, but while the threat of being tagged with any of the lesser idpol epithets - racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe et.al. - is often sufficient to keep the target in line, only the scarlet A has the bite to back its bark, especially in industries that depend for their funding on the goodwill of the transnational capital class.

None of these is more vengeful than the entertainment industry, which doesn’t take kindly to its products acting like they have free will. The rapper formerly known as Kanye West’s decision to wear a “white lives matter” t-shirt to his fashion show last year was, he said, self-explanatory - “because they do.” The confirmation - via an influential voice like Ye’s - that there was a third option between Black Lives Matter’s hysterical rent-a-Marxists getting very rich pitting the white and black working classes against each other and a return to the Jim Crow era or whatever 1619 Project alternate history establishment race-baiters had cooked up to inflame the masses, caused the Great Narrative to have an allergic reaction to the rapper. Within weeks, Ye was denounced by every major media outlet as a white supremacist and a virulent antisemite, shut out of his bank accounts, dropped by his agent Ari Emanuel (who decried the notion that Jews control the industry in an oped ordering all Ye’s business partners to kick him to the curb), and shut out of longstanding creative partnerships with Adidas and Balenciaga. Friends and collaborators were replaced by credibility vampires like Nick Fuentes, Milo Yiannopoulos and Alex Jones, who ensured Ye’s new nothing-to-lose persona would squander its chance to tell hard truths to a massive audience by encouraging him to play dancing bear spouting Hitler soundbites in bizarre full-face black masks. By the time the Anti-Defamation League was holding him responsible for dozens of purported antisemitic incidents, hardly anyone remembered what had set Ye’s downfall in motion - possibly including the rapper himself. While he had supposedly cut ties with psychiatrist-to-the-stars Harley Pasternak after the latter threatened to write him a one-way prescription to “zombieland,” it’s not for nothing that the narrative managers have been pushing the notion of antisemitism as mental illness - first given its first coat of pseudoscientific legitimacy by Theodor Adorno of the Frankfurt School - with renewed vigor these last few months. When you want a product recalled from the marketplace of ideas, it’s best to taint it with as many poisons as possible.

Defamation Nation

One might argue that devoting millions of dollars annually to the meticulous study of exactly how much and by whom one is supposedly hated, then doubling or tripling those statistics is incompatible with sanity, and that staking one’s group-reputation on a convicted murderer/pedophile is even less so. However, the Anti-Defamation League would disagree - and the state of Florida would charge you with a third-degree felony for making that argument in print. Governor Ron DeSantis traveled all the way to Israel last week to officially enact the most restrictive hate-speech law in US history with a measure that criminalizes leaving unsolicited flyers on a neighbor’s yard, threatening violators with five years in prison should the flyers’ content be deemed “antisemitic” (more on this appalling legislation in part 3). DeSantis’ hypocrisy in casting himself as David to the WEF’s Goliath only to give the so-called “globalists” exactly the hate speech law they repeatedly demanded at this year’s Davos meeting aside, once the informational iron curtain is in place, it will be impossible to smuggle information from one side to the other digitally. If simply distributing low-tech samizdat becomes a felony, there is no legal way around the One True Narrative short of literally hijacking the electrical impulse as it travels down the optic or auditory nerves (if you figure that one out, call me…). Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, now one of the primary architects of the US’ AI policy, revealed nearly two decades ago that he believed the ideal search engine provides only one answer to a question; Google’s “Bard” AI, described by its human colleagues as a “pathological liar” and a hazard to humanity, clarified that answer doesn’t have to be correct, as long as it’s delivered with confidence. All that matters is that competing narratives are silenced and the illusion of infallibility does not flicker. Is it any wonder the ADL has been deeply involved in AI research since before ChatGPT was a flicker in your nightmares? If you still believe this organization has anything to do with protecting Jewish people from discrimination, I have a gently-used Iron Dome missile defense system to sell you.

As the AI rollout cements one enforced-consensus reality in place, an international hate-crime legislation engine (see part 3) is already installing third-rail no-go zones across wide areas of reality, cutting up the infosphere into the intellectual equivalent of 15-minute cities with meticulously-applied behavioral conditioning. The narrative managers’ end goal is not to force everyone to say 2+2=5 while they know deep inside it’s really 4. It is to render them ignorant of the possibility that 2+2 could ever equal anything other than 5, in such a way that an individual proposing such a destabilizing alternative to what is clearly long-established consensus reality would be so absurd as to be downright alarming - dangerous, even - such that social pressures quickly and automatically suffocate the spark. The successfully-washed brain is incapable of even conceiving of this eventuality, returning a does-not-compute error equivalent to the Windows operating system’s Blue Screen of Death. Such a closed system is the only real safeguard against rogue information, and it is what is meant when would-be ministers of truth like Color of Change’s Rashad Robinson and the Disinformation Governance Board’s Nina Jankowicz talk about “media literacy.” So-called “conspiracy theorists” can broadcast compelling content all day - if their audience doesn’t have the necessary equipment to receive and decode the broadcast, it goes unheard and unprocessed. The “media-literate” audience is functionally incapable of perceiving undesirable realities. This is what the narrative managers hope to accomplish with AI, and what we must prevent at all costs.

(IN PART III: the RESTRICT Act, stochastic terrorism, corporate Mirotvorets, and hopefully the end of this ever-lengthening series)