Republican President George Bush Jr., and Democratic Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden have destroyed freedom of expression in the West. All three have managed to make the main media support their common ideology. In two decades, the press has turned a blind eye to anything that contradicts the official rhetoric from Washington and has become converted to its nonsense. The Jacksonian, Donald Trump, has made the restoration of freedom of speech the focus of his 2024 campaign. He is currently the only candidate to position himself in this way.
On Thursday, December 15, 2022, candidate Donald Trump gave his first election speech. He made it his priority to restore freedom of expression in the United States, while the revelations of Elon Musk (Twitter Files) and those of the America First Legal Foundation attest that all information is manipulated.
We can think what we want about Mr. Trump, especially since he has been the subject of a global smear campaign since his election in 2016 preventing us from properly assessing his actions, but we must admit that, since 9/11, he has been asking the right questions.
“If we don’t have free speech, then we just don’t have a free country. It’s as simple as that,” he said at the beginning of his video. “If this most fundamental right is allowed to perish, then the rest of our rights and liberties will topple just like dominoes, one by one they’ll go down.”
He reiterated that it is necessary to distinguish • the right of the platforms to immunity of their contents if they are satisfied to convey them without taking knowledge of them, • from their responsibility if they take the liberty of noting or censoring them. In the latter case, they should be prosecuted in the same way as the authors of the messages they disseminate. “In recent weeks, bombshell reports have confirmed that a sinister group of Deep State bureaucrats, Silicon Valley tyrants, left-wing activists and depraved corporate media have been conspiring to manipulate and silence the American people,” Trump said.
“They have collaborated to suppress vital information about everything from elections to public health…The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed and it must happen immediately,” he continued.
1- SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
The generalized lie began in the West with the description of the attacks of September 11, 2001 in the United States [1]. From the first minutes of the event, the media, without investigating and in the absence of a claim, designated the culprit. Later in the day, a BBC journalist assured that Tower 7 had just collapsed while it was still visible in the background for a few minutes.
That day, if some American journalists described with more relevance and critical thinking what they saw, only one man dared to say on TV that what the authorities were saying was false. It was real estate developer Donald Trump, for whom the first two towers could not have collapsed under the effect of the planes that had hit them. He knew all the better what he was saying because at the time he employed the same architects who had built the World Trade Center.
Donald Trump was wise enough to explain that the authorities must have had national security reasons for hiding the truth from the public. Six months later, I was not so clever in publishing the world’s best-selling book, The Big Lie.
During this period, I remember a journalist from a major American magazine who came to interview me in Paris. When I pointed out to her that, if the planes had brought down the towers, they would not have collapsed on themselves as in a controlled demolition, but laterally, she replied that she had no opinion because she was not an expert in the field. I also remember the editor of a very large US magazine calling me to explain that he could not publish anything, but that he supported me.
A leaden blanket had just fallen on the West. The years that followed with the “reshaping of the broader Middle East” were a long series of lies. The Pentagon operation was presented as a series of interventions against dictatorships or in civil wars. Washington was destroying people for a good cause. They did not hesitate to claim that Iraq had the third largest military force in the world and weapons of mass destruction; that Muamar Gaddafi and Bashar al-Assad were dictators, etc.
These events were the beginning of Fact Checking. The media, under orders, assured dogmatically the unbelievable. The daily newspaper Le Monde published absurd calculations assuring that everything was clear and logical. Then came the insults. Those who thought about it were called “conspiracy theorists” and accused of being ideologically extremist. Two leading journalists published a book on commission to assure that if there was no debris from a Boeing in the Pentagon, it was because the plane had crashed in a “horizontal spike” [2]. All this nonsense was repeated over and over again.
2- THE 2016 CAMPAIGN AGAINST THE JACKSONIANS
The debate that I had initiated worldwide was particularly slow to start in the United States. In 2004, a renowned intellectual, David Ray Griffin, decided to write a book to refute my allegations and discovered with astonishment that I was right.
In 2016, by surprise, Donald Trump took over the Republican Party and was elected President of the United States. The press interpreted this election as a victory of populism over reason. But why did the US people follow such a man if not because he refused to believe the dominant lie?
Donald Trump being nominated by the Republican Party, but not being a Republican, a vast bipartisan campaign was organized to destroy his image [3]. It began even before he entered the White House. It was orchestrated internationally by David Brock and cost at least 35 million dollars.
For the first time, the Western press described the president-elect of the United States as a racist and called for his removal before he did too much damage. For four years, none of his major decisions were reported in the press, only rumours of bickering among his staff. Did you hear about the president’s executive order excluding the CIA from the Security Council or about stopping the funding of jihadists?
President Trump’s foreign policy was portrayed as the inconsistent folly of one man, when in fact he was acting in the tradition of one school of thought, that of President Andew Jackson. But have you heard of him as anything other than a racist?
3- THE 2020 US PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
The 2016 presidential election is as important as the 9/11 attacks. The story that was made of it has no relation with the event. The problem is not who cheated or how, but that it is not transparent. The ballots of more than half of the voters were counted without meeting the requirements of transparency of a democracy.
The entire world witnessed an opaque election in a country that claimed to be an example of democracy. What Donald Trump called a “robbery” may not be so, because no one knows the actual outcome of the election. Nevertheless, this opacity led to the seizure of the Capitol by peaceful demonstrators after the police intentionally threw one of them from several meters high to kill him.
4- The Covid-19 pandemic of 2020-21
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden and Van der Leyen administrations intentionally misled their constituents. They knowingly disseminated false figures and claimed that : “Covid vaccines” (messenger RNA) protect against transmission of the virus (which the manufacturers never claimed). The “anti-Covid vaccines” (messenger RNA) are recommended for pregnant women. Anti-Covid vaccines” (messenger RNA) protect children (although they only contract this disease in exceptional cases). The “anti-Covid vaccines” (messenger RNA) have no significant side effects regardless of the age and condition of the patients (whereas they cause serious heart attacks in men under 40 years of age). There is no other effective remedy for Covid-19 other than Western vaccines (while many other states have used drugs in the early stages of the disease or developed their own vaccines).
Some interpret these fallacies as stemming from incompetence, others as corruption by pharmaceutical companies. It doesn’t matter: in either case, the West has sunk into lies because its means of communication are censored.
THE ORGANIZATION OF STATE CENSORSHIP
The Twitter Files revealed by its new owner, Elon Musk, and the emails from the US Public Health Agency (CDC) obtained by the Trumpist association America First Legal Foundation [4] attest that the Biden administration secretly monitored and occasionally censored all messages exchanged on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Whatsapp and Hello around the world. To do this, Washington had foreign complicity. President Biden himself set up a censorship agency, the “Disinformation Governance Board” [5]. Although he officially dissolved it in the face of criticism, it continues to operate under a different name.
This agency is dedicated to censoring information about Ukrainian “integral nationalists” [6] and about the crimes of the Zelensky regime [7]. It poisons us about the actions of Russia and China, so that we do not perceive the tipping of the world against the West.
It is clear that the rise of populism is above all a popular response to the extension of censorship, first in the USA, then in the whole West. Freedom of expression, and therefore democracy, is dead, killed by those who had the responsibility to protect it.
Donald Trump’s efforts, if successful, will restore free speech, but not democracy. It is too late. The world has changed. In the last 20 years, the minimum equality between citizens has disappeared: income gaps have increased more than 1000 times and the middle classes have been partially ruined.
In these conditions, a new political regime must be invented and it will be able to be built in the interest of all only if everyone has freedom of expression.
Political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network). Latest work in English – Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Progressive Press, 2019.
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