Well, the gradual censorship of right-wing voices took another lurch forward this week. Alex Jones, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Paul Joseph Watson are now all banned permanently from Facebook and their subsidiary, Instagram.
In fact, the tech giant that controls almost three-quarters of all social media interactions doesn’t just want to silence Alex Jones; it wants to erase him from existence. If you so much as share any content from Jones’ site Infowars, you might find yourself banned along with him and the others whom Facebook, Inc. has decided are too “dangerous” to have a voice.
I know about Jones’s plight from CNN. You know what CNN is. It’s the network that took the lead in promoting the false narratives that Michael Brown and others killed while violently resisting arrest were, instead, innocent victims of racist American cops. You might remember that photo of “CNN Newsroom” hosts Sally Kohn, Mel Robbins and Margaret Hoover with their hands in the air while their co-host Sunny Hostin held up a sign saying, “I can’t breathe.” The fake news about Michael Brown and others like Eric Garner who were killed while resisting lawful arrest was so widely broadcast that everyone knew exactly what the celebrity anchors meant without even seeing the so-called victims’ names. The smug and self-righteous look on their faces alone was almost enough to tell the tale.
Brown, who was 6-foot-4-inches and weighed 292 pounds, was shot and killed by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer on August 9, 2014. CNN and the rest of the corporate press spent the next couple of years reporting on any circumstance in which a black person died in an altercation with the police for which they could find someone who was willing to claim that the killing was unjustified. They not only didn’t caution against a “rush to judgment,” their coverage encouraged anyone foolish enough to listen to the overpaid, talentless hacks they hire to masquerade as journalists to believe that your typical American police officer started his day just hoping he’d have the chance to murder an innocent black man. The results were entirely predictable; minds already addled by years spent watching their poisonous product were set ablaze and violent eruptions ensued.
On July 7, 2016, five police officers were killed and nine more wounded at a Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. The shooter was a man inspired by two years of relentlessly sensationalized fake news from CNN and the rest of the corporate leftist press. Three more cops were killed and three more wounded in an ambush in Baton Rouge, Louisiana 10 days later.
Those two eruptions weren’t just murders, they were massacres and, hence, are likely still remembered today. But other police officers who took a fatal bullet because of corporate leftist fake and sensationalized news are probably only remembered by their families, friends, and colleagues.
On December 20, 2014, for example, a man who’d internalized CNN’s anti-cop propaganda named Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley wrote an Instagram post containing hashtags for Michael Brown and Eric Garner that said, “I’m putting Wings on Pigs Today . . . They Take 1 of Ours … Lets (sic) Take 2 of Theirs.”
Maryland police became aware of Brinsley’s post because he’d shot and wounded his girlfriend but escaped before police arrived. The Baltimore county authorities traced a phone Brinsley was using to New York and immediately alerted the New York Police Department that Brinsley was in their city looking for revenge for Brown and Garner. But, sadly, the alert came too late.
Five minutes before the NYPD was notified of the danger, Brinsley snuck up on NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos while they were sitting in their patrol car, pointed his gun through the open passenger side window, fired four shots, and murdered both men in the name of CNN’s fake news.
Liu was the only son of Chinese immigrants; he left behind a wife but no children. Ramos left behind a wife and two sons; he was a religious man, once studying for the seminary, and planned to join the ministry when he retired from the police force. Ramos and Liu certainly had other plans, too. Yet, you likely don’t remember hearing about these two officers assassinated on the job and probably didn’t remember their names or anything about them even if you do. But CNN and the rest of the corporate press made sure we all knew a lot of lies about Brown and Garner. And that’s why Ramos and Liu’s wives are now widows and Ramos’s sons no longer have a father.
The number of police shot to death increased from 41 in 2015 to 64 in 2016, a 56 percent increase. But that’s nothing compared to the increase in ambush killings, which rose a staggering 250 percent, from six to 21, the highest total in more than two decades. In many cases, such as those in Dallas and Baton Rouge, we know that cops were murdered because of the fake narrative about racist cops killing innocent blacks the corporate media spent two years promoting.
Just two weeks before Liu and Ramos were assassinated, New York police arrested three men for assaulting two police officers on the Brooklyn Bridge after a Black Lives Matter protest. And it beggars belief that the increase in murdered police officers in 2016 wasn’t generally due to the corporate leftist media spending two years relentlessly promoting a false and destructive narrative.
Eventually, the lie spread by the corporate leftist press that Michael Brown was peacefully surrendering was fully exposed. But, even then, the folks at CNN didn’t ultimately think the truth about Brown mattered. They were quite upfront about it a month after the “Newsroom” stunt, in a story headlined, “Why ‘Hands up, Don’t Shoot’ Resonates Regardless of Evidence,” in which we’re told that, even though the story about Brown turned out to be a lie, “It has become a powerful protest symbol. And symbols can be persuasive. History is full of them.”
An article that should have been a remorseful and introspective apology for gravely misinforming Americans and leading to the deaths of dozens of police was, instead, a celebration of the propaganda value of deliberate misinformation. Creating fake victims wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. CNN couldn’t have been clearer about it. And, unfortunately, they couldn’t have been more correct that they’d turned Brown, Gardner, and the rest into powerful symbols—powerful enough to drive some people to commit murder.
So, when Facebook, Inc. tells you it’s banning Alex Jones because he’s “dangerous,” you know they’re lying. Whatever Alex Jones’ sins, he’s never brought the nation to the brink of civil war and caused the murder of dozens of cops by relentlessly promoting and sensationalizing phony propaganda.
And neither Facebook, Inc. nor any of the other tech giants who claim to be silencing right-wing voices because they’re dangerous are doing anything about CNN and the rest of the corporate press who did.
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