the Highest Form of Patriotism

Dissent is the immune system of society. Suppressing dissent doesn't just aim to get rid of pesky political protesters and conspiracy theorists, it also aims to prevent the innovations and solutions society needs to adapt to changing conditions. History shows that suppressing dissent dooms a society to sclerosis, decline, and collapse.

Regimes that lose public support always make the same mistake; rather than fix the source of the loss of public trust - which is ALWAYS the few enriching themselves at the expense of the many - the regime reckons the problem is dissent. If all dissent is suppressed, then everyone will accept their diminishing lot in life and the elites can continue on their merry way. Or so they imagine! Dissent is a relief valve - shut it down and the pressure builds to the point that the system explodes. Regimes that no longer tolerate anything but the party line are doomed to fall in one of two ways: Either the pressure builds and the masses revolt, tearing the elite from power, or the masses opt-out and stop working to support the regime, so the regime slowly starves and then implodes.

The Big Tech monopolies in America today - Facebook, Twitter and Google - are effectively suppressing dissent in three ways: Shadow banning where the audience who gets to see your content is throttled back to a fraction of your pre-shadow-banning audience; the mechanics are shrouded in secrecy, Stasi-style. Second is De-platforming where a Big Tech monopoly declares you persona non grata for a supposed violation of their Kafkaesque Terms of Service and bans your content from their platform, effectively silencing you. And third is De-monetization where your content is still officially on the platform in truncated form, but the flow of advertising revenue is turned off; you are welcome to post content but you will no longer be able to make any money from it.

When you crush dissent and spend a full year cracking the skulls of protesters, you end up with what we have witnessed this year with France's general strikes. Here in the United States, dissent gathered momentum when all dissent was lumped together as "fake news" or "Russian propaganda." What better way to throw the baby out with the bathwater than declare any dissent from the approved party line as "fake news" or "Russian propaganda."

The catalyst was a completely fake "list of Russian agents" assembled by an unidentified source called PropOrNot in 2016. The Washington Post and other corporate media outlets immediately published the baseless accusations without bothering to seek the identity of the accusers or establish any sort of objective standards to judge the validity of the accusation. It was pure Orwellian.

In police-state fashion, Big Tech took the list of accused, declared all those named guilty and promptly shadow-banned, de-platformed, or de-monetized everyone without coming clean about how they engineered crushing the dissent. In classic Stasi fashion, the mechanics are all black box - the accused are never confronted with their accuser, never provided with the evidence of their "crime," and never given an opportunity to defend themselves against the false accusation. No due process whatsoever.

Everyone on the PropOrNot list was declared guilty until proven innocent, but there was no way to prove innocence. Kafka, meet Orwell - a completely opaque, privately owned Stasi (Facebook, Twitter, Google) does the elites' dirty work, concealed behind the impenetrable bureaucracy of algorithms, secret guidelines and Terms of Service which can be interpreted in whatever way serves the gatekeepers' interests.

Suppressing dissent guarantees disorder and collapse. The frantic efforts of an exploitative elite to eliminate dissent only accelerates the regime's path to collapse. America's contemporary Stasi cannot stand. Thank God we are at the beginning of a regime change with a Dissenter in Chief in the Oval Office.