In his 1961 farewell address, President Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex [MIC].” At the time, Eisenhower was concerned that our arms industry with its ever increasing financial and political power might conquer our Republic from within. He recognized that the rapid growth of the MIC, along with the “domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment,” would drive public policy that would “itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Since Eisenhower’s warning decades ago, the federal government has grown into a taxpayer-funded labyrinth of agencies wielding unyielding power over the people they are sworn to protect.
Now, with the rapid growth of the digital age, political division, disinformation, fake news, and the like, our world has changed again — and not for the better. Using the MIC blueprint, our government, NGOs, and academic institutions have created and are using an all-consuming “censorship-industrial complex” (CIC) to protect their own interests.
As an example, during the Covid pandemic, governments used CIC tactics to create their own “pandemic of control.” According to EngageMedia, “Officials, medical experts, the mainstream media, and Big Tech pushed the narrative that COVID-19 could be tightly controlled, and that citizens everywhere had a responsibility to abide, with no questions asked, to achieve that aim. The ‘approved’ pandemic response was defended at all costs. News media ridiculed alternative viewpoints as fake news and misinformation, and social media platforms took down contradictory views from their feeds, silencing voices that questioned vaccine passports, lockdowns, and other controls.”
The only good thing that has come out of the Covid pandemic is that citizens have started to question the wisdom and authority of their government.
In March, the House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government heard testimony on the CIC, as documented in the report The Censorship Industrial Complex: U.S. Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation Campaigns, 2016 – 2022. Even the executive summary of the 68 pages of testimony is chilling, as it portrays a government out of control, with “government-funded censors” who “invoke the prevention of real-world harm to justify their demands for censorship.”
The summary continued:
The censors have defined harm so broadly, in fact, that they have justified Facebook censoring accurate information about COVID vaccines, for example, to prevent “vaccine hesitancy.” Their goal, clearly, is not protecting the truth but rather persuading the public. That is the purpose of open debate and the free exchange of ideas. Persuasion by covert means is censorship.
CIC is a threat to all free people. Our government’s use of CIC is quickly making George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth a reality. President Biden is using the CIC to push his woke environmental, social-justice, and equity agenda, spending billions of taxpayer dollars to spread disinformation as facts.
