[CLIP] Part 2: Jacob Siegel on Pandemic Censorship & Technocratic Betrayal of the American Voter

There is something totalizing inherent in the aim of information control, and so the transition from policing electoral infrastructure to defend against foreign disinformation attacks by hostile foreign governments like Russia, to policing epidemiologists censoring true accurate as we now know reports about the effectiveness of vaccines in preventing transmission or criticism of lockdowns or investigations into the origins of the coronavirus. It may seem like a stretch, it may seem like a kind of leap across a chasm, but in fact I think that there is much more continuity than there is discontinuity, and as evidence of that I would point to the fact that the single most, I would say significant, whole of society initiative carried out by the counter disinformation enterprise was the 2020 Election Integrity Partnership. Now this was a consortium of four organizations put together with the backing and through the official imprimatur of CISA, and that is through the government itself, and this included Stanford University, a company called Grafica that was founded as a defense department initiative as part of its counter-jihadist, counter-Islamist messaging, the University of Washington, and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensics Lab. These four groups got together in this Election Integrity Partnership to carry out what internal government documents disclosed were roles, censoring functions that the government knew it was better off outsourcing to non-governmental third parties. So this has all now been disclosed either through lawsuits or the Twitter files itself. We know that the government counter disinformation agencies were looking to offload their censorship duties because of the obvious constitutional problems, and indeed the head of the Election Integrity Partnership, Alex Stamos, says in an internal briefing at one point that gets released to the public later that, you know, we're here to do things that the government kind of can't do for legal reasons. This is not because CISA didn't care about disinformation, but at the time, they lacked both kind of the funding and the legal authorizations to go do the kinds of work that would be necessary to truly understand how election disinformation was operating. You know, it's a very offhanded admission of their role, both as a para-governmental entity, that is to say that they're not a private civic organization, they exist to carry out the responsibilities of government, and that those responsibilities are not legal. It's an admission of both of those things. And so that's the Election Integrity Partnership, which censors tens of millions, I think the estimate is something like 22 million pieces of content. You know, they say that they only flagged them. But of course, flagging content was a way of marking what was supposed to be censored as much of it was later censored by the social media companies. But through all of these steps, through all of this outsourcing, you keep sort of breaking the chain of what you might call accountability. So who's really—we only flagged them, we didn't censor them. So that's the Election Integrity Partnership. And that, after the 2020 election, that partnership, rather than disappearing, is, you might expect for an organization that was created to deal with election integrity, instead rebrands as the Virality Project, with a mission now to censor, flag, monitor disinformation, misinformation, and what is soon to be called malinformation, the infamous malinformation, which refers to things that are factually true, but have been contextualized in ways that are somehow untrue, meaning essentially that they're counter to the official narrative. That's what—malinformation is a way of saying true but inconvenient, basically, a fancy term for that. So that becomes the Virality Project. I bring this up because there's no great reimagining necessary. There is no institutional remissioning. It's not a big effort. It just transitions from one to the other. Because in the end, technocratic information control is technocratic information control. And whatever its supposed aim is, whether it's being carried out because it's going to protect the public from national security threats or from public health-related threats, in the end, it's about defending power. In the end, it's about removing the sovereignty of individual actors in a political system and vesting it into an unaccountable technocratic system. That's what underlies it, whatever it claims to be doing. I want to talk a little bit about the Election Integrity Partnership. Before it morphed, so to speak, in its effort to secure elections, do you view it as having actually interfered with elections? I think what the Election Integrity Partnership did was gross interference in the election. I think that mass censorship is utterly antithetical to and incompatible with the holding of free elections. It's antithetical to self-government. It's unconstitutional. It is impossible to say, ultimately, precisely what effect it had, how many votes were swayed. But we don't have to know that precisely. It's irrelevant, in fact, what precise statistical impact it had. What's important is that it represented a complete break with the principle and procedure of democratic self-government. It was carried out with the approval of the highest levels of government, the Democratic Party, buy-in from top universities, the gleeful consent of much of the media in the United States. It was the sort of avatar for an entire ruling-class effort that treated democracy, small-D democracy, with open contempt. It seems to me that that is just incontestable as a matter of fact. I'm happy to debate with people how it got to that point, what the ultimate result was, but there is no such thing as a mass censorship that is not also hostile to democracy and to free and fair elections. And indeed, we're capable of recognizing that in every context but this one. And the people who defend it would never defend the similar actions being carried out in China or in Russia. They would know exactly what it was there, but somehow here, because of what is taken to be the exceptional threat posed by Donald Trump and white nationalism or COVID denial or climate denial or transgender rights denial or whatever the sort of human rights and political emergency that's being cited at the moment, there's a total break with the capacity for reasoning that would tell us that this sort of effort in any other context is nakedly authoritarian. I wanted to just dwell on this for a moment longer. You mentioned in your piece this Time magazine article that came out in February of 2021, which I thought was one of the most astonishing things I'd ever read. Because it was basically like, here's how we did it. People don't seem to remember this article. What I remember when I read it was, isn't this actually election interference? But I wonder if a lot of the people involved didn't view it that way. I wonder if they didn't actually believe that they doing some of these things in that article and what we just discussed, they were actually safeguarding democracy. I totally agree with that. I think that most of the people, the clear majority thought that they were safeguarding democracy. But the way that that occurs, and here I think some classic Marxist class-based analysis can be very helpful, is that their ideology is a projection of their class interests. And so to them, democracy means we stay in power. That's what democracy means to them. Democracy means a political system that benefits us. And how do you reconcile that seemingly obvious contradiction? Because the meaning, the literal definition of democracy is ultimately far less important than the kind of political connotation given to it.