Yves here. This important post fills out the picture of how extensive censorship became under the Biden Administration. I hope you’ll circulate his piece widely, since it demonstrates the campaign went well beyond social media and included disappearing disfavored content from Internet searches. What is remarkable is Urie’s evidence of a dramatic shift in search results after the dissolution of the Biden State Department censorship program. This indirectly confirms that Google’s change in its algos to prefer mainstream sites and the quick reversal was the result of government intervention, and not Google acting out of its own profit motives.
If that isn’t troubling enough, be sure to read to the end of the post about the threats made personally to Rob.
By Rob Urie, author of Zen Economics, artist, and musician who publishes The Journal of Belligerent Pontification on Substack
In December, 2024, a Federal entity called the Global Engagement Center (GEC)— an offshoot of the US State Department tasked with censoring legal political speech on the internet, was closed after Congress stopped funding it. Within a day or two of this occurring, the internet as I haven’t seen it in four years suddenly reappeared. Hundreds of my articles that couldn’t be found under any arrangement of search terms over the prior four years have since reappeared.
Within hours of Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration, a decade of my writing on politics and economics was erased from the internet. Articles that had been distributed around the globe could no longer be found under any arrangement of search terms. To the alleged purpose of the GEC of ‘combatting disinformation,’ no one has ever accused me of spreading disinformation. Much of what I have written provided evidence of duplicity from official sources.
The timing is important here. The US State Department was run by Secretary of State Antony Blinken for all four years of the Biden administration. Upon entering office, Biden immediately began making preparations for war with Russia, including shutting down Russian-language news outlets in Ukraine— just as the CIA’s army in Ukraine was launching another round of ethnic cleansing against Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Eastern Ukraine.
I had written about energy geopolitics from the time that the US assumed control of the Ukrainian state in a US-led coup there in 2014. Readers are invited to listen to the linked phone call (above) from 2014 between US Undersecretary for European Affairs, Victoria Nuland, and US Ambassador to the UK, Geoffrey Pyatt, and decide for yourselves. The political yeas and nays that they discuss in the call all became official policy in Ukraine in subsequent years.
Biden & Co. can dispute these characterizations, but not the facts that underly them. The intercepted phone call between Nuland and Pyatt hasn’t been denied by the US. The OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe) maps linked to above illustrate the ethnic cleansing that was underway— by the US and Ukraine, when Russia launched its SMO (Special Military Operation) in 2022. The OSCE is allied with NATO, not Russia.
For those who missed it, this (paragraph above) is what I wrote about the genesis of the conflict in real time in 2022— after covering the back-and-forth since 2014. While the American left spent the war years repeating the CIA talking point that ‘Russia has already lost,’ I covered the international state of play. If you don’t know about this, it may be because I couldn’t get published in the left press, and through state censorship, no longer had a readership outside of it.
That I was censored wasn’t a surprise to me. I had written about the internal logic of state control over the prior decade. While the (classical) liberal view of censorship is that it impedes the free exchange of ideas, thereby reducing the aggregate wellbeing of society, Biden & Co. relied on the opposite logic. They argued that the exchange of ideas is only ‘free’ when views that are politically inconvenient for it are kept from public view.
Within hours of Joe Biden’s inauguration in 2021, 99% of the 200+ essays that I had written over the prior decade disappeared from the internet, along with 99% of the digital evidence that I ever existed. Little of what I had written, and none of what I was then writing, could be found via searches no matter how precise and / or detailed the search terms. For what I imagine were political reasons, after a decade of writing near-weekly essays, I had been disappeared.
The alleged rationale for this censorship was ‘to combat disinformation.’ Having followed Joe Biden’s political career since the early 1980s, the man was never known for having a firm grasp on the reality that most of the rest of us share. Much of what Biden said regarding the Covid-19 pandemic was not only untrue, but deeply harmful. Telling people that the mRNA vaccines prevented both illness and transmission— both untrue, put millions of lives at risk.
More to the point, the US had only recently been lied into a military catastrophe in Iraq by agencies of the Federal government. Biden had been the Democrats’ point person in selling the war to Congressional Democrats. He did so by claiming that Iraq possessed WMDs. This was a lie. I told anyone within earshot that this was a lie at the time. The press accounts of the ‘evidence’ were either wanting or implausible. Subsequent history supports my view.
With respect to ‘spreading disinformation,’ I have had my facts challenged (to my knowledge) a total of four times in fourteen years of public writing. The first was over the civilian death count of the Iraq war. The Lancet’s account— the one that I put forward, is the only honest effort to count the war dead. No ‘raw count’— the count being claimed to be true, has ever ended up being accurate. Despite their intuitive appeal, raw counts are by definition the lowest possible count of war dead, not the most likely count.
(I used high level statistics professionally for two-point-five decades and wrote a book placing the theories that support it in historical and philosophical context).
The second charge (of having a fact wrong) involved the automaker bailouts (2008 – 2009). The press framing had suggested that the bailouts were limited. But the details of how the bailout money had been distributed told a different story. The press accounts were put to me as fact. I sent back the actual distribution of the bailout money, which proved my case. The critic apologized and put it to me that I was correct.
While I don’t recall the specifics of the third challenge, it was quickly resolved without requiring any correction from me. The fourth incident was recent. I knowingly took a public source at face value in order to broaden the information set that I was drawing from, and their information was incorrect. When I was made aware that the information was incorrect, I educated myself as to what the correct information was, wrote it up, and distributed the correction.
Had anyone from the Biden administration or the GEC (see above) challenged me on facts, I would have responded with evidence. But without being made aware of the charge of disinformation, there is no way to respond. In fact, what is frightening about the ‘censorship workers’ (of whom I am aware) is that unless they heard something on CNN or read it in the New York Times, it is considered disinformation. This, even after the CNN / Times’ Iraq WMD and Russiagate frauds.
The PMC (professional-managerial class) press only began admitting holes in the Iraq WMD and Russiagate stories after journalists accused of having their facts wrong had ‘the facts’ accumulate in their corner to the point where they could no longer be denied. It was the establishment press that spread disinformation and the independent press that corrected it— usually after spending lifetimes in the journalistic wilderness being accused of representing the interests of nefarious foreign actors.
When former US president Woodrow Wilson ran into public resistance to US involvement in WWI, he created a department of official lies to lie Americans in to supporting the effort. Plausible consequences of WWI include the Russian Revolution and WWII. And unless Donald Trump makes peace in Ukraine and the Middle East, WWIII can be added to the list. The point: the US and the world would have been far better off if WWI had been stopped before it was started.
The US war in Vietnam was posed in the Cold War terms of ‘communism versus freedom,’ when it was in fact a nationalist struggle to oust Western imperial invaders, first the French, and then the US, from Vietnam. In a now disappeared quote, LBJ stated in the mid-1960s that ‘he couldn’t end the war (Vietnam) because his friends were making too much money from it.’ Much as the German conglomerate IG Farben produced the Zyklon B gas used in Nazi extermination camps, Dow Chemical manufactured the Agent Orange used to poison Vietnam. Just business?
In 1990, the George H.W. Bush administration wanted a war against former US ally and CIA asset Saddam Hussein in Iraq. The administration hired a DC public relations firm to craft the fraudulent testimony that was then presented by the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador. The weeping child lied that she had seen the Iraqis ‘toss babies out of incubators’ to die on the floor. Bush subsequently slaughtered upwards of 200,000 Iraqi conscripts (‘highway of death’) after they had surrendered.
George W. Bush followed his father to craft the Iraq WMD fraud by which American propagandists sold the Bush administration’s fabrication that Iraq possessed WMDs. As I wrote at the time, there existed a reasonable predicate for this lie. As Ronald Reagan’s Vice-President, George H.W. Bush had given American WMDs to Iraq. As the war was winding down, some of Poppy Bush’s weapons were found. Fox News dutifully spent months with fraudulent ‘WMDs found’ headlines glaring to craft the dueling realities that fuel American party politics.
Before he launched the current war against Russia, Joe Biden was Barack Obama’s point person in Ukraine during the US-led coup there in 2014. Following the coup, Biden brought his family there to loot the place, much as the Clintonites had looted Russia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Democrats (and ‘the left’) chose to demonize Trump rather than addressing the charges against Biden. With Trump’s re-inauguration taking place as I write this, the strategy didn’t serve the Democrats well.
Having done quite a bit of mathematical programming over the years, I sensed quickly that I was being censored as the GEC was firing up. What surprised me, but shouldn’t have, is that the American and world history that I had linked to as source material was also being systematically disappeared from the internet. At one point in 2021 – 2022, the only way that I could re-find relevant history was to already have the links. Using the same search terms as used before never yielded the same, or even useful, results no matter how many times I tried.
The seemingly benign practice of ‘ranking’ internet search results by the credibility of the sources left the same establishment press that had mis, dis, or mal defined it when given the opportunity to define truth. Even the ‘coming clean’ events like the New York Times’ article on the CIA in Ukraine admitted only known facts and even then, ‘explained’ them through imagined motives rather than actual history. The Times piece is stunningly awful.
The Times reporter/disinformation censor worldview that only what they believe is true is widely prevalent amongst the American PMC. The logic of this view was put to me by a friend. My friend gets his news from CNN, NPR, and the New York Times. In discussing events in Ukraine, his standard response was ‘I never heard of that.’ The obvious reply: if I got my information from those sources alone, I wouldn’t know much that is true about the world either.
This ‘incredible sunshine of the spotless mind’ view, whereby the less that someone knows, the more power they are given to determine public policy, is the corporate model applied to government. CEOs fancy themselves as managers and deal makers, not content experts. Marketing ‘truth’ is a constrained optimization problem around what will best sell a product. American political discourse follows this corporate model as low-quality rhetoric.
The politics of my friend are clear from his conception of journalistic truth. The sources that he trusts have lost their audiences due to serial fabrications about Iraq’s WMDs and Russiagate. My friend is a member of the bourgeois cult that still does not understand that it has lost its legitimacy. Where this gets interesting is that this bourgeois (PMC) cult is a reasonable proxy for the interests of the oligarchs.
It was another two years until the Twitter Files were made public. Initially treated as a culture war phenomenon, what they revealed was a widespread and deeply intrusive censorship regime by agents and agencies of the Federal government. With all of the talk about ‘defending democracy,’ the Biden administration crushed pluralism when and where it could. Logically, censorship can only be imposed by those with the power to impose it.
As one who was called a communist for opposing the US war in Vietnam, a Saddam sympathizer (and a terrorist) for opposing two US wars in Iraq, a Putin puppet for opposing the current US war against Russia in Ukraine, and an antisemite for opposing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the trail of official lies points to the US government being the most prolific purveyor of lies related to US foreign policy. This would seem fertile territory for actual inquiry into ‘disinformation.’
While ‘enshittification’ is a good general descriptor for what doesn’t work in the modern world, intention to enshittify hasn’t tended to be the explanation for it. Prior to 2016 or thereabouts, the internet yielded results that, taken together, provided reasonable approximations of the facts. Particularly after 2021, the internet search results that I got seemed increasingly intended to mislead.
By defaulting to the establishment press in search results— the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC, misleading ‘official’ accounts represent a preponderance of what I now see in internet searches. Question: how likely are these outfits to correct their serial and copious lies? And how could these same entities that had been played for fools by the Bushies regarding WMDs in Iraq be so easily rolled only a few years later with Russiagate? (Answer: they are de facto state media).
The common factor that ties Iraq WMD lies to Russiagate is US foreign policy. The PMC press earned credibility over the last century by having reporters in far flung locations that reported from the field. Starting in the 1980s, and picking up steam with the shift to the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, large news organization used cost-cutting to reduce their overseas presence.
One result has been the elevation of ‘access journalism.’ In the run-up to George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, reporter Judith Miller, of the New York Times, was played by Bush’s Vice-President, Dick Cheney. Cheney was Miller’s source for a major story that she dutifully reported in the Times. Cheney then went on Meet the Press to cite the Times story, meaning himself, as independent evidence in support of the Bush administrations’ lies related to Iraq WMDs.
By retreating from overseas reporting while increasing reliance on domestic sources for information regarding US foreign policy, the American press shifted from reporting foreign policy from a variety of perspectives to reporting it from the perspective of powerful Americans with geopolitical agendas. This isn’t to overstate the case. The New York Times was considered a tool of the CIA and the US foreign policy establishment when I was protesting the Vietnam war as a child in 1969.
It was the sudden reappearance of the internet a few weeks ago that prompted this recollection. It rendered apparent what I had sensed, but could not provide proof of— that the Federal government had not only censored me while denying that it was doing so, but had rendered my ability to conduct basic research on the internet unviable. I can still enter searches. But the results seem intended to mislead.
Once the internet began to reappear, I wasn’t sure what was I was seeing (still not). All of a sudden, essays that I had written a decade before appeared during routine searches. Essays that— based on the information that was available to me, had only been read by a few dozen people, had in fact been distributed outside of the US, sometimes to substantial audiences. But all that I saw was / is a few dozen readers.
Not only was I being censored, but I was also being gaslit as to the reach of my essays. (The reach is tiny, but it isn’t the conspicuous waste of time that the evidence available to me was suggesting). As best I can tell, I had made it through the Trump years without being censored. The censorship that I encountered was conducted by the Biden administration.
Following Biden’s 2020 victory, I STFU for two years to allow him time to fail without help from me. Biden failed in the manner, and to the extent, that I predicted before the 2020 election. The bet here is that history will judge the man quite harshly. Few of my Democrat friends know his actual legacy. If the path to solving problems is to first understand them, the Democrats are in for a hard reckoning.
I started writing about events in Ukraine in 2014, having, to my own view, captured the economic nature of the emerging US conflict with Russia. Without relitigating it here, there is little that I have written about the conflict recently that is different in tenor and tone from what I wrote then. It is the details that have been updated. And I didn’t create the details. I just wrote about them.
Nevertheless, and I will not reveal details here due to the ongoing nature of the threat, around mid-2022 it was made clear to me that I would either cease and desist my political activities or onerous consequences would follow. The nature of the threat was the delivery of information that only Federal agencies or contractors could reasonably have had regarding actions that they had already taken. It wasn’t my wellbeing that was threatened. The threat was to harm people I care about.
Graph: part of what is surprising here is the symmetry between Democrats and Republicans regarding the viability of the American political system. With 60% of adults proclaiming that the American political system has been broken for decades, welcome to my world. This result makes my work absolutely ordinary, not radical. Source: nytimes.com.
What made the threat particularly creepy was that a list of the people who are important to me accompanied it. Being a former volunteer firefighter, the decision to put my own life at risk to save others has already been put to the test. It is a risk that I have been willing to take. So, imagine the current conundrum. This is being put forth as information, not a complaint.
I have no idea if the changes that I am seeing are visible to others. The tech ‘model’ of customization has produced a dystopian hellscape whereby critical comparison is impossible because there is no common basis by which to compare. This is reification of the individualist ontology of Western commerce. Good luck fixing the effect without first addressing the cause.
