Caitlin Johnstone: Self-Censorship: Where The Real Damage Is Being Done

Caitlin Johnstone

Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.

Oct 15

Self-Censorship: Where The Real Damage Is Being Done

I was going to write another article today about a different topic, but I backed down because I didn’t think I could deliver the kind of fiery, forceful, unmitigated argument it would need to be without risking getting banned from social media and blogging platforms.

The article I was planning on writing, which you’ll just have to imagine now, would have been titled “ ‘Assange Can Leave Whenever He Wants!’ No, Idiot, He Can’t.” The feature image was going to be a screen shot of a blue-checkmarked empire loyalist named Greg Olear tweeting the infuriatingly dopey argument that Assange is free to just waltz out the embassy doors whenever he wants, so therefore he isn’t actually being imprisoned by an Orwellian power establishment for publishing authentic documents about powerful people. Never mind the fact that you can say exactly the same thing about literally anyone under political asylum; they are all free to leave the political asylum they’ve been granted at any time, and pointing this out is just describing the thing that political asylum is. Never mind the fact that a UN panel ruled that Assange is being arbitrarily detained by the threat of imprisonment. Never mind that the same US government which tortured Chelsea Manning is currently openly pursuing Assange’s arrest because of his publications, making the assertion that he’s “free to leave” the same as saying he’s “free” to jump off a cliff. People don’t want to believe that their government imprisons journalists, so whenever Assange is in the news you see this argument making the rounds.

It would have been a firecracker of an article, but when it came time to write it, I backed down. I’d generally rather scrap an article than write something tepid and boring that won’t make any impact, so the risk of losing access to my platforms outweighed my desire to write what I’d planned on writing.

I’ve been self-censoring more and more lately, especially since the latest round of coordinated cross-platform silencing of multiple alternative media outlets the other day. Back in August I had my Twitter account temporarily deleted when I said the world will be better off without John McCain and a bunch of #Resistance accounts mass reported me; Twitter cited “abusive behavior” as its justification. The only reason my account was restored was because there was a large objection from many high-profile journalists and activists who understand the dangers of internet censorship, and I’m not willing to gamble that I’d get that lucky should something similar happen again. Being able to disrupt establishment narratives on a high-traffic website like Twitter outweighs the benefits of speaking in an unmitigated way.

And that ultimately is precisely the point. If the social engineers can make an example of a few dissident voices in the public eye, everyone else will rein in their own speech and behavior to avoid the same fate. The overall effect of this phenomenon is actually far more effective in suppressing dissident speech than the overt censorship is by itself, because self-censorship actually silences exponentially more anti-establishment opinions. For every one voice you crack down on overtly, a thousand more silence themselves out of self-preservation, not saying things they would otherwise say and not doing things they would otherwise do.

Meanwhile empire loyalists know that they can consistently get away with saying anything they want with total impunity. The other day for example I criticized the fawning media accolades that professional Atlantic Council propagandist Eliot Higgins has been receiving lately, and he responded by calling me “Grotbags”, an obese witch character from a nineties children’s television show. The joke being, you see, that I am overweight, and I am also a woman, so I am therefore similar to the character Grotbags. Ha ha ha. Eliot has been repeating this hilarious joke for months with zero consequences. He also made headlines back in June with his repeated public invitation for people who disagree with him on Twitter to suck his balls, also with zero consequences.

After my August Twitter suspension a #Resistance account publicly doxxed me, posting my home address, phone number and other information. I didn’t make a public ordeal out of it at the time because I obviously didn’t want to draw attention to it, but I did report it because I wanted it deleted. I was not expecting Twitter Support to reject my report, especially after they had me jump through a bunch of hoops to prove that I did in fact live where the doxxer was saying I lived, but they did.

“We understand that you might come across content on Twitter that you dislike or find offensive,” Twitter wrote back. “However, after investigating the reported content we found it was not in violation of Twitter’s private information policy. As a result, it won’t be removed at this time.”

I see this routinely across all platforms; some accounts act without any fear of consequences, others seem primed for hair-trigger suspension. The bias is distinctly slanted in the favor of those who support CIA/CNN narratives and attack anyone who speaks out of alignment with the agendas of the US-centralized empire.

So while we are mitigating our speech more and more, the Eliot Higginses of the new media environment consistently get away with all manner of abusive behavior without any repercussions. We’re fighting a media war in which we are not just outnumbered and outgunned, but are increasingly forced to fight with one arm tied behind our backs. The only thing we have going for us at this point is that authenticity is attractive and oligarchic funding can’t buy creativity or inspiration.

So anyway, there’s my confession that I have been caving to self-censorship to avoid being de-platformed. Rather than denying it, I think it’s best that we all admit to it when we do it and call it what it is, because it’s an unseen part of the people’s media rebellion that is generally overlooked and under-appreciated. I haven’t really figured out what to do about it beyond that, but in my experience drawing the light of attention to these things is always a good idea.

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Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal,buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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Caitlin Johnstone: How Julian Assange Exposed the Fraudulence of Mainstream Media | The Ghion Journal

How Julian Assange Exposed the Fraudulence
of Mainstream Media

By Caitlin Johnstone on August 3, 2018

: Fight Ignorance with Knowledge::

As attempts to evict Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London get more and more aggressive, we are seeing a proportionate increase in the establishment smear campaign against him and against WikiLeaks. This is not a coincidence.


The planned campaign to remove Assange from political asylum and the greatly escalated smear campaign to destroy public support for Assange are both occurring at the same time that Assange has been cut off from the world without internet, phone calls or visitors, completely unable to defend himself from the smear campaign. This, also, is not a coincidence.


The ability to control the narrative about what is going on in the world is of unparalleled importance to the plutocrats who use governments as tools to advance their agendas. The agenda to make an example of a leak publisher with a massive platform who has repeatedly exposed the corruption of the establishment upon which western plutocrats have built their empires will require continuous narrative spin, since the precedent set by prosecuting a journalist for publishing authentic documents would arguably constitute a greater leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia than the Patriot Act.

Among the latest components of this campaign has been a viral dump of Twitter DMs being promoted as a hot news item by outlets like Motherboard, The Hill, Forbes and Think Progress and across #Resistance Twitter. The fact that the juicy bits from those DMs had already been published months ago by The Intercept, and the fact that the smears and spin we’re seeing reruns of today were long ago ripped to shreds in journalist Suzie Dawson’s epic essay “Being Julian Assange” after the Intercept publication, has not dampened the orgiastic frenzy with which this non-story is being bandied about by establishment loyalists and defenders of power as evidence of Assange’s nefariousness.


This is entirely illegitimate. It is not legitimate to make claims about someone who has been deliberately deprived of the ability to defend himself. It is not legitimate to spin a narrative about someone whose ability to participate in that narrative has been deliberately cut off. You don’t get to silence a man and then legitimately take over the public narrative about him. That is not a valid thing to do.


But that of course is the idea. By cutting Assange off from internet access, phone calls and visitors, he has been deprived of the ability to give his side of the story in another interview with Fox News, for example, or in tweets to his millions of followers, thus making his side of the story mainstream knowledge. Every voice has been shoved off the stage but that of the political and media establishment which just so happens to be owned and operated by the same powerful oligarchs who want Assange silenced and prosecuted for challenging their rule. This is not a coincidence.

I have said it before and I will say it again: whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you can control the stories that the public are telling themselves about what’s going on in the world, you control the public itself. So many of the plutocratic establishment’s most aggressive spin campaigns recently have been about securing narrative control in a new media environment with unprecedented public internet access, from constant warnings about “fake news” and “conspiracy theories”, to fearmongering about “Russian bots” and “Russian propaganda”, to promoting and legitimizing the persecution of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The empire hates Assange because he punches holes in their ability to control the narrative, and thus control the public, and they have silenced him to deprive him of the ability to control his own narrative about himself. Click To Tweet


Every claim made about Assange since his silencing in late March of this year can therefore be safely dismissed by the public on general principles. As long as they are rigging the debate in their favor, the debate is invalid. Literally any attack on or criticism of Assange being promoted in public discourse can legitimately be dismissed with “Assange has been deprived of his ability to defend himself from that accusation. As long as he is cut off from the world, that’s an invalid accusation to make.”


Feel free to say this to every blue-checkmarked establishment crony on social media who is bravely kicking Assange while his hands and feet are tied behind his back. Their smear campaign is intrinsically invalid, and they should be told so at every opportunity.

Liked what you read? Do you support independent journalism? Take a second to support Caitlin Johnstone on Patreon. You can find more of Caitlin’s work by visiting her website https://caitlinjohnstone.com/. You can also follow her on Twitter @Caitoz and read her latest work on her Medium website.

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Caitlin Johnstone

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Caitlin Johnstone is an uncouth heretic and unapologetic rabble rouser writing out of Melbourne, Australia. A prolific writer. Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerilla poet. Utopia prepper. You will disagree with her sometimes. That's okay.

Caitlin Johnstone: Activism Without Inner Work Is Impotent | Steemit

Activism Without Inner Work Is Impotent

caitlinjohnstone (64) in spirituality •  4 days ago

Have you ever known someone who's intensely interested in helping people, but is so neurotic and unskillful that they mostly just make things worse?


"Stop!" you'll find yourself wanting to yell at such people. "Stop helping! Go help yourself!"
That's how I see most political activism today. So many well-intentioned people who want to help, and are so crazed by mass media psyops and cultural mind viruses that their energy seemingly goes everywhere but where it needs to. I'd like to say a bit about that here, if you'll indulge me.



It's really weird how many people in the political circles I move in are still running pretty much the exact same programs they were running in 2016. There are still former Berners acting like Hillary Clinton is the single greatest threat to America despite her being more or less irrelevant in 2018. There are still leftists and anarchists acting as though small neo-Nazi groups present a greater existential threat than the mainstream neoliberal neoconservative Orwellian power establishment.


There are still liberals running the same "OMG TRUMP NAZI LITERALLY HITLER WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE" script despite overwhelming evidence showing that the most evil things this administration has done are all extensions of Bush and Obama administration policies. There are still anti-interventionist Trump voters doing everything they can to compartmentalize away from the undeniable fact that this president is continuing and expanding the interventionist policies of his predecessors.


Even if you had a crystal clear understanding of what was happening in US politics in 2016, continuing to perceive through the lens of that same understanding today is blindness. And the more the world continues to change (and change it always will), the more blind you will be if you continue to apply your 2016 worldview to it.


Unless you've got a very clear sense for what's true and what matters and when you're being manipulated, your conceptual framework for understanding the world is almost a matter of luck of the draw. You were born into a particular family with a particular worldview, you have a set of life experiences which shapes your ideology, and that ideology forms a perceptual filter through which you consume information. That filter dictates what your media consumption habits will look like, what you'll take in as true, what you'll reject as false, and what you'll overlook or omit. You might get very lucky and coincidentally stumble into a worldview which happens to accurately reflect what's going on in the actual world, but before long that world will change, and your habitual relationship with information will necessarily lead you and reality along diverging paths.



The only variable in this process, as near as I can tell, is consciousness. Individuals who have done a lot of work bringing consciousness to their mental habits and inner workings are not randomly floating about at the whims of chance in a tornado of information, but are grounded in a clear sense of which way is up. This doesn't mean that everyone who has done a lot of inner work will necessarily share the same ideology (I often feel like I have more in common with someone on the other end of the political spectrum who has engaged extensively in self-discovery than I have with a fellow socialist who has not). What it does mean is that they have a much better chance of correctly figuring out when they are being told the truth, when they are being manipulated, and whether something is ultimately good or detrimental for the path they'd like to see society walk along. In a culture that is saturated with media propaganda, this is an indispensable asset for understanding the world.


People often ask me where my perspective comes from. What media outlets do I use? What books have I read? Who do I look to to get my finger on the pulse of the world? I usually just list off a few alternative publications I honestly don't use all that much and a few journalists I mainly enjoy because they sometimes say cool things on Twitter, but I only do this because I don't expect my real answer would be particularly interesting to the people asking the question.


In all honesty, I actually get my ideas about what's going on in the world by meandering around between conversations with my husband, conversations and debates I get into with people on social media, random articles and video clips that readers draw my attention to, bits of information I happen to stumble across, and all the while checking in with my guts about the whole mess as I go along. It's an ongoing and ever-changing process of taking in useful information and discarding unhelpful or harmful information, and it's guided primarily by the intuition and insight I've cultivated through many years of dedicated inner work.


I've got a picture of a guy meditating as the feature image for this article (credit to Toshimasa Ishibashi) because that image is a commonly recognized symbol of the pursuit of inner work, but that isn't to suggest that meditation is the only form that that work can take, or even that it's necessary.
Any method which brings consciousness to one's inner processes and mental habits is beneficial, including self-inquiry, mindfulness practices, yoga, energy work, and psychotherapy. If you remember that the goal is to no longer be at the whim of preconditioned mental habits in perceiving the world, it's easy to figure out what practices are useful toward that end by how acutely aware they make you of how little conscious control you have over your own inner processes. Anyone who's ever tried to still their mind in sitting meditation for the first time knows what I'm talking about.





This matters politically because activism without inner work is impotent. If you're beholden to the whims of your unexamined mental habits, any political activism you engage in will be determined by the groupthink of the people you're surrounded by (who are generally equally unconscious) and leaders who may or may not be guided by truth and compassion.


The difference between the activism of someone who has done a lot of inner work and someone who hasn't is the difference between a highly trained sniper and someone randomly firing shots in the dark. If you don't have a finely tuned inner truth compass you won't know where to push, where to pull, when to stop pulling and start pushing and vice versa, or where pushing or pulling would be a waste of energy. You won't have a clear sense of what's a worthy goal or what's just a politically convenient agenda for someone in power. You won't be able to see the gaps between the bars in the cage and know when and how to make a break for it.


No matter how well-intentioned you are, your good intentions are useless in this fight unless they are guided by cultivated wisdom. Plenty of well-intentioned people have thrown all their activism and energy into feeding into America's pernicious two-party system, into fanning the flames of Russia hysteria, into cheering for western interventionism in Syria or Iran.


No matter how intelligent you are, your intelligence is useless in this fight unless it's guided by cultivated wisdom. Plenty of highly intelligent people have poured all their cleverness into justifying neoconservative agendas, into staging coups to install brutal dictators, into creating engines of genocide.


The only thing that will enable you to use your gifts for the benefit of mankind is the guidance of clear inner wisdom, and the only way to obtain that is by buckling down, going against the grain of your unconscious habitual conditioning, and getting to work. The most compassionate thing you can do for the world is to clear your perceptual lenses of falsehood and delusion so that you can make yourself useful to it.

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Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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4 days ago by caitlinjohnstone (64)