{"id":48319,"date":"2021-01-17T19:07:15","date_gmt":"2021-01-17T23:07:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=48319"},"modified":"2021-01-17T19:12:52","modified_gmt":"2021-01-17T23:12:52","slug":"the-war-on-terror-hitting-america-harder-than-ever","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/?p=48319","title":{"rendered":"The War on Terror Hitting America Harder Than Ever"},"content":{"rendered":"

The War on Terror comes home<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s massive social media purges \u2013 starting with President Trump\u2019s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets \u2013 was shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas. The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump\u2019s two \u201coffending\u201d Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.<\/p>\n

Many Americans viewed this assault on social media accounts as a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans, but they are missing the point. The narrowing of allowable opinion in the virtual public square is no conspiracy against conservatives. As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.<\/p>\n

Yes, this is partly an attempt to erase the Trump movement from the pages of history, but it is also an attempt to silence any criticism of the emerging political consensus in the coming Biden era that may come from progressive or antiwar circles.<\/p>\n

After all, a look at Biden\u2019s incoming \u201cexperts\u201d shows that they will be the same failed neoconservative interventionists who gave us weekly kill lists, endless drone attacks and coups overseas, and even US government killing of American citizens abroad. Progressives who complain about this \u201cback to the future\u201d foreign policy are also sure to find their voices silenced.<\/p>\n

Those who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely private ventures acting independent of US government interests are ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of \u201cprivate\u201d US social media companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama\/Biden era.<\/p>\n

\u201cBig Tech\u201d long ago partnered with the Obama\/Biden\/Clinton State Department to lend their tools to US \u201csoft power\u201d goals overseas. Whether it was ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras, the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, \u201cArab Spring,\u201d the destruction of Syria and Libya, and so many more, the big US tech firms were happy to partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those out of favor.<\/p>\n

In short, US government elites have been partnering with \u201cBig Tech\u201d overseas for years to decide who has the right to speak and who must be silenced. What has changed now is that this deployment of \u201csoft power\u201d in the service of Washington\u2019s hard power has come home to roost.<\/p>\n

So what is to be done? Even pro-free speech alternative social media outlets are under attack from the Big Tech\/government Leviathan. There are no easy solutions. But we must think back to the dissidents in the era of Soviet tyranny. They had no Internet. They had no social media. They had no ability to communicate with thousands and millions of like-minded, freedom lovers. Yet they used incredible creativity in the face of incredible adversity to continue pushing their ideas. Because no army \u2013 not even Big Tech partnered with Big Government – can stop an idea whose time has come. And Liberty is that idea. We must move forward with creativity and confidence!<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nRon Paul
\nChairman<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The War on Terror comes home<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation.co\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}