What The Elites Mean By "Our Democracy"--Covering Up Their Mistakes And Misdeeds

I've noted before that the primary concern for any government body or agency in the event of a SHTF event is continuity of government, not saving lives or infrastructure. That is why senior government officials in the federal government still have bomb shelters but the federal government decided long ago to defund civil defense. 

    It is all part of the greater issue of control, or at the least, the illusion of control. Part of the illusion of control is making sure that people, on the whole, never learn how the government screwed up. For instance, the first use of the national security exception to discovery in a civil law suit arose not from a lawsuit seeking disclosure of a nuclear weapons program, but concerning the cause of the crash of a military plane that killed the plaintiffs' three husbands--all civilian contractors aboard the plane. It was invoked to conceal the government's negligence. Similar excuses were made to shut down law suits from workers at Area 51 that sued over illnesses caused by exposure to illegal chemical waste dumps at the facility.

    Thus it is no surprise that the government has engaged in practices intended to obfuscate the mistakes it made in handling the Covid-19 outbreak, including the so-called vaccines. The latest story in this regard is from the Daily Signal that reports that "Amazon Bowed to White House Pressure to Suppress Books Skeptical of COVID-19 Vaccines." An excerpt (omitting various screen shots):

    Amazon yielded to pressure from President Joe Biden’s White House to suppress books that opposed COVID-19 vaccines, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Signal.

    The House Judiciary Committee obtained the emails, which demonstrate the White House’s pressure on Amazon to suppress “anti-vax books” and the company’s decision to take action against the books.

    Amazon employees strategized for a meeting with the White House on March 9, 2021, openly asking whether the administration wanted the retailer to remove books from its catalog.

    “Is the [a]dmin asking us to remove books, or are they more concerned about search results/order (or both)?” one employee wrote.

    Andrew Slavitt, then a senior adviser on Biden’s COVID-19 response team, had previously asked, “Who can we talk to about the high levels of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation [on] Amazon?”

    Slavitt became notorious when Elon Musk released the internal files of Twitter in 2022 and 2023 after he purchased the company in October 2022. Slavitt appears to have repeatedly pressured social media companies into suppressing opposition to COVID-19 vaccines.

* * *

    Slavitt had also been involved in discussions with Facebook. That social media company admitted to suppressing “often-true content” because it contradicted the White House’s narrative on COVID-19 vaccines.

    On March 2, 2021, Slavitt complained to Amazon staff that “If you search for ‘vaccines’ under books, I see what comes up.”

    “I haven’t looked beyond that, but if that’s what’s on the surface, it’s concerning,” he added.

 Although Amazon did not agree to take down books, according to the article, it did agree to change its algorithm to "avoid promoting 'anti-vax books'"--i.e., shadow banned them. 

    In another example of Gleichschaltung, The Liberty Daily reports that "Government-Funded Entities Are Building a Network to Flag 'Misinformation' in Private Messages." From the lede:

    More reports are emerging about the various forms in which the Big Tech/government collusion is taking place in the US.

    It’s not just directly pressuring, or “communicating with” – as current White House officials like to put it, social sites; reports are now emerging about companies getting hired to make massive databases of supposedly unlawful speech that are compiled thanks to users effectively spying and reporting on each other on messaging platforms like WhatsApp.

    Former State Department official, now executive director of Foundation For Freedom Online, Mike Benz, calls this “a snitch network of citizen informants.” Information thus obtained is then analyzed using some form of AI, resulting in identification of “misinformation trends.”

    This is not how a functioning representative government works. One of the basic principles underlying free speech was to have a public sufficiently educated on issues to make informed decisions. That meant having the opportunity to hear different voices and points of views. But that is the last thing the elites want right now.