Eugene Vollokh writes on his blog the behemoth Google has delisted articles critical of a legal judgment punishing author Jim Fetzer for daring to write a book questioning the official narrative on Sandy Hook.
Fetzer, a retired university professor, was ordered by the court to pay nearly a half-million dollars to Leonard Pozner, the father of a child allegedly killed at Sandy Hook.
Google received a request under the plaintiff’s name “asking Google to deindex pages that contain copies of the libelous book, and Google has gone along with those requests. Google generally does remove from its indexes links to material that a court has found to be libelous, so Google searches for such material no longer find it,” Volokh writes.
I can’t think of a more perfect contemporary example of Orwell’s truth incinerating Memory Hole, a mechanism for eradicating the off-narrative.
But a week and a half ago, another request came in to Google, and this request also sought to deindex material that simply discussed the case and criticized the court decision, such as various copies of “The Legal Lynching of a Truth-Seeker: Jim Fetzer’s Stalinist-Style Show Trial” and “Sandy Hook and the Murder of the First Amendment.” The court’s judgment of course didn’t find these items (posted in response to the judgment) to be libelous, and it offers no basis for Google to deindex them.
I wrote and posted the latter article in October. In it, I argue the lawsuit judgment against Fetzer represents another attack on an already decimated First Amendment, which is now almost completely irrelevant and, in the case of writing about Sandy Hook, might as well not exist at all.
“The Fetzer trial is a big win for the ruling elite,” I wrote. “For years now, it has worked tirelessly to characterize investigative journalism outside limits imposed by the government as criminal—and now, according to the FBI, as terrorism.”
Last week my Twitter account was put in the deep freeze for repeating what Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity said of the Fox News talk show host Sean Hannity. I used the same selectively-banned pejorative to criticize Hannity the lunkhead teleprompter reader after he justified the murder of a foreign leader in broad daylight.
Not even Mossad is brazen and outrageous as Donald Trump and his Reaper drones bristling with Hellfire missiles. Israel is notorious for its deception. Trump is a ham-fisted primitive with a mobile phone and a Twitter account.
Now that war looms—as it has since Donald Trump the promise-breaker took office—we can expect more Orwellian behavior on the part of the government and its media. The state cherishes war, for only then can it truly trample liberty to the utmost. You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.
The severity of the crackdown will depend on the severity of any military conflict between Iran and the US and its coalition of willing neoliberal nation-states, the latter increasingly cold footed as Trump tweets like a Mafia don at a meeting between the families.
It could be more Trump political Kabuki theater. Kim Jung-un found out just what a used car salesman Trump really is.
Or it could be worse, not only for the average Iranian suffering under the unwarranted onslaught of US economic and now military warfare but also for the average American. Not simply through the probability of retaliatory terrorism in America responding to US government terrorism ongoing in the Middle East for decades, but also as economic victims as the global petroleum-driven economy collapses.
