Substack Stands For Freedom
Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Speech
Substack's CEO wants writers to publish what they want — even if it's wrong
By Ramishah Maruf, CNN Business
New York, NY (CNN Business) Substack has taken advantage of a new model for the internet, where subscriptions for content are increasingly becoming the norm. The website is the current king of paid newsletters, where writers publish directly to subscribers without the standards of newsroom editors.
But as social media sites struggle to monitor misinformation, CEO Chris Best doubled down on the site's hands-off approach to content moderation.
"I think the magical piece is that the readers and writers are in charge, and you have this direct paid relationship," Best told Brian Stelter on "Reliable Sources" Sunday.
Substack has attracted high profile writers, from former New York Times op-ed columnist Bari Weiss to "Top Chef" host Padma Lakshmi. But it has also attracted controversial personalities who might not otherwise find platforms online. Former New York Times writer Alex Berenson, a vaccine and coronavirus contrarian, has more than 10,000 paying subscribers on Substack.
The platform was also criticized earlier this year for allowing anti-transgender content, causing some writers to leave the platform.
"I do think there are some people who thrive on Substack who found it hard to thrive in traditional media," Best said.
He doubled down on the site's commitment to a free press and the relationship between the writer and subscriber — even if what the writer publishes is wrong.
"If I want to sign up for your emails and you want to send me those emails, that's between you and me, and that should be allowed," Best said.
Substack has to reach a "high, high bar" before intervening in content, he added, and an information ecosystem where subscribers can debate differing sides is important. "That's something that's become a little bit unfashionable," Best said.
He doesn't believe that censoring content will put an end to disinformation, framing Substack as a "thoughtful" place where "great stuff is rewarded." But it's not the platform's place to decide what's true and what isn't, he added, or what's politically acceptable to publish -- or not.
In contrast, he criticized Twitter (TWTR) and Facebook (FB) for what what he considers optimizing cheap engagement over everything else. He said it creates an environment where users scroll through toxic content, which he defines as "the things that push people's buttons, that make people anxious and afraid and hate each other," Best said.
Facebook itself is cashing in on the newsletter hype, having launched a similar service called "Bulletin" late June. The platform courted influential writers wanting to go independent and local news writers.
The News is America's New Religion, and We're in a Religious War
via Matt Taibbi
When political narrative replaces faith, truth becomes heresy
We'll tell you anything you want to hear. We lie like hell! We'll tell you Kojak always gets the killer, and nobody ever gets cancer in Archie Bunker's house… We'll tell you any shit you want to hear! We deal in illusion, man! None of it's true! But you people… do whatever the tube tells you... This is mass madness, you maniacs!
— from Network, 1976
…narrative-driven coverage that focuses huge amounts of resources on the wrongness of the rival faith. Blue audiences love stories about the deathbed recantations of red-state Covid deniers, some of which are real, some more dubious. A typical Fox story, meanwhile, might involve a woman who passed out and crashed into a telephone pole while wearing a mask alone in her car. Tales of each other’s stupidity are the new national religion, and especially among erstwhile liberals, we take them more seriously than any religion has been taken in the smart set in a long, long time.
…By the time Trump arrived, there was only one route left for media companies, who’d lost ad revenue to Internet platforms, to make money: putting content behind a paywall. Essentially, news companies passed a hat and asked for donations, just like churches. Also like churches, they began to sell belief instead of fact. They turned viewers and readers into congregationalists, people who’d be less interested in news than calls to spiritual battle. Fox had already proven this revenue model could work. In the Trump years, led by the New York Times — which lost other forms of income but went from 1.2 million digital subscribers in 2016 to 7.5 million in 2020 — the rest of the commercial media followed suit.
…For decades, TV news readers gave off that Ron Burgundy-esque vibe of, “This copy was literally just handed to me. I barely know what this shit says, and certainly don’t care enough to lie about it.”
By the Trump years, though, news readers started to sound like preachers. They used every traveling-revivalist trick in the book to pull in the faithful, from predicting the End was Nigh (or at least, the “Beginning of the End” was Nigh) to conferring Sainthood (Robert Mueller was depicted as Jesus, Batman and Superman in media profiles) to public deliverance of the gospel (remember when Annette Bening, John Lithgow, and Kevin Kline held solemn public readings of the Mueller report?) to dramatic altar calls to give “testimony” (e.g. Michael Avenatti coming on set to deliver an unvetted new rape accusation against Brett Kavanaugh live on the Rachel Maddow show), and even witchcraft (how about a former CIA chief predicting indictments of Trump on the “Ides of March” on MSNBC?).
America is a now a nation of warring media faiths, with Fox/OAN/Newsmax preaching a heretic Savanarola-style gospel of corrupt elites lying about everything from election results to vaccine efficacy, while the rival Church of the Mainstream, which describes itself as the (literally) true faith and exclusive arbiter of such things as “fact” and “science,” preaches a coming fascist apocalypse. Its pundits openly rejoice in Covid-19 as an instrument of vengeance against “denialism” and those who don’t “believe science,” and it’s not an accident that people who watch them too much do things like wear masks alone in cars.
The Biggest Casualty of COVID-19 Is Your Individual Rights
Improve your health through a healthy lifestyle, sunshine, fresh air and real food, is the best way to protect the most people.
Quarantining and shunning human interaction are probably the worst things you can do for yourself and society at large.
And let's not go down the road of all the psychological devastation caused by teaching children to fear their own hands, other people, the air they breathe, and that their very presence poses a lethal threat to others.
Time and again, reporters and entire news outlets have been caught peddling fake news, and when the press misleads rather than informs the public of the facts, they become tools for tyranny. Their viewers become more ignorant by the day rather than more informed, and thus more easily controlled and manipulated.
In a recent Substack article, independent journalist Matt Taibbi addresses the attempt by UCLA professor and co-leader of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, Sarah Roberts, to shame readers away from Substack. "Substack is a dangerous direct threat to traditional news media," Roberts tweeted.
According to her half-baked reasoning, journalists who leave mainstream newsrooms for Substack and other independent portals are taking unfair advantage of the trust they earned while gainfully employed within the Fourth Estate. Then, once on their own, they can print whatever they want without having to go through the onerous chore of fact checking and other standard checks and balances.
To imply that trust is a thing that can only be conferred by a mainstream newsroom is beyond insulting, especially since mainstream news organizations already long ago started to become infamous for betraying exactly those hallowed 'norms' to which Roberts refers," Taibbi writes.
"Why did a source like former NSA contractor Edward Snowden choose to come forward to Glenn Greenwald in particular? He surely wasn't bothered by the fact that Glenn didn't come up through the ranks of a paper like the New York Times or Washington Post.
The answer connects to one of the primary reasons audiences are moving to places like Substack: the perception that traditional news outlets have become tools of the very corporate and political interests they're supposed to be overseeing.
Roberts complains about lines between opinion and reporting being blurred at Substack (an absurd comment on its own, but that's a separate issue), but the 'blurring' problem at those other organizations is far more severe. Are newspapers like the New York Times checks on power, or agents of it?"
…Political Powerbrokers Call for Massive Censoring
We're now even seeing politicians starting to throw their weight around, demanding censoring of political opponents and news outlets that fail to properly toe the political line.
U.S. House Democrats from California — Anna Eshoo and Jerry McNerney — went so far as to send a letter to a dozen cable, satellite and streaming TV companies, basically telling them to censor or remove Fox News, Newsmax and OANN. As noted by Glenn Greenwald in an article on the rapid escalation of government calls for censorship:
"Democrats' justification for silencing their adversaries online and in media — 'They are spreading fake news and inciting extremism' — is what despots everywhere say ... Since when is it the role of the U.S. Government to arbitrate and enforce precepts of 'journalistic integrity'?
Unless you believe in the right of the government to regulate and control what the press says — a power which the First Amendment explicitly prohibits — how can anyone be comfortable with members of Congress arrogating unto themselves the power to dictate what media outlets are permitted to report and control how they discuss and analyze the news of the day?"
FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has strongly denounced the Democrats' actions, calling it a "marked departure from First Amendment norms," adding that the demands are "a chilling transgression of the free speech rights that every media outlet in this country enjoys … No government official has any business inquiring about the 'moral principles' that guide a private entity's decision about what news to carry."
But Carr’s comments apparently had no influence on U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who followed up in September 2021 with a letter to Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy, demanding that he review Amazon algorithms and use them to basically censor or ban certain books that contain what she believes are “misleading posts” about vaccines and COVID-19.
…Censorship does not protect the public. It's a control mechanism, as you are unlikely to rebel against an injustice that you don't even know exists, or if you know about it, your understanding of the problem is diametrically opposed to the truth; hence, you'll support a "solution" that will perpetuate or deepen the problem.
At an even deeper level, censorship and information suppression are efforts to alter your cognitive faculties, because how do you even define people and things that you are not allowed to criticize? As noted by Taibbi, Big Tech and media are tools for politicians, corporations and the intelligence industry, the interests of which are frequently diametrically opposed to that of the people.
Chemical companies cannot sell their toxic wares if an informed public shuns them. The fake food industry cannot flourish if the public understands the basics of health. Technocracy cannot be implemented if an informed public opposes the agenda, and so on.
What we see clearer than ever these days, is the schism in journalism where the old-school norms of gathering data and then delivering it to the audience and allowing them to make up their own minds as to whether it's good or bad has been replaced by subjective interpretation of the data.
Essentially, most mainstream reporters now tell you how to think about a given topic. They even tell us how to think about people who refuse to think the way they're instructed to think. That way, the public ends up doing the dirty work of censoring, canceling and dehumanizing the undesirables for them.
Rule Through Medicine
While the rise of dictatorships has historically involved the use of armed forces to subdue an unruly public, the budding dictatorship of today relies heavily on weaponized medicine and the control of information. If you've taken the time to familiarize yourself with the concept of technocracy, which has a distinct transhumanist component to it, you will see why this makes perfect sense and was, in fact, entirely predictable.
By tying the issue of health care into the digital surveillance apparatus, you end up with a very robust platform for automated mass control. The use of fear also works well in this scenario, since most are keen to stay alive and don't want their loved ones to die. So, they fall for lies like "we have to shut down the world and sequester indoors for months on end or else we all die."
A leading figure in this medical dictatorship scheme is Bill Gates, who now wields a dominating influence over not just Big Tech but also global health policy, agriculture and food policy (including biopiracy and fake food), weather modification and other climate technologies,15 surveillance, education and media. As reported by The GrayZone:
"Beyond the public relations bonanza about Gates lies a disturbing history that should raise concerns about whether his foundation's plans for resolving the pandemic will benefit the global public as much as it expands and entrenches its power over international institutions.
The Gates Foundation has already effectively privatized the international body charged with creating health policy, transforming it into a vehicle for corporate dominance. It has facilitated the dumping of toxic products onto the people of the Global South, and even used the world's poor as guinea pigs for drug experiments.
The Gates Foundation's influence over public health policy is practically contingent on ensuring that safety regulations and other government functions are weak enough to be circumvented … Strong evidence suggests that the Gates Foundation functions as a Trojan horse for Western corporations, which of course have no goal greater than an increased bottom line."
Indeed, Gates donates billions to private companies, and is invested in the very products and businesses he donates money to and otherwise promotes as solutions to the world's problems, be they hunger, disease, pandemic viruses or climate change.
As suggested by The GrayZone, Gates' global health empire is more about building an empire for himself and his technocrat cronies than promoting public health.
In a recent report, independent journalist Johnny Vedmore delved into the professional history and personal background Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum, who wrote the books "The Fourth Industrial Revolution" (2016), "Shaping the Fourth Industrial Revolution" (2018) and "COVID-19: The Great Reset," thereby cementing his role as a leading figurehead for the modern technocracy movement. Vedmore writes:
"As the driving force behind the World Economic Forum … Schwab has courted heads of state, leading business executives, and the elite of academic and scientific circles into the Davos fold for over 50 years.
More recently, he has also courted the ire of many due to his more recent role as the frontman of the Great Reset, a sweeping effort to remake civilization globally for the express benefit of the elite of the World Economic Forum and their allies …
Like many prominent frontmen for elite-sponsored agendas, the online record of Schwab has been well-sanitized, making it difficult to come across information on his early history as well as information on his family.
Yet, having been born in Ravensburg, Germany in 1938, many have speculated in recent months that Schwab's family may have had some tie to Axis war efforts, ties that, if exposed, could threaten the reputation of the World Economic Forum and bring unwanted scrutiny to its professed missions and motives …
Digging even deeper into his activities, it becomes clear that Schwab's real role has long been to 'shape global, regional and industry agendas' of the present in order to ensure the continuity of larger, much older agendas that came into disrepute after World War II, not just nuclear technology, but also eugenics-influenced population control policies …
Is Klaus Schwab trying to create the Fourth Industrial Revolution, or is he trying to create the Fourth Reich?"
(Note: Seems to me that he is all about building back better nazis)…
What We Lose Is Exponentially Harder to Get Back
Safeguarding our Constitutional rights and civil liberties against unlawful government overreach is essential. Yet many are willingly giving up freedoms that, once gone, may be difficult, if not impossible, to get back. Vaccine passports are just one example.
By showing proof through a digital certificate or app on your phone that you've received a COVID-19 vaccine, the hope is that you can once again board an airplane and travel freely, attend a concert or enjoy a meal in your favorite restaurant, just like you used to.
Except, being required to present your "papers" in order to live your life isn't actually freedom at all — it's a loss of personal liberty that you once had, one that disappeared right before your eyes and one that's setting the stage for even more intrusive surveillance and privacy erosion.
While government has a duty to protect the health and welfare of its citizens, this duty must be balanced against the loss of individual rights and liberties. Right now we're facing a battle of freedom versus tyranny. Long term lockdowns are clearly not in the public's best interest. Rather, it's tantamount to abuse.
Dangerous speech versus free speech; mobs of ignoramuses
via Jon Rappoport
“For if Men are to be precluded from offering their Sentiments on a matter, which may involve the most serious and alarming consequences, that can invite the consideration of Mankind, reason is of no use to us; the freedom of Speech may be taken away, and, dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.” George Washington, 1783
Many, many people believe that spreading COVID falsehoods can be so dangerous that censorship is absolutely necessary.
This view happens to be the central refuge of liars.
It turns out that big-time liars always want to censor their opponents. It’s the only leg they have to stand on. In an atmosphere of free discourse, they would fall.
And of course, who decides what is false and what is true? Who hangs out that shingle and makes judgments that affect the lives of millions of people?
There is an astounding level of ignorance here: many people believe “the truth” should carry the day. Once it is established, there is no need to permit freedom of speech.
These people have a very low ceiling of understanding. They’ve never explored what freedom of speech is all about. They’re citizens in name only.
“If someone says the vaccine is harmful, people will be dissuaded from taking it. That would be dangerous.”
…A writer penned, “Always cross the street when you’re facing a red light. Stay on the curb when the light is green.”
Outrage followed. The writer was censored for dangerous speech.
The rulers and their followers were so impressed with this victory, they established a national task force to root out falsehoods of all kinds and censor them. Pursuing this path, the society turned into a police state. And the majority of people approved.
We’re heading in that direction now.
“Strange it is that men should admit the validity of the arguments for free speech but object to their being ‘pushed to an extreme,’ not seeing that unless the reasons are good for an extreme case, they are not good for any case.” John Stuart Mill, 1859
It’s no surprise that modern civilization, intellectually based on a fool’s version of “science,” has built science as a new religion, with all the restrictions that organized religions have enforced.
After all, when the teachings of a man called Jesus were incorporated into a powerful Church, that Church set about censoring, imprisoning, torturing, and burning dissidents. As if Jesus would have approved.
Centuries later, people were shocked to learn this Church was rife with pedophile priests. I would be shocked to learn the Church isn’t filled with pedophiles.
Many are the OTHER secret crimes the men in power today are committing, given that they’re already relentlessly pushing a highly destructive vaccine into the arms of a billion people.
They HAVE TO demand censorship of dissidents.
So no, I’m not surprised that the press and social media and politicians are trying to censor COVID information which doesn’t serve their purposes.
Consider this. A week ago, at a standard FDA conference to discuss recommending COVID boosters, several scientists testified that convincing data to support the additional shots were entirely lacking. Two leading in-house FDA scientists had just resigned because they opposed the push for boosters. And finally, the FDA committee as a whole rejected the present need for boosters.
Yet the following day, the head of the NIH, and the White House itself, ignored the FDA and said that boosters were coming. Even the FDA was effectively censored.
There are thousands of scientists all over the world who strenuously oppose the official COVID narrative, and they can’t even get a glance from editors of medical journals, when they submit papers.
Talking news heads are feeding the population fast-food COVID science—a manufactured product consisting of synthetic bullshit about cases, deaths, the virus, the vaccine. It’s cardboard. And no dissenters allowed.
Since I stopped writing for mainstream and so-called alternative outlets in the early 1990s, I’ve gone my own way. As of this writing, I’m still here. My videos have been taken down. My site was hacked. We restored it. I’m still here.
I take freedom of speech seriously. No matter what.
Right now, as I write this, Australian men with balls, union construction workers, are staging an insurrection against their union bosses, who are colluding with corrupt politicians to enforce COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates. The workers are facing off against cops in the street. This is one of the biggest stories in the world.
The New York Times and the Washington Post and the news networks should be leading with it and covering breaking developments wall to wall. Instead, they’re downplaying and hiding it. These news whores and their pimps are holding the line for Fascism.
…“He who stifles free discussion, secretly doubts whether what he professes to believe is really true.” Wendell Phillips, 1870
Those fools who can only “opt for the truth” will never grasp the meaning of the 1st Amendment. They’ll never see the freight train of Fascism coming.