Boomers and our children are the only generations in recent history to have had the privilege of living in an era of mostly unrestricted free speech. Prior to the internet and the email communications and the social media platforms it spawned, free speech and free press had, what Hillary Clinton longingly called, gatekeepers. The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, the Associated Press and toward the end of that period FOX. They controlled the dissemination of "news". In order to get news unfiltered by the gatekeepers, one had to subscribe to small circulation magazines, financial newsletters and such. When internet communications arrived on the scene in the 1990s, freedom of speech began to flourish, gradually at first and then with gusto. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter were largely uncensored and unfiltered. Anyone with a camera on their computer or phone could become a self-styled expert on something or other on YouTube. Everyone had equal access. The internet did not care what one said or thought. They were happy to sell advertising clicks on anything and everything. At the same time mostly conservative talk radio came into its own.
In retrospect, it's clear that this unprecedented free speech brought about the end of the screening of political candidates by the state, deep state intelligence agencies, middle state bureaucracies and the various shallow state government/private sector partnerships exemplified by the military/industrial/education//health care etc complexes. As H. L. Mencken said, "In a democracy, the people get what they want, good and hard." In 2016, we got Donald J. Trump. The last deep state-approved Presidential candidate was Barack Obama.
Ever since, the deep, middle and shallow state have been laboring industriously to make sure THAT never happens again. The social media companies have all (except X under Elon Musk) been strong-armed into amplifying only state approved narratives. The strong-arm technique is extortion, pure and simple. As in "That sure is a profitable social media site you have there. You sure wouldn't want to lose it, would you." The implicit threats include crippling regulations up to and including getting rid of Section 230 which shields social media companies from liability stemming from inflammatory and libelous claims their users might post.
The final two nails in the coffin are the Supreme Court's dismissal of Murthy v. Missouri because of lack of standing and the appointment of retired U.S. Army General, Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service, Paul Nakasone to the Board of OpenAI as well as to its Safety and Security Committee.
The Supreme Court decision means the Weekend With Biden administration or its successor can continue its blatant censorship of social media to make sure no one can be seen or heard stepping over the official government narrative. Right now that means the Democratic Party narrative since they control the Executive branch of government. Sure, a party with standing can come back later and give the Supreme Court an opportunity to rule that this kind of media censorship is unconstitutional. But it won't happen before this year's election.
OpenAI is the company behind ChatGPT. For the uninitiated, ChatGPT is the public facing tool of artificial intelligence. In highly simplified terms, when given a prompt or a question, ChatGPT will scour all the publicly available information stored in the cloud to come up with a response to a prompt or an answer to a question. It's called artificial intelligence but it's really just a summary of groupthink. You may have noticed that internet searches now come up with those groupthink summaries rather than links to original sources. An unrepentant deep state cretin is now a gatekeeper on whatever gets onto the cloud, or at least what ChatGPT can draw from the cloud. You can bet that there will not be a trace of anything that contradicts the Deep State narrative. So, get ready to say goodby to anything approaching objectivity when you do an internet search.
We're back to the era of Walter Cronkite when it comes to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. And that's the way it is. I'm Richard Fields and that's this week's Report From the Fields.