The Moving Arc of Internet Censorship

Jon Rappoport
JON RAPPOPORT’S BLOG
March 14, 2013

On the home front, I’m happy to announce that my site, www.nomorefakenews.com, is back up and running after a few days of technical problems. These glitches, as it turned out, stemmed from a hosting error that was finally fixed.

You can sign up for my free emails on the home page, and you can once again order products from my store.

As many of you know, the Facebook situation is still not resolved, and this is a clear act of censorship. People who try to share my articles and include the phrase “jonrappoport.wordpress.com” are informed they can’t do it.

It seems this Facebook action was triggered by people who were put off by one or more of my articles and filed “abusive content” reports. For these people, free speech ranks a distant second to their own feelings. That’s where their courage stops.

The Facebook censorship began shortly after I posted an article headlined: “The hideous BAM in Obama…” It was about the president’s launch of a 10-year billion-dollar brain-mapping project, called B.A.M.

I excoriated Obama for forwarding the clear goal of using research to do what psychiatry does best: control brains.

Facebook states that their censorship, when triggered by abusive content reports, is only temporary. However, it is now almost a month since they laid on the block.

In their literature, they make it very easy to file these reports, but instructions on how to appeal them and have blocks removed are hard to find.

At any rate, when you share my articles, you can link people to nomorefakenews.com and there they will find all recent headlines. Clicking on them, they’ll go right to my full articles.

Moving on, I have just read an alert from Alliance for Natural Health, which mentions a piece of Facebook insanity that can be laid at the door of the FDA.

The FDA has issued a warning letter to a supplement company, AMARC, because the company (or someone else) posted a Like on a testimonial.

The testimonial, written by a customer, described that he was using a company product “to keep cancer at bay.” And putting a Like on this comment is now considered an implied endorsement of a supplement as an unapproved drug.

This is so crazy it’s hard to follow. To sum up:

supplement company’s Facebook page carries a comment by a reader;

the comment basically says, “great product, I’m using it to keep cancer at bay”;

someone from the company (apparently) puts a Like next to this comment;

the FDA informs the company this Like is really a health claim for the supplement;

not only that, since the “claim” implies the supplement can help prevent a disease, the supplement is being advertised as a drug;

and no one can do that without prior FDA approval of the “drug.”

As I’ve written many times, the FDA routinely approves drugs that kill, like clockwork, 106,000 Americans every year—by a conservative estimate. That’s over a million killings a decade. (See, Barabara Starfield, JAMA, July 26, 2000, “Is US health really the best in the world?”)

But a thumbs-up Like on Facebook, for a supplement, triggers an FDA warning to remove the Facebook comment and the Like.

This involves, of course, a much wider problem (crime). As a reporter, over the last 20 years I’ve interviewed many people who have achieved astounding results by using various supplement protocols. These results were, in fact, no matter how you wanted to look at them, CURES. They were cures of conditions the FDA considers diseases.

Therefore, the cures are illegally obtained. It doesn’t matter that people are living new lives.

To be more precise, if people go public with their recovery, and in the process they name a supplement company and a product, or a practitioner who supplied them with the product, they could get that company or practitioner into hot water with the federal government.

Therefore, the public is robbed of the opportunity to understand just how effective natural health can be. These thousands of astounding and true stories are in the closet. Or they’re aired in very brief fashion, often anonymously. They could flood the public consciousness, but they don’t.

Instead, we’re fed countless lies in ads, in medical reports, in studies, in media stories about how drugs are doing wonderful things for everybody everywhere. And these lies are countenanced. They’re approved lies.

I have a suggestion. It would have to be implemented carefully and well. A website should be devoted entirely to natural health stories. With proper disclaimers, it might work in freedom. People explain in detail how they regained their health through natural means.

Products could be mentioned, but no company names, and no practitioner names. No ads on the site. Some legal advice would be needed up front, on such a project.

Of course, a discerning moderator would have to be at work here, to discount mere testimonials cooked up by unscrupulous people to sell products.

But when the legitimate stories of a few thousand people are posted on the site, recognition would spread.

I can’t emphasize too strongly that people’s futures and lives are at stake. It’s quite incredible to sit and talk to someone who was on the brink and then found his life again through natural means. It’s quite incredible to get the full story, not just a blurb. You’re looking at vitality, the electric and emotional essence of it. It’s right there, in front of your eyes. Restored. Instead of terrible suffering.

To censor that complete story is a crime against humanity. It’s death sold over life. It’s a a bureaucracy of death at work. And there it sits, in the center of the federal government.

This is truly Orwell’s 1984, and we have to use all possible means to beat it back.

I began working as a reporter because a health activist named Ida Honoroff, all blazing fight feet of her, all 60 years of her, walked up to me one day at a health expo with her arms full of reports about a horrendous pesticide called 2,4-D.

She didn’t know me. We’d never net. She just said, “You have to tell people that next weekend, which is a big summer camping weekend, they’re going to be spraying this in the Angeles National Forest.”

I was paralyzed. She had me in her spell.

After a few seconds, I came out of it and said, “Okay, I will.”

And I did. I managed to get some idiot talk-show host in LA to put it on the air. He called the warning a hoax, but at least it got out there. I did a few other things, too. Subversive things.

I felt alive and I never looked back. I began to realize I could find out who the bastards were. Instead of harboring a generalized sense of outrage against the “bad guys,” I could make them emerge out of the fog. And not just in relation to 2,4-D.

When I was working for various newspapers and magazines, as a freelancer, I was always on the edge of being censored. Editors would say, “Haven’t you got another story idea?” They didn’t want the main course, they wanted the dessert.

That all stopped when I finally saw what the Internet was all about. I was a guy with a portable typewriter, so it took me awhile to get it. But when I did, I went off the reservation completely.

When censorship raises its ugly head here, online, I’m not happy. I’m motivated.

These days, I’m seeing more people who approach the federal government as if it were a holy church. This is their religion. They see the giant scummy octopus as a god. These people are horrendous little creatures who belong in a fantasy novel full of trolls and goblins and gargoyles. They exude putrid scents and energies wherever they go.

They love censorship. They are cousins to the distant folk who used to gather around at the Roman Church burnings and watch the show.

They’re fundamentalist government fanatics. If they had a Bible, it would be the millions of pages of regulations propagated by federal agencies.

The idea of more censorship and surveillance and inspection floats their secret boat of entitlement. They thrive in oxygen-free environments.

They find a way to exist in barnacle-like fashion attached to the State.

And yet, astonishingly, their self-image is that of a sword-waving revolutionary on the cutting edge of justice.

They make up multiple names for themselves and visit comments sections, where they spill little bits of bilge for their beloved leaders, their crime bosses. This they think of as activism.

If there were a Hell, they wouldn’t need it; they’re already in it.

So they cook up stories about themselves, to stave off the whirlwind that comes on the heels of knowing their souls are dead.

In a sense, they are the cutting edge, because this civilization is heading in the direction of more soulless machine death.

But that’s not where you and I are going. On our roads, we’re picking them off ourselves, now and then, like insects.