Information: A War Worth Fighting
I do try to joke from time to time but the DHS leaks from the Intercept earlier this week are alarming. More on what was written and why I do this.
Late Tuesday night I dropped some general thoughts from the last few days or so in Amnesty, mIsiNfoRmATiOn, and Hurray COLA! My intention was for there to be some humor injected into that post but in hindsight I think much of what is happening requires more dissection. I do want to circle back on some things. The White House/COLA stuff? That’s a farce and doesn’t require much more time - we’ll give it some anyway. The amnesty stuff? Largely ditto and it’s been well covered by other writers. Simply put, I reject the self-serving offer of amnesty from the influencers who should probably be offering some humility instead. Despite the cavalier tone of my post earlier this week, I do see problems coming.
For me, the most concerning thing I mentioned Tuesday night was in the middle of the post. The leaked DHS intel from The Intercept on Monday is deeply troubling and it has inspired me to reemphasize a big reason why I do this blog. In my opinion, the financial system is not designed to benefit normal people in the long run; pure and simple. If it was you’d be getting a yield on your savings with a Fed Funds Rate at 4%. But you won’t be. Rather, you’re supposed to acquire assets with the hope that your paper gains will keep up with the intentional debasement of the currency so you can sell to a greater fool when it’s time to retire. This model doesn’t end well and I do hope that I can help more people navigate the danger from that. There may come a time when that message is no longer allowed if we don’t push back on things that are happening now. From The Intercept:
How disinformation is defined by the government has not been clearly articulated, and the inherently subjective nature of what constitutes disinformation provides a broad opening for DHS officials to make politically motivated determinations about what constitutes dangerous speech.
The lack of clearly defined terms is a feature not a bug. These kinds of policies are intentionally written arbitrarily so that whichever team has the ball at any given time can put the words into action however the team captains want. I am not a blue teamer or red teamer. I don’t care which jersey you choose to wear. Wherever you feel like you’re part of the wolf pack is fine with me. It may seem like I lean right, but that’s largely because the left has made mocking it so friggin’ easy over the last several years. For the majority of my adult life, I’ve been largely apathetic to both flavor offerings from the duopoly party.
In June, the same DHS advisory committee of CISA — which includes Twitter head of legal policy, trust, and safety Vijaya Gadde and University of Washington professor Kate Starbird — drafted a report to the CISA director calling for an expansive role for the agency in shaping the “information ecosystem.” The report called on the agency to closely monitor “social media platforms of all sizes, mainstream media, cable news, hyper partisan media, talk radio and other online resources.”
I don’t particularly care for the New York Times, Fox News, The Atlantic, CNN, or MSNBC - but each of these companies should be allowed to create the crappiest content that their hearts desire. Let the viewers/readers judge for themselves which media businesses should receive their attention. Personally, I don’t think any of them are good and they should be punished for it; but not by the state.
My core values are exactly the same as they were in 2016 when I voted for Captain Aleppo; I want the government out of as many of our personal decisions as possible. I want to keep as much of my wealth as possible. I want the US to stop dropping bombs on people in other countries. I believe money should hold its value and there shouldn’t be any one person or group setting the price of capital. That last line is where I may get myself into trouble if the DHS has its way.
The broad definition of “threat actors” posing risks to vaguely defined critical infrastructure — an area as broad as trust in government, public health, elections, and financial markets — has concerned civil libertarians.
And there it is. Trust in financial markets. If you pose a risk to trust in financial market infrastructure, you just might be a “threat actor.” If, for instance, a proponent of Gold or Bitcoin rightly points out that the entire financial system can be used as a weapon against mainstream narrative heretics, that person is theoretically a threat actor based on the arbitrary interpretation of what that verbiage says. While I talk about government and public health more sporadically, at its core Heretic Speculator is a financial blog. I’m not going to stop calling out the central bank. Period.
I was very much aware things might go this way when I purged most of my big tech accounts. This is what I wrote in January 2021 when I made the decision to delete almost everything when notable Fed antagonist Ron Paul had his Facebook page suspended without cause:
I actually like Ron Paul. I've been a fan for a long time. He is the most non-aggressive, mild-mannered former politician I can imagine. I've never seen anything from him that would justify suspension. He does, however, frequently speak out against the Fed and central banking.
Thanks to this report from The Intercept, now we know the Fed antagonists are on the list. Maybe not at the top. But just being on it at all is a strong enough indication that speaking out against financial weaponization could result in ‘the treatment.’ How hard is it to find an example of such in 2022? Well, all one needs to do in early November is go all the way back to October to find critics of PayPal’s $2,500 social credit penalty getting fact checked by Reuters because PayPal claimed it wAs a miSTaKE after the fact. Yeah… sure it was.
I have suspected that the COVID skeptic “mIsInFOrMAtiOn” would simply be the vector for Thinkpol in Oceania. Once created, there was little doubt in my mind the unit would come for the anti-central banking crowd. If you want to put me in any wolf pack, that is one that I can accept. And these DHS documents seem to show that labeling people as threats for calling out the fiat Ponzi could certainly be on the radar of the powers that be.
Take your jersey off for a moment if you’re still wearing one and ask yourself this simple question: no matter who is in charge, do I actually believe the state should be the sole arbiter of truth? Please recall the tweet from the White House about COLA adjustments from Tuesday night. The current administration wanted to take credit for a Social Security payment adjustment that has been automatic for decades…
The tweet is gone now. Probably because Twitter slapped it with a context disclosure. While the context label from Twitter opens up other potential issues, the Biden White House isn’t the only one guilty of these kinds of loose associations with reality. I was critical of the Trump White House as well for saying things that weren’t true. Here are some of my thoughts on the constant China trade deal teases that I published back in April 2020. Those teases were used to gin up stock market gains that were goosed by multiple expansion more than fundamental economic strength and it was obvious in real time.
The point is, it doesn’t matter who is in charge. The state simply cannot be trusted with the power of being the final word on what is truth and what isn’t truth. So I reject these ideas and I’m not stopping my criticism of the central banks or the politicians. We must be allowed to debate. We must teach how to think not what to think. It’s that simple.
At the end of the day, I remain incredibly optimistic for the future. I think things are probably going to get very uncomfortable economically for a lot of people first. But I do think the other side of what will possibly be a painful recession will be a very prosperous return to fiscal sanity at the household level. We’re going to have to sacrifice some conveniences. We’re going to have to learn how to prepare our own meals, fix things when they’re broken, and live within our means. But the only way we can come out of the next downturn with knowledge that has legitimate value is if we maintain access to a variety of information sources. We must able to transact ideas without the threat of being turned off for “wrongthink.”
Information, and the freedom of access to information, that is provided by everything from the internet to public libraries must be maintained. This is the war worth fighting. It’s because it’s everything. It’s speech. It’s money. It’s the ability to transact with each other. We cannot let a central authority decide what we are allowed to know and share with each other.