by William Skink

Anyone who celebrated the news that Alex Jones was de-platformed by tech giants is a short-sighted fool cheering on a tech-censoring spree that will have serious chilling effects on free speech.

There are still a few independent-minded people capable of understanding the potential implications, and James Conner at Flathead Memo is one of those people. Conner says it best when he writes:

Suppression is a confession that the suppressed speech is more powerful than the rebuttal to it.

Martyring Alex Jones will not expunge his paranoid world view, it will do the opposite. Supporters of Info Wars will see this as confirmation of the potency of Jones’ truth telling. Nothing positive was achieved by this move.

When it comes to targets for suppression of speech Alex Jones is just an appetizer. The main course is Julian Assange. At Consortium News John Pilger excoriates media on Assange silence:

Nothing in my time as a journalist has equaled the rise of WikiLeaks and its extraordinary impact on journalism. It is probably the only journalistic organization that has a 100% record of accuracy and authenticity! All of WikiLeaks’ revelations have been authentic. And it has been done “without fear or favor.” Although there has been a concentration on, say, the release of the Hillary Clinton/Podesta emails, or the Iraq and Afghan war logs, WikiLeaks has released information that people have a right to know across the spectrum. It has released something like 800,000 documents from Russia, and now WikiLeaks is accused of being an agent of Russia!

All the reporters and journalists freaking out over every Trump taunt deserve to be referred to as enemies of the American people if they continue to remain silent on Assange. Will they defend the 1st Amendment or will they continue to be stenographers for government power? Especially despicable are the media giants that accepted Pulitzers for stories enabled by Wikileaks, but ignore his increasingly dire plight as Ecuador gets ready to throw Assange to the wolves.

Here is more from Pilger:

I was looking this morning at a report by Media Lens in Britain describing how the British press has reported on Julian Assange. It describes the tsunami of vindictive personal abuse that has been heaped upon Julian from well-known journalists, many claiming liberal credentials. The Guardian, which used to consider itself the most enlightened newspaper in the country, has probably been the worst. The frontal attacks have been coming not from governments but from journalists. I described this recently as “Vichy journalism,” a term which now fits so much of the mainstream media. It collaborates in the same way that the Vichy government in France collaborated with the Nazis.

There used to be spaces within the so-called mainstream for unbiased discussion, for the airing of real grievances and injustices. These spaces have closed completely. The attacks on Julian Assange illustrate what has happened to the so-called free media in the West. I have been a journalist for a very long time and I have always worked within the mainstream, but the journalism I see now is part of a rapacious establishment and one of its prime targets is Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. This is precisely because WikiLeaks is producing the kind of journalism that they ought to be doing. WikiLeaks has in fact shamed journalists, which might help to explain the deeply personal abuse he has suffered. WikiLeaks has revealed what journalists should have revealed a long time ago.

Amen, John.