



The campaign launched on the pretext of Russia's intervention in last November's presidential election is now targeting the heart of the free flow of information and ideas on the Internet. Democrats are the protagonists, having to solve their own internal issues, while Trump follows with enthusiasm, although theoretically he is being targeted too.





American senators, giants of social media, as well as agencies like the FBI have been participating in recent weeks in the biggest witch-hunt since the McCarthy era, under the guise of the alleged Russian government's intervention in the US presidential election.





The recent hearing held in Congress on the issue is a qualitative leap to obscurantism, as the target is not only the Russian hackers supposedly supporting the Trump election, but every journalist and media that promotes "extremist content." This term describes reports and messages circulated on the Internet that could cause "social division", such as, reports of murders of African-Americans by the police and analysis on social inequalities within the United States.





Republican senator Chuck Grassley had come to claim that Russia was behind the protests against police brutality in Ferguson, Baltimore and Cleveland. That is, the problem is not that the police in the US shot and killed at least 1,000 people last year - the overwhelming majority of them coming from marginalized and poor Black and Latino communities - but that some have mentioned this fact!





Summing up the spirit of the process in Congress, Democratic senator Adam Schiff said that Russia is promoting 'divisional issues that trigger reactions and anger' in the United States and in this way 'leads American citizens to proceed with acts such as collecting signatures and participating in demonstrations'.





It is worth noting that the driving force behind the new McCarthyism is not the Trump administration (which, of course, enthusiastically follows), but the opposition of the "liberal" Democrats. At the forefront we find the flagships of American liberalism, such as the New York Times, as well as the largest companies of the Internet. Recently, Twitter has also announced that it will no longer accept Russian media Ads, such as Russia Today, while Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg clarified that he places his company at the disposal of the US prosecution authorities to locate Russian "interventions ". For its part, Google has already been accused that under the pretext of eradicating so-called "fake news" has promoted changes to the search algorithm, which exclude left-wing media and journalists.





The campaign launched on the pretext of Russia is now targeting the heart of the free flow of information and ideas on the internet. Democratic senators have come to say that large social media tools should intervene in their algorithm so that issues "that can cause anger" would not appear at the top of the search list. Behind the hysterical reactions of the American political establishment lies the fear for articles and comments of social criticism that become viral on the internet, that is, they are being transmitted at lightning speed to social media.





Being used to control completely the flow of information through the dominant media for almost a century, the US economic and political elites are now attempting to impose the same domination on the Internet. Of course, they find supporters on the US companies that exercise monopoly control over both social media (Twitter, Facebook) and content search (Google). The three companies have already announced that they are hiring thousands of employees to monitor the flow of messages and intervene whenever necessary. In fact, Amazon gave us, a few weeks ago, a foretaste of these interventions, when its employees erased all the critical comments on its pages about Hillary Clinton's new book.





Although the silence of freedom of speech is coordinated at the highest level of the US state and private companies, the Democratic Party seems to have its own reasons for leading the witch-hunt. As revealed this week by the former interim chairperson of the party, Donna Brazile, Clinton proceeded in an internal "coup" to exclude Bernie Sanders from the race for the Democratic nomination. In a secret agreement with the National Committee of the party, she undertook absolute control over the campaign's finances almost 15 months before being formally nominated a candidate for the presidency. Relevant information had come to light when hackers released parts of the internal e-mail of her office. The Democratic Party, however, disregarded the allegations in order to give the nomination to Clinton and ... be defeated by Donald Trump.





The Trump-Clinton confrontation can be found at the core of the new McCarthyism, as the two politicians represent different approaches for controlling social reactions. Trump managed to exploit the class rage of society by distorting its content to climb to power. On the contrary, Hillary Clinton believed she could hide this rage under the carpet, promoting identity politics and "rightful" speech. The new line of the American establishment seems to be closer to Clinton's policy as it attempts to remove from the public sphere any information about the real condition of the popular strata in the United States.





As we have seen recently, concerning criticism about sexual deviations of Hollywood stars and producers (a topic that is particularly serious indeed for the spectacle industry, but innocuous for the US dominant class), the information can be freely circulated on the Internet. However, when criticism gets political and, above all, class characteristics, it will be cruelly prosecuted.





Article by Aris Chatzistefanou under the title 'McCarthy returns to America', translated from the original source:



