US oligarchs: Russia hacked our election.

Public: Uh oh! What should we do about it?

US oligarchs: Greatly inflate the military budget, sanction US rivals, and censor dissenting opinions.

Public: Umm... aren't those things you've always wanted to do anyway?

US oligarchs: Hush.

I know objecting to internet censorship makes me a right-wing Nazi-kissing literal Hitler in the eyes of many in this bizarre funhouse mirror world of online political discourse, but I insist that censorship by powerful corporations is one of the greatest obstacles we face in our fight to survive and thrive as a species in a world that is increasingly imperiled and dominated.

It has become painfully obvious that political solutions to the problems we face are locked shut to us. Democracy does not exist in America in any meaningful way, and those of us who live outside of America are all subject to the whims of the power establishment which has loosely centralized itself there. Here in Australia we have paper ballots, exit polls and ranked-choice voting, which is a wet dream for many American election reform advocates, but it’s completely meaningless for us in a lot of ways because we’re functionally a US military/intelligence asset. All matters of interest to the US-centralized power establishment are completely uninfluenced by Australian voters; we only get to pretend to be a real country insofar as that doesn't interfere with the interests of the empire.

The idea that we can vote our problems away is only useful insofar as it gets the populace trying the doors and learning for themselves that those doors are locked. The rigged US Democratic primary was a perfect example of that; if millions of people hadn't tried to elect an unauthorized candidate, they never would have discovered that the machine was manipulating the field in a plethora of different ways to prevent them from accomplishing their goal. But beyond that the door of actual political democracy is bolted shut.

This is not yet the case with democratized information sharing. The operational word being yet.

I highlighted this way back in May when I wrote an article titled "How To Fight The Establishment Propaganda Machine And Win", which was promoted by Julian Assange and received a fair bit of attention. I'd noticed what a crucial role the mass media plays in manipulating the way ordinary people think and vote, and how the oligarchs would be unable to rule if public trust in their propaganda machine was shattered, so I pointed out the fact that our species has a radically unprecedented ability to share ideas and information and described some ways we can use that new ability to disrupt the machine.

But the machine had noticed this hole in its armor as well, and planned accordingly. Since I published that article the democratization of information has been greatly hindered by censorship from powerful Silicon Valley plutocrats, with Google algorithm changes slashing the viewership of leftist and anti-establishment websites like CounterPunch, World Socialist Website, Alternet and WikiLeaks, while Facebook and Twitter along with Google's YouTube grow increasingly brazen with the kinds of political speech they are willing to silence. Facebook has caused a drastic drop in the visibility of unauthorized articles, and I myself have been temporarily suspended for political speech by both Facebook and Twitter.

Just the other day I was supposed to have a live streamed interview on Youtube with progressive commentator Jamarl Thomas, but minutes prior he had his live streaming privileges revoked for reporting on a standard mainstream story about Russiagate. Thomas is someone I'd consider a relatively mellow voice on the progressive circuit, providing thoughtful commentary on the political landscape without extending nearly as far into the realm of conspiracy theory as many of us do, and they censored him of all people, for a story about something that happened on freaking MSNBC. He talks about his experience here in the first part of our conversation.