Heaven’s net is indeed vast. But although its meshes are wide, it misses nothing. Lao Tzu. Chinese Sage. 604-531 BC.
The dead weight of the state is everywhere in the lives of Australia’s citizens, no more so than in the media realm.
How often do you hear people say, I don’t listen to the news anymore?
That’s because it’s boring, uninformative and reeks of government propaganda.
Australia has long been a petri dish for American intelligence agencies, as Covid clearly demonstrated. The Pentagon was all over the so-called Covid pandemic, and you can bet all over Australia’s deranged, massively destructive, response. Just how far can we push them? Just how tightly can we control the information ecosystem?
With her deeply entwined connections with Washington, including a stint as technology adviser in the US Congress, Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, one Julie Inman Grant, is a living breathing embodiment of the so-called Deep State, now frequently referred to as The Blob, a mesh of government and private agencies aimed at controlling the public square.
Ms Grant is also closely connected to Bill Gates through her 17 years at Microsoft, including as Government Affairs Manager, and worked at Twitter, from 2014-2016, a time when the platform was little more than a public messaging board for the CIA, the FBI and Homeland Security. She is also a participant in the World Economic Forum, where she is described as an “agenda shifter”.
It is one of the darkest developments in Australian history that both sides of Australian politics, the “Lib-Lab Uni Party”, are fully on board with having a WEF aligned eSafety Commissioner acting in essence as the nation’s Chief Censor.
Ms Grant was appointed eSafety Commissioner by former Goldman Sachs director and then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2016, heading the world’s first regulatory body committed to “keeping its citizens safe online”.
There’s a reason why Australia is the only country in the world to adopt an “eSafety” Commissioner: because it’s a very bad idea.
Last October Ms Grant issued a $610,000 fine against X, her former employee then known as Twitter, and is now facing accusations of having a personal vendetta against the company. Owner Elon Musk reportedly doesn’t give “a flying rip” about the fine. The case is now in the Federal Court and fines could be increased to more than $700,000 a day if Ms Grant has her way.
Fresh back from an international jaunt which included the annual World Economic Forum get together in Davos, Switzerland, in March Australia’s eSafety Commissioner issued legal notices to Google, Meta, Twitter/X, WhatsApp, Telegram and Reddit requiring each company to report on steps they are taking to protect Australians from terrorist and violent extremist material.
The notices were issued under transparency powers granted under the Online Safety Act and require the six companies to answer a series of detailed questions.
“The tech companies that provide these services have a responsibility to ensure that these features and their services cannot be exploited to perpetrate such harm and that’s why we are sending these notices to get a look under the hood at what they are and are not doing.
“It’s no coincidence we have chosen these companies to send notices to as there is evidence that their services are exploited by terrorists and violent extremists. Transparency and accountability are essential for ensuring the online industry is meeting the community’s expectations by protecting their users from these harms.”
The tech giants have until early May to respond.
The legal threats are just one part of the armoury Ms Grant is using in an attempt to gain complete government control over the online experiences of Australians.
Under her regime industry codes have been developed which require the tech companies to scan emails, online photo libraries, cloud storage accounts, and dating sites of Aussies for “illegal content”, or face fines of nearly $700,000 per day.
Apple has warned the moves underline basic privacy and could lead to mass surveillance.
Five codes developed in conjunction with industry – covering social media services, Internet carriage services, app distribution services, hosting services, and equipment codes – have been accepted by the eSafety Commission and will take effect soon.
But despite considerable revision two problematic codes, Designated Internet Service and Relevant Electronic Services codes, “still don’t meet our minimum expectations”, according to the Commissioner.
Now that tech companies have failed to meet the requirements of the Act, Inman Grant will exercise her powers under section D145(1)(a)(ii) of the Act – which empowers her to “determine a standard” if a draft code “does not contain appropriate community safeguards”.
Given the technical nature of all this, it is no wonder the Australian public are unaware one of the world’s most extreme censorship regimes is in the process of being inflicted upon them.
TOTT News, the only media outlet to closely track Australia’s descent into digital totalitarianism, argues: “It has been a methodical, incremental move to this point. Julie looks to seal the gates on a mass surveillance agenda that has grown extensively since 9/11, and was accelerated by the Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. All for our ‘safety and security’, of course. How much longer will a free internet survive in Australia?”
This all comes as Microsoft, which Bill Gates remains closely associated with, has made the eyebrow raising announcement that it will invest $5 billion in conjunction with intelligence agency the Australian Signals Directorate to “boost national cyber security”.
The eSafety Commissioner is acting as if the government hadn’t been forced to withdraw her Misinformation and Disinformation Bll last year after a massive public and media backlash. The industry codes are seen as a backdoor way of achieving the same result, total control of the internet.
If you’re seeking help in understanding all this creeping totalitarianism in a once freedom loving country, don’t look to Australia’s major political parties.
Both sides of politics are onboard with Ms Grant’s reign of censorship.
Thanks to the two party preferred system with which Australia has been cursed, an utterly corrupted Liberal Labor nexus means there is little genuine representation of the people’s interests.
It has been left to rare and much derided political outliers, and the flood of citizen journalists moving to free speech platforms including Telegram, Twitter and Rumble, to tell the truth. The last thing the political elites want is an independent media they can’t control.
The Albanese Government announced last year that it would be quadrupling the funding of the eSafety Commission in the 2023-2024 budget.
“Record investment to improve the safety of Australians online” was the headline for Communications Minister Michelle Rowland’s press release: “Our world-leading online safety regulator will receive an additional $132.1 million over four years, providing eSafety funding certainty so they can support a safer experience online for Australians – including for vulnerable people and children.”
Australia’s political opposition, such as it is, has also been fully onboard.
Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman called on tech giants to take action to stop “evil material”, including extremist and child abuse material, from being shared.
“I welcome the action taken by the eSafety Commissioner on terrorist and violent extremist material and activity,” Mr Coleman said. “This kind of content is completely abhorrent.”
In reality the eSafety Commissioner’s efforts to censor everything online has nothing to do with controlling terror content or child porn. There is unlikely to be any more so-called violent extremism online now than in previous years, nor is there likely to be any more child exploitation material than usual, the twin bogies justifying mass censorship of Australians.
If any Australian wants to keep track of online terror threats around the globe all they have to do is go to MEMRI, the Middle Eastern Media Research Institute, which frequently runs graphic footage and images of attacks, including beheadings, for subscribers.
This jihadi realm has almost nothing to do with Western favourites including Google, Facebook, Twitter or any of Ms Grant’s other targets.
The Institute has charitable status under American law.
Raw ISIS provided footage of the Crocus Concert Hall terror attack in Moscow, which left 137 dead and 154 wounded, is readily available to subscribers. That’s how easy it is to access terror online.
Nor do the eSafety Commissioner’s actions have anything to do with eliminating child pornography, which is nothing but a cover story to conceal her real motives. The Australian Federal Police, with its more than 7000 staff, already has personnel directly investigating child abuse material in Australia and in collaboration with Interpol routinely busts perpetrators and users.
The Federal Police have worked hard to create one of the strictest and safest online environments against child exploitation in the world. And online activities are often used by AFP officers and encryption experts to track down perpetrators insane enough to think they can get away with it.
You really have to ask why now?
Mike Benz, a particularly intense man, Director of the censorship watchdog Foundation for Freedom Online and a former US State Department employee, offers an explanation.
We have reached a point in history when panicked governments can no longer control the public narrative. The traditional power nexus between governments, intelligence agencies and legacy media outlets, which held sway for a good century, has collapsed, with more people now receiving their news via social media apps than traditional news sources.
Benz puts down the year 2016, the year of Trump’s election, as the time when everything changed. The dramatic realisation that they could no longer control much of the media space, as they had been doing for so long, unleashed a flurry of activity and as Benz puts it: “Gave rise to a multibillion dollar censorship industry which joins together the
military industrial complex, social media companies, the government, the private sector, civil society organisations and a vast cobweb of media allies and professional fact checker groups that serve as this sentinel class who survey every word on the internet.”
This informal alliance Benz calls “the Blob” has redefined democracy as a “consensus of institutions” to justify censorship and maintain control over our government and public discourse.
As Benz describes the situation, America’s so-called Deep State initially embraced the freedom of expression offered by the internet because it fuelled populist movements and helped to overthrow governments they did not like, and inspired, as just one instance, the Arab Spring.
But with the election of Trump came the realisation they were confronted with the rise of domestic populism. In Australia, that realisation came with the Convoy to Canberra in February of 2022. No politician, intelligence agency, police force or political strategist in Australia failed to notice that a massive number of people, without a mask or a QR code in sight, marched on the nation’s capital. They demonstrated traditional Australian traits, good cheer and camaraderie, traits which the nation’s leaders had failed to show in the previous two years of authoritarian derangement.
The extreme levels of censorship surrounding the event amounted to a news information blackout. Not one of Australia’s mainstream media outlets covered the event in any but the most cursory and dismissive of manners, yet this was arguably the largest ever demonstration in the nation’s history. It amounted to a people’s revolution.
By not just ignoring the concerns of the protestors but attempting to cover up the event itself, the government is courting its own demise. Next time people are incensed enough with their collapsing standards of living and the authoritarianism of the state they’re not going to politely march on Parliament House. They’re going to blockade the city. Just as has been happening across the European Union.
“What I am essentially describing is military rule,” Benz says. “What’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy.”
It is now possible for the technology to map the development of stories worldwide and delete millions of posts simultaneously, in real time, to ensure the government narrative is maintained, a hegemony of thought which is perversely driving yet more and more people into uncharted and uncontrollable spaces.
Some Australians have been playing a game of late. Talk about disappearing ATMs, closing bank branches and the country’s headlong march to becoming a cashless society, and see how long before the algorithms delete your post. More or less instantaneous.
Right on cue, Murdoch outlets have been running the line that Australia leads the way to a cashless society. BlackRock owns 26 million News Corp shares, which cannot be trusted as an independent news source. Nor, for that matter, can the government’s propaganda wing, the $1.2 billion Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
The redoubtable Jeffery Tucker, founder of the Brownstone Institute, one of the world’s leading academic enclaves to emerge from the Covid era, has attempted to deconstruct the entire Blob.
Billions of dollars in government contracts have ensured that the once libertarian edge of the tech sector has disappeared.
Governments have become Big Tech’s biggest clients, and consumers on the platforms are just a part of the game plan.
“The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public,” Tucker writes.
“The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centres, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves.
“The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect.
“I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors.”
Telegram is a subject of particular interest to the eSafety Commissioner because it has become the home of so many Australian dissidents, many of whom have established substantial followings on the platform.
David Oneeg, with his 50,000 followers, an audience many mainstream journalists would envy, is regularly pilloried by the News Limited Press as a conspiracy theory. On a more or less daily basis he preaches the virtues of exercise, good diet, being a good person, and helping others.
You can meet a lot more conspiratorial people down your local pub.
Others confronting the government agenda include Cops for Truth, which makes fascinating reading, Doctors for Covid Ethics, which keeps abreast of all the many unfolding scandals surrounding the Covid era, including data fraud, former NSW Police Officer Roland Chrystal, who has more than 6,000 followers, We the Unvaccinated, Men Against the Narrative, Australia for Freedom, mRNA Death Toll and Reignite Democracy Australia, amongst many others.
That’s why the eSafety Commissioner is so determined to shut Telegram down, because collectively Australia’s citizen journalists and outspoken activists make the Albanese government look like criminal fools.
One of the most successful of all Australia’s independent media operators is Maria Zeee, a journalist with an international reputation who has some 67,000 followers on Telegram.
She told The New Dawn: “Essentially the eSafety Commission is a Ministry of Truth. I am concerned about Julie Grant herself. Her resume is a long history of working with the White House and the US Government, which is now under intense scrutiny for censoring Twitter.
“People who have worked with the US Government need to be looked at. They have violated First Amendment Rights. Julia Grant has worked with the people who violated their own Constitution.
“And it would seem the same tactics are being used here.
“There is a clear targeting of special platforms. Both Google and X failed to comply with her requests but Google got away with a warning. X gets a fine. Why is that?
“The government is aiming for a complete control of online speech and narrative.
“Telegram is a huge problem for this government. That is where people who have important information and concerns about our country are largely communicating.
“The government is peddling misinformation on climate change and Digital ID. They want to control the flow of information so people cannot be truly informed. What we are seeing is a last ditch attempt to gain control, particularly at a time when people are growing more and more distrustful of their politicians.”
One of the independent voices to come to prominence during the Covid era has been Paul Collits, who brings with him considerable experience in government. He told The New Dawn: “The ruling elites now routinely operate through public-private partnerships, at every scale right up to the global. This is the explicit and preferred model, whereby private companies come to a position of co-governance with elected politicians and unelected bureaucrats. It is a hybrid monster that has been called many things – the blob, corporatism, the censorship industrial complex – which has gained inordinate power over everyday life, and citizens’ lives.
“The US Government has been getting Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook to silence dissidents.
“And it turns out there is a direct parallel in Australia, and a close connect between the Australian Government and the globalist-in-chief, the World Economic Forum. Her name is Julie Inman Grant, a darling of the jet-setting tyrant class.
“On the watch of both our major political parties, she has been getting third party
‘fact checkers’ to censor Australian citizens who dare to challenge the State narratives. Citizen journalists beware.”
This year the situation has been made yet more urgent, and the death of legacy media more imminent, by Facebook’s announcement it is exiting the entire arena of news altogether.
In myth the cornered dragon, about to be killed, looks up and says, but I only did it for you, I only meant the best for you.
So it is in Australia. In 2021 former Prime Minister Scott Morrison introduced the so-called News Media Bargaining Code, which in theory was meant to compensate news producers for the use of their content by social media giants, particularly Facebook, and thereby to prop up local journalism.
That was an annual $250 million lifeline to Australia’s dying legacy media.
Far from providing trusted and reliable news, as proponents of the News Media Bargaining Code claimed, all it did was boost executive salaries, give dying media brands an inflated sense of self-importance, lead punters to their digital paywalls and drown out a whole new generation of young, independent journalists.
Facebook wasn’t paying for journalism at all, for whenever punters clicked on an intriguing headline, all it did was lead to a legacy media paywall. It was desperation on the part of a government and media in cahoots with each other; and Facebook had enough sense to see it was a lousy deal.
The outcry from the legacy media has been pitiful to behold. Witness Michael Miller, Executive Chairman of News Corp Australasia, writing in The Canberra Times: “Have no doubt, jobs will be lost, titles will close, communities will be at risk of not receiving the quality local news they deserve, and our democracy as a whole will suffer.
“The Australian government must protect smaller communities who will be the real victims of Meta’s decision to not compensate publications for the local news they produce.”
That’s a bleat from a dying animal.
Proving history really does do irony, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, in condemning Facebook’s move, said: “We will always stand up as a government for Australian media interests and media diversity.”
News Corp’s defence of the status quo concluded: “You might use Facebook, but Facebook also uses you.”
And, of course, the government uses Facebook to censor the entire Australian population. It is not a free speech platform. It does not promote quality journalism. And it is an instrument of state control.
The biggest threat to a government captured by corporate interests is the people themselves and their ability to gather online, to express themselves, and to enable citizen journalists to truly question the dark forces oppressing them.
A brave and exciting world of new ideas and genuinely creative people exists just outside the bounds of mainstream media, out there on the uncensored platforms. Far from being a threat, they are a salvation. The Enemy is Within.
There are only two ways out of this morass. Either the government continues on its present path, censoring dissidents and becoming more totalitarian with every passing day. Or it takes heed of the concerns of the public, and reforms its practices.
As Australians face challenges on multiple fronts, under the auspices of the eSafety Commissioner they are witnessing a well planned gambit to shut down their access to free speech platforms, making them powerless to stand up to the governing class.
The resolution, or the revolution, is up to us.