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Seth Dillon, the owner of The Babylon Bee, knows a thing or two about cancel culture.

In March 2022, The Babylon Bee — the wildly popular satirical website he owns and runs — was locked out of its Twitter account.

The Bee’s crime? Awarding its inaugural Man of the Year title to Assistant Secretary for Health Rachel Levine.

For the record, Levine is a biological male who identifies as a woman, and at the time was being widely celebrated by the legacy media for his various firsts in breaking through the transgender “glass ceiling” in the federal government.

Twitter assured The Babylon Bee their account would be unlocked immediately if they only deleted their provocative post, seen below. The company refused, and went on to spend almost seven months in a digital gulag.

The Babylon Bee’s Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine https://t.co/mZdcXbUnmf

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) March 15, 2022

In a twist of fate, it was these very events that prompted billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk to plot his purchase of Twitter, which he has since rebadged as X. In the eyes of many, X stands today as the last great holdout of free speech on the internet.

So when Seth Dillon opines on cancel culture, he’s a man worth taking seriously. And here is what he tweeted earlier this month on the topic:

The left moved quickly from embracing cancel culture (“Speak freely but expect consequences”) to explicitly calling for unconstitutional censorship (“It’s too dangerous to let you speak freely”). https://t.co/7sebEyjYQZ

— Seth Dillon (@SethDillon) October 7, 2024

Dillon’s is an intriguing thesis. Could be true that cancel culture has run its course? Having failed to adequately stamp out dissent, has cancel culture been replaced by full-throated calls for censorship under the now ubiquitous (and dystopian) language of “misinformation” and “disinformation”?

State Interference

Dillon cites an article by author and journalist Michael Shellenberger, who could hardly be accused of being a conservative. Shellenberger writes:

Clinton, Gates, Kerry, UN, WEF, et al. say we must let them censor the Internet to save democracy. We must not. Their demands are totalitarian and Orwellian. Deep state leaders are turning regime change tactics developed abroad against the American people.

The “regime change tactics” to which he refers are what’s known in the intelligence community as colour revolutions, which ostensibly destabilised foreign governments and catalysed regime changes in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004-2005) and Kyrgyzstan (2005) in order to advance American foreign policy interests.

Shellenberger argues that the techniques originally developed by US intelligence to foment regime change abroad have since been adapted for domestic use to suppress dissent within America, specifically on topics such as Covid-19 and the 2020 US election. Those tactics include media manipulation, civil unrest, engineered social movements (i.e., cancel culture), and the framing of dissent as extremism and a threat to democracy.

The sudden explosion of efforts across the Western world to stamp out “misinformation”, he argues, is only the latest development on this front.

The explosive rise in mentions of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ post-2016 in both news media and academic papers. pic.twitter.com/x0cQvjKEOb

— David Rozado (@DavidRozado) October 14, 2024

Worrying Developments

Shellenberger profiles a handful of the places where these efforts have advanced most effectively:

In truth, governments are waging war on free speech. Australia is at risk of passing sweeping censorship legislation in November. The Irish government has abandoned its hate speech legislation for this term, but governing parties are promising to bring it back. And the European Union is well on its way to implementing the most aggressive censorship agenda in the West.

And, over the last three weeks, one of the world’s most influential and largest billionaires and philanthropists, Bill Gates, and two recent Secretaries of State, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, have all made strong calls to censor the Internet of wrongthink.

As I cast my mind back over the last several years, it occurs to me that both the language of cancel culture and specific, high-profile instances of it have quickly faded from public debate. By contrast, talk about “misinformation” and “disinformation” is everywhere.

To repurpose a popular analogy, not only is the emperor naked — he’s self-consciously streaking around the town square.

At least our overlords have spelt out their sinister intentions. There’s no going back now, it seems. And note that an increasing number of them have painted their targets squarely on Elon Musk’s back. I wonder why?

Until my thoughtcrimes see me dragged off to the gulag (digital or otherwise), I’ll be hanging out on X. I hope to see you there.

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Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Adobe.