“If freedom of speech is taken away then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”
— George Washington
This is a politics blog post. Back in December, I wrote about the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, an “all-volunteer” group which formed in 2020 to help combat misinformation. ( here, here, here). A new field called “cognitive security,” emerged, that appears to have been initiated by the Obama administration in January 2017, just before President Trump was inaugurated. Instead of just trying to combat cyberattacks and improve cyber-security, the goal now is ostensibly to protect people from misinformation, by identifying and thwarting all the bad people spreading “misinformation.” This term “cognitive security” was made-up by the experts, who are working on ways to label, target and silence Americans, whose views they feel are spreading “misinformation.”
It’s setting up thought police, no matter what term they choose to use.
Throughout the Trump presidency there was an endless stream of Democrat and liberal media hype about “Russian disinformation/misinformation” and all of it was tied up in trying to link Trump to Russia or other Republicans and right-wing people to Russia. Days before the 2020 election, dozens of former US intelligence officials declared that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” and none of them had any intelligence whatsoever to make that determination. The liberal media ran with their assessment though. Later it was revealed the FBI had that laptop in their custody and could have evaluated that laptop.
During the 2020 pandemic, “misinformation” once again targeted right-wing people as the bad people spreading “misinformation,” but it wasn’t so cut and dried and some of the “experts” pushing all the federal health policies ended up being very wrong. However, while fear and alarm were ramped up, many Americans had their rights infringed upon, including some prominent experts in vaccines and epidemiology being banned from social media for disagreeing with Dr. Fauci and his “experts.” Many Americans couldn’t attend church services, many businesses were forced to close or dramatically alter how they operated.
If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that the politicized labeling craze moved into high-gear in 2020 and there was a concerted effort to smear people who disagreed with the COVID social mitigation policies as evil and dangerous people. By the time the vaccine rolled out, there was a mass-media effort, ranting about the dreaded “Unvaccinated,” which also came with booting out over 8,000 military members, who refused to get the COVID vaccine. Last year those COVID vaccine policies were ditched and due to serious recruiting shortfalls, the military has been trying to coax those military members to rejoin.
Without rehashing the pandemic or all the fall-out, with the information that came out about the CTI League, one of the key components of this new field of “cognitive security” is to pigeonhole people into groups and label them… to identify the people who hold “dangerous” beliefs and might spread “misinformation.”
A couple days ago, there was a FOX News report on the House Judiciary findings:
“House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan said the documents obtained by the committee indicate that after Jan. 6, 2021, the Treasury Department’s Office of Stakeholder Integration and Engagement in the Strategic Operations of the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, distributed materials to financial institutions that outlined “typologies” of “various persons of interest” and provided the banks with “suggested search terms and Merchant Category Codes for identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement.” https://judiciary.house.gov/media/in-the-news/alarming-surveillance-feds-asked-banks-search-private-transactions-terms-maga
That link is an interesting read Jordan continued:
“Jordan said the committee obtained documents showing that FinCEN distributed slides, prepared by Key Bank, to other banks to explain how they could use merchant category codes (MCC) to detect customers whose transactions may reflect “potential active shooters, and who may include dangerous International Terrorists/ Domestic Terrorists/ Homegrown Violence Extremists (‘Lone Wolves’).”
Jordan said the slide instructs financial institutions to query for transactions using certain MCC codes like “3484: Small Arms,” “5091: Sporting and Recreational Goods and Supplies,” and the keywords “Cabela’s” and “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” “Bass Pro Shops,” among others.
Key Bank declined to comment.”
Whatever you think about the warnings about the government tracking your purchases and labeling people into groups – well, it’s already happening and it’s all one-sided.
Last year, I wrote a blog post, Who are the totalitarians?, mentioning the spread of hate speech laws happening in Europe and Canada. Well, this effort is ongoing in America too and the architects here are having to find ways to mask federal government involvement due to our 1st Amendment free speech rights, so expect more melding government via “nudging” of private corporations pressuring people to comply to the far-left speech policing dictates or corporations working with federal government entities to identify people who run afoul of the new speech codes being pushed.
It’s easy to dismiss all of this as more tin-foil hat musings, but it was just last year that the Biden administration launched a short-lived “Disinformation Governance Board” within the Department of Homeland Security with this woman as the head of it:
There are all sorts of clips this week of the WEF annual meeting in Davos, where the world’s elite fly in and share all their ideas on how to radically transform the world and right-wing media always go berserk highlighting this. However, those right-wing concerns, I believe, aren’t all wild tin-foil hat craziness. Just follow the bits of information that keep cropping up in Europe, Canada, Australia and here at home in America that center on “fighting misinformation” and the left’s battle against “hate speech.”
Back in May 2023, Biden climate envoy, John Kerry, was claiming victory for the climate agenda:
“The economy has so drastically and fundamentally changed in the past several years, Kerry argued – spurred in large part by the Democrats’ climate and energy law passed last year – that the markets would reject a challenge to the nation’s clean energy trajectory.
“I don’t think anybody elected president – Republican, Democrat, liberal, conservative – could change what is happening today,” President Joe Biden’s top climate diplomat told CNN in a candid and wide-ranging interview in his State Department office.” https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/12/politics/john-kerry-republicans-china-biden-climate/index.html
Despite Kerry’s claiming victory for the green transformation, this transformation also includes a radical social policy agenda. Populist uprisings in Europe have been increasing in the last few years, with farmers in revolt and even here in America, there have been several boycott efforts. For all of Kerry’s bravado, he’s repositioning himself and stepping down as Biden’s climate envoy in a few weeks.
Being very distrusting of the Democrat stealth way of ramming through policies or finding corrupt ways to work around the US Constitution, to implement their policies, I think it’s probably safe to keep my tin foil hat, pictured above, handy. One of my sons made that for me several years ago when I was telling him about the corrupt Dem spin information war. I was a tiny bit hurt that he completely dismissed what I was saying, but watching that spin info war progress and all the word games that accompany it, unfortunately most people just “trust the experts” and start spouting the new words and phrases the media and elites in academia hype, without question. You can look at a term like “gender-affirming” care for kids, which involves pumping kids full of hormones and encouraging irreversible sex-change operation. That term was mainstreamed via a mass-media spin effort, replete with all sorts of experts selling it. Millions of people began “trusting the experts” and bought into the gender ideology without question. Along with the mainstreaming the new gender terminology, there was also a mass-media spin effort to demonize anyone who dared question the new ideas and terms.
With the hype about “misinformation,” well there’s already been several years of “Russian misinformation” media-generated hysteria, we’ve had all the COVID hysteria and we’re into the fourth year of dangerous “MAGA extremists” Dem-spin theater. As the experts developing this new made-up field of “cognitive security,” replete with ever-increasing categories, anyone could end up placed on some secret government list, due to their purchases, the social media content they watch or even the streaming content they watch on TV, and not even know it. And with the merging of carrying out government policy via corporate elites, we have no real way to prove it, let alone challenge it.
As for me, I’m holding on to this tin-foil hat and that son still trusts some of the COVID experts, but he’s always been a gun enthusiast, so when he ends up on some watch list or this Dem-initiated thought police effort advances and hits him, I’m prepared to give that tin-foil hat back to him.
History clearly shows that these sorts of totalitarian efforts to police speech and thoughts always spiral out of control easily and the people making the lists never run out of new labels to divide and silence people.
libertybelle diaries 
Yep. I’m definitely on a watchlist somewhere. 😬