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Escape from "The Land of the Free"
Description
My escape from America after a three-week visit went swimmingly. (I am now back in Saidia, Morocco, swimming in the Med every day). Unlike Scott Ritter, I wasn’t prevented from boarding an international flight, then sent home to be raided by the FBI. Unlike Richard Medhurst, I wasn’t arrested, dragged out of the airport, and thrown in a jail cell for the crime of practicing alternative journalism. And unlike Pavel Durov, I wasn’t kidnapped by thought police to be tortured until I turned over my passwords.
I got out before nuclear World War III breaks out (which could be sooner than most people realize, since in the current situation, Russia expert Gilbert Doctorow tells us, “a preventive Russian attack on NATO, on the continental United States, not to mince words, is entirely conceivable.”) I got out before a monkeypox scamdemic locks down airports. I got out before an actual Trump assassination attempt by his Deep State enemies (as opposed to the July 13 preventive PR op) leads to all hell breaking loose. I got out before another stolen, I mean, disputed election throws the country into chaos.
Why I Left
In 2006, during an interview on Wisconsin Public Radio, the host—I believe it was Joy Cardin—asked me something like: “If you really believe 9/11 was an inside job, why are you still living in America?” My answer was something like “I’ll be damned if I let those neocon b******s run me out of my country.” Since there was still a modicum of free speech, I planned to use it by way of a truth jihad. And it worked…for awhile. Until around 2015 the 9/11 truth movement dominated the internet. The search engines still gave honest results, such that anyone googling anything about 9/11 was led to the most-frequented urls relating to 9/11—the truther sites and videos. The notion that internet platforms could discriminate on the basis of political viewpoint was anathema, as it had been since the internet’s founding.
But by the mid-twenty-teens, internet freedom started dying. Neocon think tanks, following Cass Sunstein’s lead, pushed the idea that in an era of dangerous “conspiracy theories,” viewpoint neutrality was no longer viable. Trump’s election was blamed on internet freedom in general and Russia’s misuse of it in particular. Within a year or two, the worldwide web was no longer a free speech zone. I was relentlessly shadowbanned and increasingly deplatformed (first by Facebook and GoFundMe, and then, in the wake of COVID, by Patreon and YouTube).
As freedom vanished, popular and elite culture became more vapid and vulgar. The subliminal message that truth is dangerous penetrated the mass mind. But deep, dangerous truth, and the hearty and fearless willingness to embrace it, is what gives both conversatio