New Zealand shows the hidden hand behind information restriction
"Fake News" is an inadequate classification. It fails even to begin to approach describing the complete scope of manufactured opinion. A high proportion of what nearly everyone believes is programmed by high wizards of opinion formation. This fact is reflected in the title of a recent book by one of the few honest reporters we have, Sharyl Attkisson, "How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control …What You Think" … (besides "What You See" and "How You Vote").
A good start at understanding the full scope of how your thinking is a commodity to be traded to the highest bidder, can be found in a little appreciated article, 10 Resources For Hack-Proofing Your Mind by Stella Morabito. Very few people even begin to suspect the full history of what Morabito describes as "coercive thought reform", but what can be called in plain, old-fashioned American-speak, "Brainwashing".
See vidoes about Edward Bernays. tinyurl.com/y595ksfv
An accurate assessment of the importance of these facts can be seen behind the scenes of the criminalization of incorrect thinking in the draconian New Zealand government reaction to spreading news about the massacre Teen Faces 14 Years in Jail for Sharing Live Steam of New Zealand Mosque Attack.
While commonsense restrictions on shouting fire in a crowded theatre are well-understood, there is no understanding plain-thinking restrictions on intrinsic conflicts of interest, like prohibiting governments from collecting taxes on alcohol while empowering them to regulate drunk-driving, or allowing government employees to vote while they exert self-interested political pressure.
Governments have complete ability to counter inaccurate claims like holocaust denial, the state favored view in Iran. Simply giving extreme viewpoints air will allow citizens to arrive at the truth on their own. President Kennedy stated it plainly, ""We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people."
People who get their information from National Public Radio and PBS are going to think what they want, regardless of the truth. C.S. Lewis expressed this commonsense fact, which everyone knows, in the third of his adult science-fiction books, "That Hideous Strength". "Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything."
New Zealand’s government joins the European Union in showing a low opinion of the commonsense of the average person, in the way it attempts to criminalize the free exchange of information. Nothing in sharing videos about the massacre has any effect on inhibiting repetition of such behavior. Everyone knows this.
What such overreaction does reveal, is the extent to which progressive planners and social engineers understand just how badly brainwashed we all are, and how ruthless they are in planning to exploit it.