Has Another Voice Just Been Silenced On YouTube?
In our rapidly emerging corporate fascist state, freedom of speech, the press and the freedom to peacefully protest is as endangered as a penguin in a pizza oven.
By Mark Taylor
DeMOCKracy.ink (8/15/24)
Details on this story are pretty much non-existent as of early Thursday evening, but it appears yet another voice on YouTube may have been silenced by the corporate blob that is the United States government.
One of the best podcasts to have emerged in the past couple years — and especially since the US war on Russia being staged in Ukraine and the US/Israel genocide in Gaza and the West Bank — has been former Fox News commentator and former New Jersey Superior Court Justice Andrew Napolitano’s Judging Freedom.
Napolitano has one of the best rosters of expert guests including former UN Iraq weapons inspector Scott Ritter, Grayzone journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate, former diplomat Alastair Crooke, military experts Col. Lawrence Wilkerson and Capt. Matt Hoh, scholars John Mearsheimer and Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and legendary CIA whistleblower Ray McGovern, among others.
Usually the show broadcasts interviews throughout the day, Monday through Friday on YouTube. But not today. Because I am a regular viewer, my YouTube feed usually has all the day’s interviews lined up and a half-dozen more from the past week or two. Earlier today, there were only two or three Judging Freedom videos and they were from two to 8 months ago. Then there were none.
The audio of today’s broadcast is up on the Judging Freedom website.
But what happened with YouTube? I did some online searching for information but found nothing.
When Scott Ritter was detained by federal agents as he was about to board a flight to Russia for a conference presentation and reporting trip in June, his passport was confiscated and — two months later — has still has not been returned. Rittner is not even sure which agency snatched it. Napolitano was scheduled to fly out the same day to the same conference. Ritter called urging him not to go and Napolitano heeded his advice.
More intimidation
Then last week a group of FBI agents showed up at Ritter’s home with a search warrant for electronic devices and, even though they were not specified in the warrant, the feds absconded with boxes containing some 80,000 pages of unclassified UN documents from Ritter’s time as a UN weapons inspector. Ritter tried to alert government officials, the media and public that the “weapons of mass destruction” hysteria that the Cheney/Bush administration used to trigger the tragic Iraq War was a ragged, rigged tapestry of lies and deceit. Ritter said he has been in the process of writing a book based on that now stolen documentation.
Is there some connection between Ritter’s harassment by the feds and today’s absence of Judging Freedom from YouTube? I certainly don’t know, but it is something to consider.
If you come across any information, please let me know and I’ll post it here.
In our accelerating corporate fascist state, freedom of speech, the press and to peacefully protest is as endangered as a penguin in a pizza oven.
From the scrubbing of the entire archive of RT broadcasts to any updates on the disastrous reverberations from the covid vaccine disaster, YouTube has increasingly turned into a free speech minefield where podcast episodes get demonetized for any messaging wandering a syllable off the accepted corporate script. Tragically — and dangerously to us all — the platform is quickly morphing into the social media ideal of Orwell’s 1984.
Stay alert.
Speak up.
And — most of all — resist in whatever way you can.
All of our freedoms are on the line.
Photo by Mark Taylor / DeMOCKracy.ink
I have a lot of respect for Judge Napolitano. First they wiped out all of Lee Camp's Redacted Tonight (and all of the other great RT programming) from YouTube, and then they started de-monitizing lots of other channels. And now this... Could there be a pattern? (*sarcasm*) Sigh.
Keep resisting and keep spreading the information any way you can!
I was watching his series the day on YouTube when the final interview didn’t appear. The next day no new interviews. I knew something was wrong and viewers became worried. After the Ritter event people assumed the same was happening to the Judge. Crazy times. Scary times.