What Google and Facebook Are Hiding
The American Deep State Strikes Back
Ron Unz • May 24, 2020 •
After several months of record-breaking traffic
our alternative media webzine suffered a sharp blow when it was
suddenly purged by Facebook at the end of April. Not only was our
rudimentary Facebook page eliminated, but all subsequent attempts by
readers to post our articles the world’s largest social network produced
an error message describing the content as “abusive.” Our entire
website had been banned.
Facebook
publishes a monthly report cataloging its actions to eliminate
“improper content,” and although our publication was probably one of the
largest and most popular ever so proscribed, the
explanation provided
was remarkably cursory, with our name mentioned in only two scattered
sentences across the 47 page document.Our investigation linked this network to VDARE, a website known for posting anti-immigration content, and individuals associated with a similar website The Unz Review.
Although the people behind this operation attempted to conceal their coordination, our investigation linked this network to VDARE, a website known for posting anti-immigration content, and to individuals associated with a similar website The Unz Review.
As I’ve previously discussed,
characterizing our alternative media publication as an
“anti-immigration” website “similar” to VDare seemed utterly bizarre
considering that only about 0.2% of our 2020 content was republished
from that source and many months had elapsed since we had last featured a
piece on immigration. So I strongly suspected that the claim merely
served as an excuse.
I
don’t use Facebook or other social networks myself, and noticed little
reduction in our daily traffic following that purge, seeming to
demonstrate our lack of reliance upon social media. But a week later,
this abruptly changed, and our regular daily readership dropped by a
significant 15-20%, hardly a crippling blow but quite distressing,
setting us back many months of previous growth.
This
puzzled me. Why would the Facebook ban have had such limited initial
impact but then suddenly become so much more serious? Eventually I
discovered that a second, even more powerful Internet giant had also
banned us, which explained the sharp drop. Our entire website
and all its many millions of pages of serious content had been silently
deranked by Google, thus eliminating nearly all our incoming traffic
from search results. A few quick checks confirmed this unfortunate situation, best illustrated by a particularly striking example.
Just over a decade ago, I had published an important article entitled The Myth of Hispanic Crime,
and for ten years it had always placed extremely high in Google
searches, generally being ranked #2 across the 52,000,000 results for
“Hispanic crime” and also #2 among the 139,000,000 results for “Latino
crime.” The impact of my analysis on the heated public debate had also
been quite considerable, and a few years ago a leading academic
specialist even asked me to blurb his book on that subject. But my
article had now vanished from all such Google searches.
Although
Google holds an overwhelming monopoly for web searches across the
Western world, comparable products such as Bing and DuckDuckGo using
similar technology do exist, and these still list my article among their
results, with Bing ranking it at #2 for “Hispanic crime” and “Latino crime,” while DuckDuckGo places it #4 in each. But no one would ever find it using Google.
All
the other pages of our website have been similarly blacklisted,
effectively eliminated from all web searches courtesy of Google’s
information monopoly. This even included the periodical content library
that I had built during the 2000s, containing the near-complete
archives of hundreds of America’s most influential publications of the
last 150 years. Millions of these important articles were available no
where else, and their disappearance representing a tremendous loss to
academic scholarship.
Google
still does contains all these pages, and if the additional specifier
“unz” is added to the search, the results do come up, but for anyone not
knowing where to look, our entire website and all its content has
completely disappeared. This explained our sudden 15-20% reduction in
regular traffic.
Internet
law is obviously quite murky, but it seems a great shame if Google has
decided to use its software monopoly to severely manipulate search
results and deliberately hide important information. The notion of
Google “disappearing” an entire website and all its material is surely
fraught with peril. Should Google’s executives be allowed to
“disappear” whichever politicians or candidates they dislike? Should
wealthy individuals or powerful groups be able to pay or lobby Google to
have their critics removed from all search results?
During
2018 Google employees themselves took a very strong public stance on
exactly this issue, protesting their own company’s willingness to
produce a “censored” version of their search engine for use in China, a controversy that reached the national headlines, and soon forced executives to abandon the project. But although Google censorship of content within China still remains an inflammatory topic,
Google censorship of American content is now apparently so routine and
acceptable that it took me more than a week to discover that our entire
website had been thrown down the Orwellian “memory hole.”
I’d
always taken great pride that my Hispanic Crime article spent a decade
ranked #2 among nearly 200,000,000 Google results for that important
topic, and was dismayed that Google “disappeared” it. But in fairness,
I’d have to admit that individuals who make themselves disagreeable to
ruling political elites have sometimes suffered far worse retaliation.
For example, my Saturday morning newspapers carried the latest episode
in the unfortunate story of Jamal Khashoggi, the dissenting Saudi
journalist whose critical writings in the Washington Post so
irritated his government that they had him killed and his body
dismembered with a bone-saw. Compared to that, having my article
deranked by Google hardly seems a major complaint.
For
years our website has published a great deal of extremely controversial
material, and many readers are probably much more surprised that Google
and Facebook took so long to purge us rather than they finally did so.
Consider, for example, my own American Pravda series,
which together with related articles runs 280,000 words and has drawn
about 3 million pageviews, while attracting over 25,000 comments
totaling another 3.5 million words. Many of these articles candidly
address some of the most controversial aspects of the JFK Assassination,
the 9/11 Attacks, and the history of World War II, topics so touchy
that a couple of years ago the redoubtable Israel Shamir described me as
the “Kamikazi from California,” and suggested along with numerous other observers that our website might soon be annihilated as a consequence. But aside from a rather lackluster rebuke from the usually ferocious ADL, absolutely nothing untoward happened.
Yet
now we have been almost simultaneously banned by both Google and
Facebook, America’s leading gatekeepers to the Internet, concerted
action that hardly seems likely to have been coincidental, especially
coming after years of apparent equanimity. So what had prompted this
sudden purge?
I think the obvious answer was my most recent American Pravda installment,
which attracted more early readership and social media interest than
anything I had previously written, and which appeared just eight days
before Facebook’s ban.
My
article noted some important facts that are less widely known that they
should be, and are quite embarrassing both to our own government and its
overly subservient mainstream journalists.
For
decades, the American media had regularly denounced the Chinese
government for its notorious 1989 slaughter of the student protesters at
Tiananmen and shamed its leadership for continuing to flatly deny that
historical reality, with China’s demands for censorship of the massacre
being a leading source of conflict with Google. However, I pointed out
that more than twenty years ago the former Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post, who had personally covered the events, published a long article
in our most prestigious journalism review admitting that the infamous
“Tiananmen Square Massacre” had never actually happened, and was just a
concoction of incompetent journalists and dishonest propagandists. Yet
for decades the promotion of that debunked hoax by our elite media has
continued unabated.
As
another example, I noted that back in 1999 our warplanes had bombed the
Chinese embassy in Belgrade, killing or wounding dozens of Chinese
diplomats. At the time, our media uniformly reported the attack as a
tragic accident, while ridiculing China’s government for alleging
otherwise. However, just a few months later, many of the leading newspapers in Britain and the rest of the world revealed
that the bombing had indeed been deliberate, quoting numerous NATO
intelligence sources to that effect. But since the American media completely boycotted
this major international story, very few Americans ever discovered that
the Chinese had been telling the truth all along and our own government
lying.
Although these historical items were important, they merely set the stage for a far more explosive analysis. The bulk of my 7,400 word article
presented the very considerable circumstantial evidence that our
current Coronavirus national disaster was entirely self-inflicted, being
the unintended blowback from an extremely reckless American biowarfare
attack against China (and Iran), presumably organized by the Deep State
Neocons or other rogue elements in our national security establishment.
This
ongoing disease epidemic has already killed 100,000 Americans and
wrecked our economy, so we can easily understand why the guilty parties
would do all they could to prevent some of the critical information from
getting into general circulation, pressuring Google and Facebook to
suppress the crucial evidence. A few excerpts from my long analysis,
now banned by America’s Internet giants, are worth once again repeating:
As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hatred Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?
* * *
For obvious reasons, the Trump Administration has become very eager to emphasize the early missteps and delays in the Chinese reaction to the viral outbreak in Wuhan, and has presumably encouraged our media outlets to direct their focus in that direction.As an example of this, the Associated Press Investigative Unit recently published a rather detailed analysis of those early events purportedly based upon confidential Chinese documents. Provocatively entitled “China Didn’t Warn Public of Likely Pandemic for 6 Key Days”, the piece was widely distributed, running in abridged form in the NYT and elsewhere. According to this reconstruction, the Chinese government first became aware of the seriousness of this public health crisis on Jan. 14th, but delayed taking any major action until Jan. 20th, a period of time during which the number of infections greatly multiplied.Last month, a team of five WSJ reporters produced a very detailed and thorough 4,400 word analysis of the same period, and the NYT has published a helpful timeline of those early events as well. Although there may be some differences of emphasis or minor disagreements, all these American media sources agree that Chinese officials first became aware of the serious viral outbreak in Wuhan in early to mid-January, with the first known death occurring on Jan. 11th, and finally implemented major new public health measures later that same month. No one has apparently disputed these basic facts.But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.
Although
criticism of the mainstream media has been the central theme of my
American Pravda series, I always spend at least a couple of hours every
morning carefully reading our leading newspapers, which I regard as
unmatched sources of important information so long as their articles are
treated with proper caution and rigor. As an example, I would note
that most of the crucial evidence suggesting an American biowarfare
attack was hidden in plain sight in such eminently respectable news
sources as the NYT, the WSJ, and ABC News.
As our global confrontation with China has grown hotter, my morning New York Times has continued to provide invaluable information for anyone who is willing to read it carefully.
For
example, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo probably ranks as the most
prominent Deep State Neocon in the Trump Administration, and is a
leading architect of our confrontation with China. Last week he broke
quarantine to take a trip to Israel and hold important talks with Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as reported in a 1,600 word NYT article.
Although the majority of their discussion concerned American support
for the proposed annexation of the Palestinian West Bank, a serious
disagreement came with regard to Israel’s growing economic ties with
China, with the piece noting that the Jewish State had “antagonized”
Washington by allowing Chinese companies to make major infrastructure
investments, some of them in sensitive locations. According to the
three Times journalists, Netanyahu firmly stood his ground,
determined to “push back” against Pompeo’s repeated warnings and refused
to reconsider his government’s China policy.
But just a couple of days later, the Times then reported that Du Wei, the Chinese ambassador to Israel, age 57, had been found dead at his home,
having suddenly fallen victim to “unspecified health problems.” The
piece emphasized that he had become a leading public critic of America’s
current policies toward China, and the juxtaposition of these two
consecutive NYT articles raised all sorts of obvious questions in my mind.
According to standard mortality tables,
an American male age 57 has less than a 1% chance of dying in a
particular year, and given the similarity in overall life expectancy,
the same must surely true of Chinese males. Recently appointed Chinese
ambassadors are likely to be in reasonably good health rather than
suffering the last stages of terminal cancer, and such causes together
with obvious, visible injuries account for more than half of all fatalities at around that age.
Thus, the likelihood that the 57-year-old Chinese diplomat died
naturally within that two day window was probably far less than 1 in
50,000. Lightning does sometimes strike under the most unlikely of
circumstances, but not very often; and I think that the unexplained
deaths of ambassadors during international confrontations probably fall
into the same category.
It
therefore seems exceptionally unlikely that the sudden demise of
Ambassador Du was not somehow directly connected with the heated dispute
between Pompeo and Netanyahu over Israel’s China ties that had occurred
two days earlier. The exact details and circumstances are entirely
obscure, and we can merely speculate. But since speculation has not yet
been outlawed by government edict, an interesting possibility comes to
mind.
In
sharp constrast to the elected leaders of America’s vassal-states
throughout Europe and Asia, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu hardly
regards himself as beholden to the American government. He is a
powerful, arrogant individual who remembers the endless standing
ovations that he enjoyed when he addressed our own House and Senate,
receiving the sort of bipartisan public adulation that would be
unimaginable for a Donald Trump, who remains deeply unpopular with half
our Congress. So faced with demands by a Trump envoy that he sacrifice
his own nation’s interests by cancelling important Chinese economic
projects, he apparently disregarded Pompeo’s warnings and told him to
get lost.
The classic 1972 film The Godfather
ranks #2 in the IMDb Movie Database, and one of its most famous scenes
concerns a conflict between a powerful and arrogant Hollywood film mogul
and a visiting representative of the Corleone family. When the polite
requests of the latter are casually disregarded, the movie tycoon
awakens to discover the bloody head of his prized race-horse in his own
bed, thereby demonstrating the serious nature of the warning he had
received and indicating that it should not be disregarded. Pompeo had
recently served as CIA Director, and I suspect he called in a few favors
with elements of the Israeli Mossad and had them take lethal steps to
convince Netanyahu that our demands that he reassess his ties with China
were of a serious nature, not to be treated lightly. I strongly
suspect that the controversial Chinese-Israeli economic ventures will
soon be abandoned.
I
had never heard of the unfortunate Chinese ambassador prior to his
sudden demise, and under normal circumstances any such notions of
American foul play might be dismissed as absurd. But consider that just
a few months earlier, we had publicly assassinated a top Iranian leader
after he was lured to Baghdad for peace negotiations, an act vastly
more weighty than the plausible deniability of of a middle-aged diplomat
being found dead in his own home of unknown causes.
A few days later, my Wall Street Journal carried an article entitled China’s ‘Wolf Warrior’ Diplomats Are to Fight,
beginning on the front page and running 2,200 words, by far the longest
piece appearing in that day’s edition. Yet although the late
Ambassador Du had been in the forefront of this ongoing Chinese campaign
to challenge American influence, both in Israel and during his previous
posting to Ukraine, and the sudden demise of this particular “wolf
warrior” was surely known to the journalists, his name appeared nowhere
in the text, leading me to wonder whether it had been deliberately
excised to avoid raising obvious suspicions in the WSJ readership.
For
hundreds of years since the Treaty of Westphalia, the lives of
diplomats have been almost always treated as sacrosanct, and a typical
response to breaking such international conventions might be tit-for-tat
retaliation. China’s leadership tends to be remarkably pragmatic, and
recognizes that its national strength is rapidly growing even as our own
society decays and declines, so perhaps they will forego any such
reaction, at least for the time being. But if any American diplomats or
other ranking officials begin to suffer strange fatalities, the
explanation may be less than mysterious, though Google and Facebook will
certainly do their best to keep it so.
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