Ever heard of the Global Alliance for Responsible Media?
No, and that’s the idea.
It’s a secret, bureaucratic group that nonetheless wants to decide what you read, see and hear online.
GARM, as it’s known, is an initiative from the World Federation of Advertisers, a cartel that exerts control over some 90% of global marketing spending — and it used (possibly illegal) big-bucks leverage to go after free speech online, per a bombshell new House Judiciary Committee report.
The idea is simple.
GARM pick out supposed bad websites that allegedly spread “disinformation.”
That word almost always means correct information on Hunter’s laptop or now-accepted arguments that COVID may have come from a lab or anything else that cuts against the Dem-dominated narrative.
Then, under the GARM rubric, the cartel with its massive list of its big-company partners and huge ad agencies would work to starve those sites of ad dollars.
GARM is masterminded by a pseudo-fascist named Rob Rakowitz, who’s appointed himself mega-censor of everything people can read and professes himself frustrated by an “extreme global interpretation of the US Constitution” on speech issues.
He and his jackbooted crew went after the familiar targets.
Like Twitter: Hardly had Elon Musk taken it over before a GARM member was pushing for a boycott.
And Facebook, which GARM tried to get to censor a Donald Trump campaign ad.
Facebook told them where they could get off; Rakowitz whined that was “reprehensible.”
Rakowitz even — insanely — went after Spotify for daring to host Joe Rogan’s podcast, though Rogan wasn’t taking ad bucks from any of the companies in GARM’s cartel.
Rakowitz also hawked the now-discredited Global Disinformation Index, a London-based group of speech-haters who declared pubs like Reason, RealClearPolitics and The Post verboten — clearly because they lean right or libertarian.
GDI was seemingly a source of the group’s target list.
And the outfit was also the beneficiary of State Department bucks — yet another channel through which the White House tried to stifle free speech and thought.
It’s all one big, ugly complex — operating juuuuuust outside the traditional boundaries of legally defined censorship, but nonetheless unmistakably censoring like crazy.
With power-mad, middle-management nobodies like Rakowitz running point.
The Judiciary Committee has done yeoman’s work exposing various tendrils of this ugly weed, and this newest release is just as important.
As is its argument that GARM may have broken antitrust law with its Orwellian power-play.
The disinfo warriors need to be called to account with whatever penalties the law allows.
No matter how long it takes.
Otherwise, Goebbels-wannabes like Rakowitz (and the real disinformation they push) will win out.