Once a symbol of free speech, Voice of America* has become a mouthpiece of control—where truth is filtered, dissent is erased, and satire is mistaken for policy.
Silence them all — (VOA), Even The Voice of Whose America!
And if you raise your voice about it? There’s a label waiting for you: “foreign agent,” “disinformation spreader,” “conspiracy theorist.”
Well, here’s a new label for Kari Lake, see the first segment of this article, and her ilk: Enemies of Journalism.
Let’s not pretend anymore. This isn’t about protecting the truth. It’s about protecting the narrative. And those of us who still remember what journalism means — who still carry a little Brass Check in our pocket — we won’t be silent.
Not now.
A journalist today is more afraid of a Facebook flag than a government subpoena.
It’s time to reclaim the brass check—not as a token of shame, but as a badge of independence. Those who resist the comfort of consensus, who question what can’t be questioned, who publish what others suppress—they are the new brass checkers.
It does not stop with top-down censorship but the new collective mentality. We now live in a media climate where ‘Springtime for Hitler’ isn’t a farce — it’s a blueprint. The absurd is no longer absurd enough to fail.
Today’s fact-checkers play both censor and clown, stamping out dissent while the audience cheers, mistaking the performance for parody.
Gen Z does not understand satire. Apparently, there are some who don’t know this was written by a Jew who liberated concentration camp victims in the “Battle of the Bulge.” They especially get offended at recent parodies, such as by Jewish writers like Sacha Baron Cohen, who dressed up in every offensive stereotype he could think of, but gave time to a Nazi concentration camp survivor who explained what happened to her.
The family of the holocaust survivor thought his film was intent on mocking the holocaust and Jewish culture……. But it was the opposite: it mocked the mockers. It’s a parody about racism, same as Mel Brooks’ Springtime for Hitler.
“Springtime for Hitler” journalism. Satire comedy is politically incorrect now, as well as is more often than not the truth!
Parody for brilliance
What began as a farce — incompetent, tone-deaf, and clearly absurd — is now celebrated as progressive media policy. In Mel Brooks’ classic, the fictional Nazi musical was supposed to bomb, i.e., be a total box office flop. Instead, it became a hit because the audience mistook parody for brilliance.
We’re living that moment in real life. Today’s ideological censors dress their work in the language of ethics and equity — but what they’re really doing is sanitizing dissent and outsourcing local truth to spin doctors.
In the age of official lies and outsourced truth, the biggest disinformation doesn’t come from fringe bloggers or Kremlin trolls — it comes from inside the wire. It is ironic that the Voice of America* was meant to broadcast truth to the world’s oppressed; today, it silences authentic voices while promoting scripted narratives.
We now live in a media reality that makes Brave New World and Fahrenheit 451 look like light filled predictions of what the future had in store. What Upton Sinclair warned of in 1919 — journalism as a bought-and-sold racket — has metastasized into a fully corporatized, government-subsidized machine for silencing dissent.
Today’s fact-checkers are not protecting truth; they are protecting narratives and spreading lies. Whether it’s Voice of America*, Radio Liberty*, or a Facebook** feed, truth has been outsourced, fenced off, and filtered until only approved versions remain. Authentic voices — local journalists, whistleblowers, cultural insiders — are labelled “foreign agents,” “disinformation spreaders,” or simply erased.
This isn’t accidental. It’s not incompetence. It’s a deliberate policy. From Kari Lake’s push to staff U.S. international media with only “proper” Americans — even if they don’t speak the language — to the algorithmic suppression of inconvenient facts, we are witnessing a system designed to preserve control, not inform the public.
We now live in Springtime for Hitler journalism: a world where what began as parody is now embraced as policy. Absurdity has become the rule, and truth the enemy. The public doesn’t even recognize the joke anymore. Satire is misunderstood, facts are rebranded as conspiracy, and journalists fear a Facebook flag of suspicious content more than a Federal subpoena.
But there are still Brass Checkers: those who refuse the token, who write without prior approval or ordered articles, commentary, they who still question what isn’t allowed to be questioned.
They carry Upton Sinclair’s legacy forward by refusing to remain silent—not now, not ever
And when cracks appear — through whistleblowers, journalists, or anyone too close to Pentagon experiments — fact-checkers swarm in, stamping stories as “misleading,” “unverified,” or “against standards.”
Then we know there is something to the story, and that someone has dug up some semblance of truth, and had the audacity and backbone to publish it. The reality of fact-checking, echo chambers, and lack of transparency—epitomized by outlets like Myth Detector, the U.S. Treasury Department, and Politico targeting journalist—reveals a deliberate machine designed to sanitize dissent and protect narratives over facts.
But today’s elites know the playbook and know how to change the rules as needed. They aren’t risking bread riots, as was in France. Their strategy: kill information before people know they’re starving. The cages already exist — no need to call them camps. Fences, biometric scans, threat databases, and official spin say it’s all “for our safety.”
As fact-checkers label authentic voices as “disinformation spreaders” without primary evidence, and platforms yield to government pressures, the public is left with a filtered version of truth, reminiscent of the ‘Soma’ of Brave New World and the ‘Book Burning’ of Fahrenheit 451.
It is time for the public, at least those who still read, to take action, especially among those who value truth over control, and to expose the deliberate mechanisms—echo chambers, lack of transparency, and government-platform collusion—that threaten the soul of journalism and human development.
*- is recognized as a foreign agent in Russia, and its activity in the country is limited
**-banned in Russia
Seth Ferris, investigative journalist and political scientist, expert on Middle Eastern affairs
