Unbelievable. President Lula’s own party, the PT, is breaking the law and posting on X. They are like the pig rulers from Orwell’s “Animal Farm.” The laws don’t apply to them. This is a what totalitarianism looks like.
The biggest media company in Brazil, Globo, which has been demanding censorship, is also breaking the law and posting on X. Globo is a state-funded propaganda network. Lula increased government funding for Globo by 60%. This is grotesque. Brazil’s elites are lawless.
Brazil President @LulaOficial says he respects free speech, the rule of law, and free markets, but he doesn't. @LulaOficial and @Alexandre de Moraes are about block X and have just frozen the bank accounts of @ElonMusk 's @Starlink . Both acts are flagrantly illegal..
Brazil is now a dictatorship. It is run by two men, President @LulaOficial and Supreme Court Justice @Alexandre de Moraes. They are today ending both freedom of speech and free markets. Brazil is no longer safe for foreign investment and its currency should reflect that.
When I first saw this story, I thought it was fake news, but it's accurate. The story is from Globo News, which received a 60% increase of government money under @LulaOficial , and Valdo Cruz is a reporter who is very sympathetic to Lula and De Moraes.
The media says @KamalaHarris is strong, intelligent, and democratic enough to be president of the US.
But she's apparently not strong, intelligent, and democratic enough to hold a press conference or have a serious sit-down interview with a journalist since announcing her candidacy five weeks ago.
Democrats and the media defend Harris. @JamesCarville said, “Where is it written that you have to sit down for a press interview?” He's right. It's not.
But that's because nobody ever thought it needed to be written down.
In a democracy, politicians talking to reporters and taking questions directly from the people is an unstated norm. This norm has existed since before our founding as a nation.
In fact, that norm is ancient. It has existed for thousands of years. And isn't it "norms" that the media and Democrats constantly accuse Trump of violating?
By not talking to the public or the press, Harris is behaving like a dictator. And those defending her behavior are defending the most authoritarian and undemocratic political campaign in American history, one that started with Harris being appointed, not elected.
In June, Carville attacked the media as not biased enough. "F— your objectivity," he said. "The real objectivity in this country right now is we’re either going to have a Constitution or we’re not.”
Who are the real tyrants here? The ones avoiding hard questions? The ones bullying reporters into being even more one-sided?
Harris is avoiding the press and the public because she's terrible at talking in an open and democratic way.
You might think, "She doesn't have to be good at thinking on her feet to be a good president."
But she does. How will she be able to confront Xi and Putin and other tough foreign leaders if she's not comfortable speaking on her feet, whether privately or publicly? And how would Harris be able to claim to represent the will of the people if her campaign consisted entirely of one-sided propaganda?
The purpose of democracy is for the people to decide. The people can't decide if they can't ask hard questions of the people who want to rule them.
As such, Harris's behavior and that of her media and party enablers are neither smart, courageous, nor democratic. Shame on everyone who is encouraging this farce of a "strategy" to continue.
This is the third time in three presidential elections that Democratic Party elites have subverted democracy to choose a presidential candidate.
Why? Because it's a party controlled by the media, donors, and the deep state, not the people. It's a party of the societal elites known as the professional-managerial class.
However, one feels about the GOP, the same can't be said for Republicans. Republican voters rejected their own party leaders, donors, and the foreign policy establishment to nominate Trump for president in 2016.
Democrats by contrast sided with the establishment candidate in choosing Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.
Democratic Party elites have displayed authoritarian characteristics on COVID, climate change, and social media censorship. Progressive professionals treat their ideological and political views as settled science and demand that democracy defer to committees of credentialed experts.
They condemn Republicans as being in the grip of right wing authoritarianism. They are projecting. Research shows that it's progressive professionals who are highest in entitlement and grandiosity typical of narcissism and left wing authoritarianism.
They express their grandiosity when they claim to be saving democracy from Trump. They express their entitlement when they violate democratic norms to censor their opponents, manipulate elections, and attempt to incarcerate their enemies.
Now they are telling us that Kamala Harris should not have to speak to the people or to the press. It's disgraceful.
For now, we are still free. But Britain is imprisoning people for things they said online, censorship leaders are re-grouping in the U.S., and Brazil's government has forced X to close its office there. This is what the transition to global totalitarianism looks like.
Around the world, the crackdown on free speech is accelerating. In Britain, the courts are sentencing people to years in prison for things they posted on X, formerly Twitter. In the United States, the architects of the Censorship Industrial Complex are raising money for Kamala Harris in hopes of re-imposing government censorship on social media platforms after she wins.
And in Brazil, the government has forced X to end its operations after threatening to arrest X’s employees in Brazil if the company continues to refuse to permanently ban disfavored journalists, influencers, and elected political leaders from its platform. The Brazilian government may soon block access to X in Brazil, forcing its citizens to rely upon VPNs, or virtual private networks, in order to access X illegally.
On the one hand, none of these events appear to have anything in common. In Britain, there were riots triggered by misinformation that the killer of two children was an illegal immigrant. In the United States, the Censorship Industrial Complex emerged in reaction to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. And in Brazil, a single Supreme Court justice has taken it upon himself to demand extreme levels of censorship in reaction to the election of a populist president in 2018.
But at another level, all of these events are connected. Starmer, Harris, and Lula have all embraced the first and most important step toward totalitarianism, which is censorship. This is even more alarming given the events of the last few days, when Harris announced that she would seek price controls on food and a housing agenda that would significantly expand the role of the government without increasing supply.
I don’t think the labels of communist or fascist accurately describe the systems that Starmer, Harris, and Lula are creating. In some ways, those three leaders are drawing upon elements of both totalitarian systems. But trying to compare what’s happening now to what happened in the early 20th Century risks confusing us as to what is happening before our very eyes.
But I do think the label of totalitarianism is accurate to describe what these leaders are doing and where they appear to be headed.
Part of what’s so alarming about what they are doing is that they are melding together the demands of global capital and of Woke Leftists at the grassroots level. Both are driven by intolerance of free speech and free expression. Scarcely a day passes without the mainstream media attacking Elon Musk as a threat to democracy because he has allowed freedom of speech on X. Why are they doing that? Because the mainstream media are financed by and should be thought of as global capital’s marketing and propaganda operation.
And, as alarming, there is strong evidence that those leaders are and have been working together to impose a censorship industrial complex worldwide. Europe, Australia, and Brazil have all sought to ban and censor disfavored views and individuals not just in their home countries but worldwide. Over the last decade, these governments, politicians, and political parties have worked to coordinate their work at the United Nations, World Economic Forum, and other NGOs that operate across borders. And reporting by Public and others has uncovered collaboration between intelligence agencies in all three nations.
Media disinformation that populism poses a threat to democracy has increased the public’s support for online censorship. From 2018 to 2023, the share of Democrats who told Pew they wanted the government to engage in more censorship of disfavored online speech rose from 40% to 70%. An identical dynamic is occurring in Brazil and Britain, whereby the mainstream news media and Left-wing political activists have called for the censorship of their political enemies.
Friends, I’m sorry to say, but this is what the global transition to totalitarianism looks like. Big businesses, left-wing governments, and the legacy news media have made clear that they cannot tolerate free speech online. They grew accustomed to controlling public opinion first through the legacy media and then through Facebook, Google, and Twitter.
Global elites have made clear that they believe that freedom of speech on a single social media platform, and one that is far smaller than Facebook or Google, is intolerable. This desire for total control is the central characteristic of the totalitarianism that is presently emerging from elites at the corporate and political levels around the world.
In addition to pushing censorship, these leaders and global elites are seeking to overturn liberal democracies and impose a radically different system of iliberal rule in the Western world. Rather than meritocracy and equal justice for all, elites are seeking to impose a Woke racialist hierarchy that gives preferential treatment to some groups and prejudicial treatment to other groups supposedly based on historic oppression.
There are signs of hope. Recently, a group of censorsial advertisers called the group of advertisers, called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) disbanded after X sued them.
But X cannot defend freedom of speech alone. We need a global free speech movement to defend our fundamental freedom against tyranny. If we lose free speech we will lose everything else, including our civilization. The step between censorship and price controls and shortages will be a very small one.
We are working with our allies around the world to raise the alarm. In June we gathered free speech advocates from the United States, Britain, Brazil, and other countries, and we are now working together on a combined effort to stand up for freedom and against the tyrants.
If you’d like to support our work, please subscribe now to Public. If you can do more than that, please consider a tax-deductible donation to support the free speech movement.
The moment we have been warning about is approaching more rapidly than any of us expected.civilizationworks.org/donate
Germany is on the brink of becoming a police state.
"The Federal Ministry of the Interior wants to give the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) the right to secretly enter and search homes. The draft reform of the BKA law provides for the authority to secretly enter homes as an accompanying measure to online searches and source telecommunications surveillance. The draft has been made available to SPIEGEL."