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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Nov 6, 2021 • 16 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X
The mayors of many progressive cities act helpless to stop the spread of homeless encampments, but Boston's mayor proves they can be humanely shut down so long as you a) recognize they're actually open air drug scenes & b) stand up to @ACLU

bostonglobe.com/2021/11/05/met… Image
Almost everything people believe about "homelessness" is wrong. The word "homeless" is a propaganda word designed to mislead you into thinking the people on the street are there because they are poor rather than because they are suffering from untreated mental illness & addiction
Don't take my word for it.

"It was advocates who coined the phrase, ‘homeless,'" the U of Penn's Dennis Culhane, America's leading academic homelessness expert, told me. “They’re the ones who thought ‘homeless’ would be a soft, fluffy term for the public to be sympathetic to.” ImageImageImage
“The anti-homelessness movement chose the term ‘homelessness,' as opposed to ‘transient,’ ‘indigent,’ etc. for its implication that the biggest difference between the homeless & the housed was lack of shelter," wrote left-wing anthropologist Teresa Gowan.

amazon.com/Hobos-Hustlers…
Words are powerful. The word “homeless” not only makes us think of housing, it also makes us *not* think of addiction.

The news media participated, using Great Depression metaphors to frame homelessness as poverty since the 1980s.
Progressives say it's somehow more kind to totally misdescribe the reason people are on the street, but it's not kind at all. In fact, it's actively harmful. What other disease do we justify misrepresenting in service of a political agenda? The result is the denial of proper care
Boston's progressive mayor shows that this might finally be starting to change. They are providing shelter to street addicts and requiring people to use it, or sleep somewhere else. And they are offering drug treatment & psych care to those who need it.

bostonglobe.com/2021/11/05/met… ImageImage
Boston's mayor has been aided by honest reporting:
"The area is currently an open-air narcotics market where multiple overdoses are a daily reality. Reports of violence & sexual exploitation are common. Two tent fires have been reported and there have been at least 6 homicides" Image
Could something similar happen in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Austin, Philadelphia, Denver, and other cities where people are being exploited, raped, and abused in open drug scenes?

Of course it could. It's just a matter of political will.
We have known for decades that the only way to close open drug scenes is through a combination of social services and the police

Against the misinformation of some progressives, that's what Portugal, Netherlands & other European nations did:

bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.11…
Today, at 12 noon, residents of the Tenderloin neighborhood, where San Francisco's largest open air drug scene has created chaos, will march & protest

"We are immigrants & refugees... small business owners. We are the Tenderloin and you have failed us."

hoodline.com/2021/11/reside… Image
“Like most children who live in the Tenderloin, my granddaughter is scared to walk outside," said one organizer. “We have been treated as a containment zone for decades and it is time to stop."

hoodline.com/2021/11/reside…
Our @calif_peace Coalition will attend

We are:

- parents of street addicts
- parents of kids killed by fentanyl
- recovering addicts
- community leaders

We demand

- end open drug scenes
- universal psych
- Shelter First, Housing Earned

Learn more

californiapeacecoalition.org
At 11 am, Tuesday, November 30, @calif_peace will protest SF's deadly open drug scene

At least seven of us, including parents of kids at risk of dying from fentanyl, will commit nonviolent civil disobedience

To participate in the protest or civil disobedience, please DM me
Years from now we will look back at the rise of drug deaths from 17k to 96k between 2000 & 2020 as a period of collective insanity

We will view it as outrageous that we let our brothers & sisters die preventable deaths because progressives were misled & cowed by drug ideologues
Let the courage of Boston's liberal mayor inspire us. She is, so far, standing firm against @ACLU & other drug fatalists.

May her action be the beginning of the end of victimology, the noxious ideology that has become, literally, the death of us

/end

michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/the-reason-t…

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 19
The government didn’t censor anyone on Covid, say the media. But it did. Facebook’s Zuckerberg even said he regretted giving in to the government's demands. And now, new documents reveal that the Dept. of Homeland Security may have broken the law by hunting down Covid wrongthink. Image
Department Of Homeland Security Illegally Targeted Covid Dissent, New Documents Suggest

DHS’s cybersecurity agency went far beyond its congressional mandate in hunting wrongthink and monitoring emotions

by @galexybrane & @shellenberger
Chris Krebs, founding director of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security; President Barack Obama; Jen Easterly, Director of CISA (GETTY IMAGES)

The idea that intelligence and security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others have been involved in the surveillance and censorship of the American people is a conspiracy theory, according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was not a victim of government censorship, says NBC News. There was simply no “Censorship Industrial Complex” or government-coordinated activity that targeted American citizens’ speech and violated the First Amendment, mainstream journalists and commentators agree.

But there was and is a Censorship Industrial Complex. The Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of DHS expanded its mandate in January 2017, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, to cover election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. This would eventually entail protecting “cognitive security” by combating mis- and disinformation. DHS asked four government-funded think tanks to flag “misinformation,” which was often simply political speech that Democrats didn’t like, and together with DHS urge social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to delete, suppress, or censor it in some other way. In 2020 and 2021, the four government contractors worked hand-in-glove with DHS and other government agencies to pressure social media platforms to engage in political censorship.

Defenders of those efforts say they weren’t engaged in censorship and that the Supreme Court agrees with them. Representatives from these Big Four counter-misinformation NGOs say they did not censor anyone, nor could they, since they didn’t operate the social media platforms. They simply did what anyone could do which was to flag misinformation to the social media companies. No government agency ever threatened to harm a social media platform that refused the offers of help from NGOs engaged in counter-misinformation. And the Supreme Court ruled that government officials have long been free to try to persuade the publishers, reporters, and editors at newspapers and thus were and are free to do the same with social media platforms. “CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship,” a Senior Advisor for Public Affairs told Public. “Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

In truth, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire,” said Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Senior Facebook executives worried that the Biden administration would not help Facebook deal with its problems complying with European regulations if it didn’t censor vaccine hesitancy.

And CISA did not refute any of Public’s allegations; it simply dismissed them. That may be because there is no dispute over the basic facts of the situation. DHS and the censorship NGOs persuaded the social media giants to give them unique and special status for flagging disfavored election and Covid content in 2020 and 2021 through a special ticketing (Jira) system. Ordinary members of the public not only did not have access to this system, nobody outside the small government-organized censorship clique knew it existed.

The head of the Stanford censorship program said its function was to “fill in the gap of things the government couldn’t do.” And there was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford’s flagging and censorship operation. CISA’s Director and the Director of one of the Big Four censorship groups texted each other “with some regularity,” according to a staffer. A CISA official named Brian Scully was in a Signal messaging group with at least one Stanford intern and Twitter’s content team.

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.
“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

Why, then, did it do it? How did an organization supposedly focused on cybersecurity end up tracking and orchestrating the censorship of disfavored Covid information?

Please, subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the rest of the article!

x.com/shellenberger/…Image
Image
Thank you and bravo to @America1stLegal for their discovery of these damning documents, which show @CISAgov @CISACyber going far beyond its congressional mandate.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 18
Biden says there’s no “sense of danger” in the repeated invasions of the air space above homes and military bases by unidentified drones. That’s a ridiculous and terrifying lie. Of course there is. Protecting our air space has been one of America’s highest priorities for 80 years Image
From Biden to Mayorkas to DOD spokesperson, the US government officials are flagrantly lying to the American people and nobody knows this more than US military base commanders and the men and women who work in the military.
If you are in the military, Intelligence Community, or other US government agency and know something about these drones, please contact me to shine the light on the wrongdoing.

Encrypted email: michaelshellenberger@proton.me

I will go to prison to protect my sources.
Read 11 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 14
Biden officials @AliMayorkas & John Kirby said, " We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace" and "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace," but US officials have reported drones at Langley, Edwards, Earle, & many other sites.
Drones penetrated restrict airspace at Langley, Norfolk, Edwards, and Nevada National Security Site.

This was heavily reported and so it's very odd for Kirby to make his claim on Thursday and for Mayorkas to repeat it on Friday.

wsj.com/politics/natio…
Now perhaps Kirby and Mayorkas were only referring to the recent drone sightings in New Jersey.

But in NJ there are official reports from Picatinny Arsenal and Naval Weapons Station Earle of drone incursions in recent weeks.

nypost.com/2024/12/12/us-…Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 7
There is an epidemic of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we must block the puberty of children born in the wrong bodies to prevent them from killing themselves, the Russians control Trump through a sex blackmail operation, the Covid vaccine prevents infection, millions or billions will die from starvation and harsh weather from climate change, there's no way a Covid virus could have escaped from a lab, mass migration improves societies with no trade-offs, it's best for addicts if we give them hard drugs to use in special sites downtown, we need the government to fight misinformation online in order to save democracy, Biden is sharper than ever, Kamala is 100% prepared to be president, and anyone who disagrees is racist, sexist, and/or fascist.

While many Americans are increasingly and at least partially aware that all of the above are lies, we are still a long way from coming to grips with their enormity, their monstrous consequences, and the totalitarian ways in which the mainstream news media, many employers, and governments demanded that we believe them. Current and former heads of state, our most-trusted journalists, and full professors at Ivy League universities created and propagated those Big Lies, repeatedly, for years, even after they had been thoroughly debunked, sometimes within days or hours of them being made, by people who ruling elites then sought to bankrupt, shame, and ostracize.

There has not yet been a proper accounting of the very many abuses of power, including the Big Lies, by elected officials, the media, and other governing elites during the Woke Reign of Terror (2013 - 2024). That accounting will need not only to thoroughly debunk all of the major lies, it will also need to explore why elites created and perpetuated them, why so many people believed them, why they lasted for so long, and what can be learned from them, both separately and how they worked together as a whole, constituting the worldview of the people who run Western societies and nations. Historians, sociologists, psychologists and many others will, for centuries, study the Work Reign of Terror as a uniquely irrational and self-destructive period in America's history. Hopefully something good, including wisdom, courage, and improved self-governance, will come out of those studies and reflections.
Woke Religion: A TaxonomyImage
Woke Psychopathology: A TaxonomyImage
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 22
The Australian PM @AlboMP wants global censorship to counter misinformation. But only free speech can counter misinformation. Please share this to affirm your opposition to his awful bill!
Was the censorship bill a head fake to jam through Digital ID? 🤔
👀 Image
Read 6 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 21
I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.
Spot on:

Very concerning

Read 7 tweets

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