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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
@shellenberger
Oct 18, 2023 • 15 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X
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The mainstream media insist that the Censorship Industrial Complex is a conspiracy theory, but it's not. It's real. And, now, 138 artists, journalists, and public intellectuals from around the world, and from Left to Right, are calling on governments to dismantle it. Image
Introducing the Westminster Declaration

One hundred and thirty-eight public intellectuals and journalists demand governments dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex

by @shellenberger @mtaibbi @NAffects @lwoodhouse & @galexybrane
Home page of The Westminster Declaration ()

In March of this year, two of us, Matt and Michael, testified to Congress about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex comprised of government agencies, non-governmental organizations, and Big Tech companies working together to suppress disfavored views and disfavored people.

At that hearing and ever since, elected members of Congress, the mainstream news media, and the NGOs have argued that there is no Censorship Complex, just people doing research into and trying to correct misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation.

But now, a group of 138 scholars, public intellectuals, and journalists from across the political spectrum have issued a strong call warning the public of the Censorship Industrial Complex and urging governments to dismantle it in the name of the “first liberty,” freedom of speech. It’s called The Westminster Declaration.

How did it come about?
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Please subscribe now to support the free speech movement and to read the rest of the article!






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And please read The Westminster Declaration!

westminsterdeclaration.org
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New York Post

"Whatever your political bent, this new form of speech control is a threat to you. Only by debating freely in a rapidly fragmenting world can we resolve differences without resorting to violence."

Thank you @mirandadevine ! 🌹❤️

nypost.com/2023/10/18/wit…
Times Of London

Rishi Sunak warned over ‘censorship of ordinary people’ on social media

thetimes.co.uk/article/rishi-…
Telegraph (Front Page)

Social media firms are silencing free speech with 'disinformation' claims, Sunak told

Over a hundred academics, historians and journalists have warned the PM against censoring free speech, in a statement delivered to No 10

"Their intervention comes after The Telegraph revealed that a secretive government unit was flagging criticism of lockdown as Covid 'disinformation'.

"The Counter Disinformation Unit, which operated out of Whitehall, worked with intelligence agencies to monitor the online posts of journalists and members of the public.

"At least three people whose legitimate opinions about Covid were flagged by government monitors have co-signed the statement sent to Mr Sunak, which warned that labels such as “disinformation” were being abused."

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La Verità: Il manifesto a difesa della libertà di espressione
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La Verità: Il manifesto a difesa della libertà di espressione
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La Verità: "Il manifesto a difesa della libertà di espressione"
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laverita.info/westminster-de…
France-Soir: "DECLARATION POUR LA TRANSPARENCE ET LE DROIT A L'INFORMATION"

francesoir.fr/opinions-tribu…
France-Soir: "DECLARATION POUR LA TRANSPARENCE ET LE DROIT A L'INFORMATION"

francesoir.fr/opinions-tribu…
Welt: Wir kommen von links, rechts und aus der Mitte und sind zutiefst besorgt über die zunehmende Zensur

welt.de/kultur/plus248…

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More from @shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Jan 25
Most of the debate since yesterday has focused, understandably, on whether the ICE agent acted in what he perceived to be self-defense. Whatever the case, it’s clear that, by encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations, the Left is getting people killed. Image
A Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minnesota shot a second person dead yesterday. Most of the debate since then has focused, understandably, on whether the ICE agent acted in what he perceived to be self-defense.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that, by encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations, the Left is getting people killed. Videos show both victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, impeding law enforcement operations, which progressive nonprofits, Democrats, and liberal influencers have been encouraging for months.

Good drove her vehicle perpendicular to block traffic while her partner taunted ICE officers. Pretti intervened at least twice, first by waving traffic through on the street and again as an ICE officer sought to subdue another person interfering in the operation, triggering the agent to use pepper spray against him.

In saying this, I am not defending the decisions and behaviors of the ICE officers or anyone else. The killings are a tragedy. And there is a worthwhile debate underway over ICE tactics, separate from the specific behaviors of Good and Pretti.

We don’t know what was in the minds of Good and Pretti specifically, but Democrats, progressives, and anti-ICE activists have for years called ICE and the Trump administration fascist and compared them to the Nazis. On January 19, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called ICE “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Last year, in California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to block ICE from hiding its identities. The Los Angeles mayor called them a “reign of terror.” And a few days ago, the Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota urged citizens to “put your body on the line” to block ICE protests.

Walz and other Democrats have blocked state and local law enforcement from working with ICE, which has contributed to increasingly risky behavior by anti-ICE activists like Good and Pretti, and thus growing danger to everyone involved. There were no Minneapolis police visible in the videos of the Good and Pretti deaths.

And many of America’s largest progressive cities and states are all openly defiant of federal law, declaring themselves “sanctuaries” that protect illegal migrants from the federal government.

California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and others are “sanctuary states”. At the same time, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Newark, Jersey City, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Durham, Asheville, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Reno, are “sanctuary cities.”

The underlying problem is that for decades, schools, Hollywood, and the media have made clear that we should risk and even sacrifice our own lives to stop fascism and Nazism. And yet neither ICE raids nor Trump are fascist, and it is offensive to compare them to the Nazis.

The Nazis rounded up Jewish citizens and shipped them to death camps. ICE, by contrast, is detaining foreigners who the government believes committed criminal offenses beyond coming to the US illegally. No nation in the world has allowed more people to enter illegally. Nor has any treated them with greater due process than the US is doing.

The American people elected Trump president, like it or not, and the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in Article VI establishes that federal law prevails over conflicting state or local laws. It ensures the Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land,” binding state courts and governments. The ICE raids may be bad politics, but there is no question that they are constitutional.

While some Democrats and progressives know their language is hyperbolic, half of the individuals surveyed told pollsters last year that Trump is a fascist. Such radical beliefs appear to have partly motivated two assassination attempts against Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

While the radical Left has for decades called its political opponents fascists, these views were until recently marginal views, even within the Democratic Party. Moreover, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton all spoke out against illegal migration until 2016. So what changed? Why did so many Americans come to view a democratically elected president and law enforcement operations as equivalent to fascism? What radicalized the Left?

Part of the answer is bad information. Many progressives believe ICE is simply sweeping up hard-working and law-abiding immigrants, and do not know that 64 percent of immigrants detained since Trump took office in January 2025 had criminal convictions or pending charges, in addition to having broken the law by entering and working in the country without a visa.

For some, labeling Trump as a fascist was simply a political tactic and not something they believed. But many others believe it, as the polling data shows.

Many people, both liberals and conservatives, believe progressives like Good and Pretti are acting out of empathy and sympathy for migrants. But if they are, it is purely ideologically driven, not from any real-world understanding of migrant communities. Few of the white progressives protesting ICE have ever spoken more than a few words to much less gotten to know illegal immigrants, even those who work for them as cleaners, cooks, and gardeners, much less come to understand their lives...

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🎯
Read 15 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 23, 2025
So “60 Minutes” straight up lied. Plus, they could have gone to a White House press briefing or asked Trump after a cabinet meeting or on Air Force One. They chose not to. Totally unethical & irresponsible behavior. @bariweiss was right to hold the piece.
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Almost like there’s a pattern here
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 22, 2025
It was "corporate censorship" for CBS @bariweiss to delay her story, says "60 Minutes" reporter Sharyn Alfonsi. But Alfonsi presented no evidence to support her allegation. And Alfonsi has a history of biased reporting that even liberal "fact-checkers" denounced as inaccurate. Image
In April of 2021, CBS’s “60 Minutes” falsely claimed that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis exclusively chose Publix, a major Florida supermarket chain, to distribute Covid vaccines because it had donated to his political campaign.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz, a Democrat who helped oversee the state’s vaccine distribution at the time, repeatedly debunked the accusation. He did so first in response to a March 2, 2021, Miami Herald piece.

“This idea why @Publix was picked has been utter nonsense,” Moskowitz wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “We reached out to all pharmacies and they were the only one who at the time could execute on the mission.”

On April 4, the day the “60 Minutes” segment aired, Moskowitz tweeted, “@60Minutes I said this before and I’ll say it again. @Publix was recommended by @FLSERT and @HealthyFla as the other pharmacies were not ready to start. Period! Full Stop! No one from the Governor’s office suggested Publix. It’s just absolute malarkey.”

Now, the same reporter who did the flawed DeSantis piece, Sharyn Alfonsi, has accused her employer of censoring her story about deportees El Salvador’s prison. “The public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship,” Alfonsi wrote in an email to her colleagues that has been viewed four million times on X.

However, Alfonsi offered no evidence to support her allegation of “corporate censorship,” implying that people to whom Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss reports caused her to delay the piece.

Neither Weiss nor Alfonsi responded to a request for comment. If either does, we will update this story immediately. Moreover, we will report any evidence that we or others find that shows that corporate executives above Weiss directed her to kill the story. So far, there is none.

And an editorial decision is not the same as censorship, particularly since Weiss said she is delaying, not killing, the segment.

Alfonsi, in her leaked email, said she tried to get a response from the Trump administration but couldn’t, which was one of the reasons Weiss cited in her email to CBS staff for holding back the piece.

An experienced television news journalist, who has been in the business for three decades, said CBS could have done what it has often done in the past, which is to ask a Trump official at one of the many press availabilities.

“They could have sent a CBS reporter to the White House press briefing,” the person said, or had a reporter ask President Trump directly during one of his frequent press conferences at the White House and on Air Force One. The CBS website shows that it has at least six full-time reporters at the White House.

“The episode shows Sharyn’s poor investigative skills,” the person added. “She should have doorstepped the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security or sent someone to the White House.”

To “doorstop” a person is when a journalist confronts someone, such as a senior government official, often when they are coming or going into their workplace.

“Sharyn could have gone to the briefing herself, or CBS could have gone in and said ‘CBS has finished an investigation. Here are the allegations. How do you respond?’”

Alfonsi falsely claimed in her segment that DeSantis gave an “exclusive” to Publix. Floridians could get the Covid vaccine from many different sources, including county health departments, other major pharmacy chains including CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart, and mass vaccination drive-thru sites with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Three major liberal or left-wing fact-checking organizations and the liberal Boston public TV station WGBH all criticized the piece. “60 Minutes’ misses the mark in its story about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and COVID-19 vaccines,” wrote Poynter. “A sloppy moment on Sunday’s show is raising serious concerns.”

Wrote Politifact, “While “60 Minutes” focused on his emphatic denial, it left out the background that he offered about how the state had been working with other retail pharmacies to distribute coronavirus vaccines at long-term care facilities in December and his own interactions with Publix customers.”

Said the progressive Media Nation, “It’s a rare day when we encounter as blatant an example of liberal media bias as in the “60 Minutes” report last Sunday on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis…Unfortunately, the botched story on DeSantis, a Republican, will be cited by conservatives for a long time as evidence that you just can’t trust the media.”

And a Boston CBS News reporter said, “If you’re going to smear someone by guilt-by-association, or pay-to-play, which is about the most serious offense a public official can engage in, you better have the facts in a row. If you don’t, you’d best leave it out.”

There are other signs of “60 Minutes” bias....

x.com/shellenberger/…

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Here is the liberal Boston PBS member station segment on Sharyn Alfonsi's biased and inaccurate story. Every single person in it criticizes Alfonsi's piece about Ron DeSantis' vaccine roll-out.

Nobody who looks at this walks away thinking that Alfonsi did anything other than an irresponsible hit piece.
Read 4 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 10, 2025
Days before last year’s election, the media claimed Trump wanted to kill Liz Cheney, which we debunked at the time. @BBC has now admitted it was a lie. @CNN should do the same. Notably, BBC & CNN have, for years, promoted censorship of their competitors for “misinformation.” Image
The media around the world demand government censorship on the basis of the disinformation it produces on Trump, covid, climate, gender, Ukraine, etc. The EU is currently paying European media to act as “trusted flaggers” — censors — of social media.
It’s digital totalitarianism.
A Norwegian newspaper spread misinformation about the demolition of the Nord Stream pipeline and Facebook censored on the basis of that censorship

x.com/shellenberger/… x.com/shellenberger/…
Read 6 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Dec 2, 2025
Marco Rubio is the most powerful Secretary of State since Kissinger. As such, it is significant that he believes the US has recovered alien tech and given it to private military contractors. A senior Rubio advisor says, “We’re headed toward massive disclosure.” Image
Since May of this year, Marco Rubio has served in a dual role as President Donald Trump’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State. The National Security Advisor is the President’s principal in-house advisor on all national security matters, chairs the National Security Council, coordinates the interagency process across the government, and briefs the President daily.

As Secretary of State, Rubio negotiates treaties, appoints and directs ambassadors, controls the $84 billion State Department and USAID budget, oversees 80,000 employees at more than 270 diplomatic posts worldwide, and has direct authority over diplomatic security, intelligence sharing, sanctions enforcement, and emergency evacuations of U.S. citizens abroad.

The last official to hold both such positions was Henry Kissinger from 1973 to 1975. For Rubio, who was also the former ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, to play both roles reflects President Trump’s high confidence in him.

As such, it is significant that Rubio believes that elements within the US government have recovered technology from a nonhuman intelligence, reverse-engineered it, and let private military contractors take control of it in ways that could be undermining national security and result in a Pearl Harbor-like event.

“The real risk in transferring technology that is not useful to us today to a corporate entity over decades,” says Rubio, “is that the corporate entity comes to basically possess and control access to it for their own purposes, not for the purposes of national security.”

Nick Pope, who investigated Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) for the UK Ministry of Defence, said, “It’s hard to overstate the significance of [Rubio’s] statement. Rubio’s remarks are so forthright that one could speculate they’re officially-authorized prelude to Disclosure, to test the waters ahead of an official, Presidential announcement.”

The State Department declined to provide an on-the-record comment to Public for this story. A spokesperson for the Department of War said it had no “verifiable information to substantiate claims that any U.S. government or private company programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials and technology have existed in the past or exist currently...."

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

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Any true skeptic of this issue should want significantly more government transparency and disclosure on UAP. Anyone arguing against greater transparency and disclosure is telling you that they want to continue the cover-up.

If you belive that this is all a dangerous delusion and social contagion resulting from years of government disinfo to cover up secret weapons programs, which has now infected the highest levels of government, then you should be the loudest advocate for UAP transparency and disclosure in the world.

The secrecy has gone on for too long. It is destablizing for our highest security, defense, and intelligence officials say one thing to journalists and filmmakers and for the DOD to say something completely different. The State Department, CIA, ODNI, and White House all declined to comment publicly for my piece. We need our government officials to be honest about what is going on.

There is no security justification for this level of secrecy. We are free people governed by a constitution that protects us against unaccountable government actors. We must fight to maintain that status.Image
Read 7 tweets
Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Nov 18, 2025
We can trust Oracle to centralize our data in a single place to create digital IDs, says Larry Ellison. We can't. Thanks to a "previously unknown & widespread vulnerability" in Oracle's "E-Business Suite software" thousands of us recently had our personal data stolen. Image
"The Washington Post... didn’t explain why it took almost a month to determine the amount of data stolen and has not responded to multiple requests for comment." @JeffBezos @CyberScoopNews Image
@JeffBezos @CyberScoopNews "Oracle quietly admits data breach, days after lawsuit accused it of cover-up" Image
Read 10 tweets

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