Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Aug 7, 2024 3 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Tim Walz says he cares about public safety and freedom, but he doesn't. In 2020, he waited 3 days to deploy the National Guard to stop rioting. In 2022, he demanded censorship. Similar story for Newsom, Starmer, and Trudeau. They unleash anarchy and then demand tyranny.
For hundreds of years, liberals have been fierce opponents of authoritarianism. It has traditionally been liberals, not conservatives, who fought against restrictions on free speech, defended the right to privacy from the government, and fought abuses of power by government agencies. In contrast, conservatives have placed a higher value on maintaining social order and upholding traditional moral hierarchies.

But increasingly, it’s been liberal politicians who have demanded authoritarian restrictions on free speech and personal freedom. In December 2022, Democratic Vice Presidential candidate and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz claimed, “There's no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech and especially around our democracy.” In fact, the First Amendment protects both. And in 2020, Walz implemented a Covid snitch line and encouraged residents to report violations of pandemic restrictions.

It turns out he wasn’t alone. The Civil Rights Department of California Governor Gavin Newsom introduced last year a snitch line and urged citizens to report their fellow citizens for alleged hate speech. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has called for greater censorship of social media platforms, and British police have over the last few days arrested three people for what they posted online. And Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has demanded greater online censorship, froze bank accounts of protesting truckers, and is pushing legislation that could send a person to prison for life for speech.

Each of those men would defend such measures as required for public safety. They would argue that misinformation and hate speech online lead to real-world violence like the riots we have seen in Britain. COVID-19 transmission threatened public health. And something had to be done to peacefully end the trucker protest.

But none of those measures was required because there were other ways to deal with those problems. It is a gross simplification to attribute Britain’s recent riots to online misinformation and the best antidote to misinformation remains good information, not censorship. There was never any reason to think that people outside not wearing masks were a sufficient threat to public health to justify a snitch line reminiscent of Communist totalitarianism, violating both privacy and personal liberty. And, the government had other ways to end the trucker protest and indeed used them, making the bank freezing a gratuitous and authoritarian overreach.

What’s more, the authoritarian measures imposed by these leaders were highly selective in nature. None of the four politicians named demanded censorship of the misinformation and hate speech that spread after the killing of George Floyd, which one could argue contributed to the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots as much if not more than the ones over the last week in Britain. Nor have the politicians called for censorship to halt the sharp increase of illegal migration. And all of the politicians have adopted a different standard of policing of protests by BLM and other left-wing causes than for anti-immigration, Freedom Convoy truckers, and right-wing ones, which some have called “two-tier” policing.

In the case of gender, liberal politicians have pursued anarchy for medical professionals and tyranny for anyone who stands in the way of so-called “gender-affirming care.” On the one hand, liberal politicians like Walz and Newsom have championed the right of medical professionals to block puberty, prescribe cross-sex hormones, and perform surgeries. On the other, they have increasingly taken over from parents the right to decide what happens to their children.

As such, liberal politicians like Walz, Newsom, Trudeau, and Starmer are simultaneously creating greater authoritarianism and greater anarchy. This is in stark contrast to liberals in the past who fought authoritarianism and demanded greater free speech, personal freedom, and privacy. What exactly happened? How did liberals become advocates of anarcho-tyranny?Image
Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Michael Shellenberger

Michael Shellenberger Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @shellenberger

Jul 11
Whether @AGPamBondi , @FBIDirectorKash , and/or @FBIDDBongino stay or go, one thing is clear: the Trump admin. must release the Epstein Files. It's our God-given right to know. The issue has transcended partisanship, and neither the Right nor Left are moving on. Image
"This is the worst coverup of my lifetime... If you can get away with this, you really can get away with anything.

"If the government can tell people to not believe what they just said a few months ago and have everyone be fine with that.

"That's a level of gaslighting that I refuse to be a part of.

"Never forget, they just promised us names in the release of the Epstein files." @coffeebreak_YT

This is essential viewing:

"The Worst Coverup Of My Lifetime."
"The Story Keeps Changing"

This is also essential watching. Just see for yourself the statements people have been making, and how their stories changed dramatically.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 10
Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz just now: " I know for a fact [Epstein] documents are being suppressed and they're being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals, I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them, but I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But, hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong."

@SeanSpicer : “Just out of curiosity, without names, are these politicians, business leaders…”

Dershowtiz: “Both. Everything.”
The lip synching is messed up but it's real and not AI. Here's the original:

Correction: The video is from 3 months ago. @seanspicer posted it just now.
Read 4 tweets
Jul 7
Within minutes of Texas floods killing dozens of girls, the media said it was because of Trump budget cuts and climate change. In truth, the deaths occurred in “one of the highest flood-prone regions in the entire state,” warnings were issued, and the underlying cause was the failure to install flood warning sirens. Climate journalists are cultists.Image
Image
Image
Image
These people are shameless Image
Image
Image
Read 5 tweets
Jul 6
Trump cuts to the National Weather Service, and climate change, are to blame for the Texas flood deaths, said the media yesterday. Today, most admit NWS did its job. The real problem was the lack of a flood warning system. Those who blame the climate are trapped in a weird cult.
Per capita flooding deaths in Texas declined dramatically:

"As the population of Texas increased from ~9.2 million in 1958 to ~28.6 million in 2018, overall flood deaths remained fairly constant, meaning that the fatality rate dropped by about two-thirds." @RogerPielkeJr Image
More Pielke: "The flooding was certainly extreme but it should not have been historically unexpected. The documented record of extreme flooding in “flash flood alley” goes back several centuries, with paleoclimatology records extending that record thousands of years into the past.

"Consider the figure above, from a classic 1940 historical text on U.S. floods, which shows that the same region of Texas that experienced this week’s floods has long been known to be a bullseye for flash flooding. In fact, almost a century before Hoyt and Langbein, Texas experienced one of the greatest losses of life in U.S. history related to extreme weather.

"In 1846, in the months after Texas became a U.S. state, massive flooding compounded the many problems facing thousands of recent immigrants from Germany who had been settled in New Braunfels, Texas, which was significantly impacted by this week’s floods.

"According to a contemporaneous 1846 account, cited in a fantastic 2006 PhD dissertation on flooding in Texas by William Keith Guthrie, at the University of Kansas, 'The Guadalupe [River] would often rise fifteen feet above its normal stand after these heavy rains, carrying with it in its swift torrent a number of large trees, uprooted farther up the hills. Smaller brooks, ordinarily not containing flowing water, became raging torrents which could be crossed only by swimming.'"Image
Read 5 tweets
Jun 29
The website of NYC mayoral frontrunner says he'll "shift the tax burden" to "whiter neighborhoods." When asked about his openly racist agenda, @ZohranKMamdani insists it's not a proposal at all but rather "a description of what we see right now." That's next-level gaslighting.😬
This guy's ability to lie so calmly while smiling should send chills up the spines of every New Yorker.

He could have taken it down and said, "You know, I regret that the website said that and so I deleted it, because it doesn't express what I believe."

Instead, he's just asked millions of New Yorkers to believe his own obviously flagrant lie rather than their own eyes. That's creepy and wrong.

Everyone can see for themselves that he used a gratuitous racial reference regarding a tax proposal. We don't tax people on race. So why use it? Because he and his campaign wanted to introduce race.

And it's not the first time. @ZohranKMamdani should delete his flagrantly racist tweets and web site language, apologize, and promise to never invoke racism in these ways again.Image
Image
The audacity of @ZohranKMamdani to cite Dr. Martin Luther King should make your skin crawl. King adamantly rejected anti-white racism.

Mamdani’s call for higher taxes on white neighborhoods should shock New Yorkers. If they elect him as Mayor then they will have no excuses. He’s made clear that he will advance a racist agenda and then demand that people believe his lies.
Read 6 tweets
Jun 28
The idea that former Intelligence Community officials are working with European leaders to censor the Internet sounds like a conspiracy theory, but over the last two days, Obama’s CIA Director plotted with UK, EU, and Irish officials in Dublin to do precisely that. Image
These people are a direct and imminent threat to free speech and democracy worldwide. They are dangerous and out of control:

Former CIA Director John Brennan helped initiate the Trump-Russia collusion hoax. He used foreign spies to help trigger the FBI investigation of of the Trump campaign. And he manipulated the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment to falsely claim the Russians favored Trump over Clinton.

Niamh Hodnett, Ireland’s “Online Safety Commissioner,” leads Ireland’s censorship regime under the Online Safety and Media Regulation Act, which mirrors EU and U.S.-backed models shaped by intelligence-linked NGOs.

Aine Kerr, a Former Facebook Policy Manager, helped manage Facebook’s public policy as it partnered with U.S. intelligence agencies post-2016, then co-founded Kinzen, which received support from EU and transatlantic institutions focused on content surveillance. Her work connects platform moderation with state-funded narrative monitoring.

Nóirín O’Sullivan, a Former Garda (Irish police) Commissioner and EUROPOL Official, who went from leading Ireland’s national police to a senior role at EUROPOL, which works closely with intelligence and security services across Europe. She advocates for integrating security principles into online content governance.

Claire Loftus, Ireland’s Former Director of Public Prosecutions, oversaw prosecutions during a period of expanding legal efforts to criminalize online expression and misinformation. Her presence signals an effort to align the judiciary with state-backed censorship.

Robyn Simcox, the UK Commissioner for Countering Extremism,
operates within the UK Home Office, a department with direct ties to MI5 and GCHQ. She frames conspiracy theories and misinformation as forms of radicalization and demands surveillance and preemptive regulation. Her office channels intelligence priorities into speech policing under the banner of counter-extremism.Image
Image
Image
Image
Brennan triggered the Trump-Russia collusion hoax
Read 10 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(