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Michael Shellenberger Profile picture
Michael Shellenberger
@shellenberger
CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship & Free Speech @UAustinOrg : Dao Journalism Winner : Time, "Hero of Environment" : Author, “Apocalypse Never,” "San Fransicko"
694 subscribers
Feb 20 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
For weeks the media have insisted that Trump and Elon were lying about rampant government fraud, waste, or abuse. Finally WSJ admits that “wasteful spending… isn’t hard to find.” Ya think? Image Both of these examples of disinformation were published today Image
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Feb 14 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
JD Vance is right: the greatest threat to free speech and democracy in the Western world comes from Europe. This week, I warned of the global axis of censorship, and why America must stand up for our founding values. It is inspiring to see the Trump admin. center free speech! Bravo @JDVance !

Feb 12 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
The New York Times says “Musk Asserts Without Proof That Bureaucracy Is Rife With Fraud.” Seriously? The GAO — under Biden — estimated last year that we are losing $233-$521 billion *per year* to fraud. Guys, it’s right there. Why do you continue with this… fraud? SMH Image
Image Seriously, why do you guys keep doing this? Everyone can see you’re lying. It’s pathological.
Feb 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
For decades, presidents said they told us everything they could about Covid, JFK, Epstein, UAPs and more. They lied. Trump promised real disclosure and now @realannapaulina says, “We’ve been treated like children for too long,” and will disclose! LFG! 🔥

.@realannapaulina is right: the only way to repair the trust lost between the American people and those we entrust with our security is for a historic process of disclosure of information that should no longer remain secret. Image
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Feb 7 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
The American people elected Trump and he has authority over the Dept of Ed, not Congress. Its oversight duties don’t mean its members can storm executive branch buildings. Radicalized members, not Trump, are the ones threatening the separation of powers.

The members of Congress are saying they’re entitled to enter the building because they are members of Congress. Nope. That’s not what our Constitution says.

Left-wing authoritarianism overlaps exactly with narcissism. That’s what’s on display above. Most obnoxious people in DC Image
Feb 5 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The CIA has offered employees eight months pay and benefits to leave. Great start. After that, Director @JohnRatcliffe can clean house. The CIA illegally spied on the 2016 Trump campaign, hid Covid's origins, and spread disinformation about the Hunter Biden laptop. Image The U.S. Intelligence Community said in January 2017 that Russia favored Trump as president. It didn't. The CIA "cooked the intelligence" to hide that Vladamir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, as president.

Feb 4 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Forty-three paragraphs into the NYT's latest hit piece on @elonmusk, the six (!) by-lined reporters reveal that the federal government lost $236 billion to apparent fraud ("improper payments") in 2023 alone. Maybe this isn't the dunk you guys thought it was? Image It takes a village Image
Jan 29 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
The media said "gender affirming care" relied on good science. It didn't. The internal files of trans medical group WPATH proved that. And now, Trump's ban on government support for chemical & surgical mutilation of children recognizes that WPATH is junk science. Awesome. Image "Ending Reliance on Junk Science. The harm done to children by chemical & surgical mutilation cloaks itself in medical necessity, spurred by guidance from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), which lacks scientific integrity"
whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
Jan 28 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The office of Calif. Gov. @GavinNewsom said that none of the $50M in taxpayer money would be used to protect criminals from deportation. But then, when pressed, the "officials could not make the guarantee." Nor could they say how they'd prevent the money from being abused. Image One of the main reasons the LA fires became unnecessarily catastrophic is because @GavinNewsom and @MayorOfLA defunded fire prevention and fire fighting. They instead spent hundreds of millions to increase homelessness, who cause over half of all LA fires
Jan 20 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
Biden pardoned Fauci. He says it’s not an admission of guilt. But if Fauci were innocent, no pardon would be needed. The evidence suggests Fauci helped create the Covid pandemic, and then covered it up. The investigation must go forward. All Covid & Fauci Files must be released. Fauci led an aggressive disinformation effort to discredit the lab leak hypothesis. If the Covid virus didn’t escape from the lab, why did he deliberately spread false or misleading information about it? Why did he repeatedly interfere in the investigation?
Jan 17 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Strong words from LA fire fighters to the chief: "[I]f you had done things right... fatalities would have been reduced, property would have been saved....the preventive systems... were nonexistent... We attribute this to... lack of experience, arrogance, inability to lead..." Another good scoop by @RichMcHugh @NewsNation

Jan 15 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
January 2: National Weather Service (NWS) warns of “extreme fire weather conditions” in Los Angeles

Jan. 3: NWS repeats warning in special LA briefing

Jan. 4: LA Mayor Karen Bass flies to Ghana on junket

Jan. 7: LA goes up in flames as Bass poses for photos at cocktail party Image January 2: "...extreme fire weather conditions... Potential Fire Weather Risk" Image
Jan 9 • 5 tweets • 5 min read
Over the next few weeks you’re going to hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles.

Those will be lies. They could have prevented them. Governor Newsom cut the funding for preventing forest fires and failed to build sufficient water resources for fighting fires. Mayor Karen Bass cut $17.5 million in funding for the Los Angeles Fire Department and then went to Ghana even though she knew of the risk of catastrophic fires.

It’s true that California, in general, and Los Angeles, in particular, are fiery places. It’s true that the Santa Ana winds made the fires worse.

But Newsom and Bass have known about those hazards for all of their careers and failed to deal with them. Their rank incompetence and lack of leadership are shocking and scandalous.

It’s hard to overstate how badly they screwed up water management. LA firefighters haven’t had the water they needed. Newsom hasn’t built the new water reservoirs that Los Angeles needed. And Newsom even cut the budget for water infrastructure projects last year.

Why is that? Part of the reason is that they were focused on other things. Making the fire department more racially diverse. Climate change. Homelessness.

And the reason they were focused on those things is because those are what the radical Left that controls the Democratic party wanted them to focus on.

Year after year, they do nothing while focusing on things like trans and Trump and climate and ignoring the things that really matter to the people of California.

The Democrats in California aren’t like Democrats in other states. They are radicals. I would know, since when I was a young radical I moved to California for that reason.

As many of us get older, we become more moderate. We become more practical. We understand firefighters and police officers are necessary. We are reminded of the importance of things like safe streets and hard work and good schools.

But more than that, I saw the consequences of radical progressive policies on the environment, homelessness, crime, education, water, and everything else. Violent criminals, in particular, are devouring Los Angeles, Oakland, and the rest of California.

The people who control the Democratic Party in California worship books about Los Angeles, like City of Quartz by the Marxist author Mike Davis. In that book, Davis claims that the problem in Los Angeles is that too much money goes to things like firefighting to protect wealthy neighborhoods.

They did the same thing on crime and homelessness. They failed to provide adequate funding to the police. They weakened the laws that allowed for burglaries and robberies. They subsidized homelessness, attracting homeless people from around the United States to camp illegally and start fires.

Over half of the fires in places like Los Angeles and Oakland are caused by the homeless committing arson, often out of some petty revenge.

We don’t know what started all of the fires, but at least one started within the housing subdivision. Others may have started in the interface between housing and wildlands. Or it could have been started by the homeless.

Whatever the case, California and LA didn’t invest enough in preventing fires because they were distracted by radical Left causes.

When Rick Caruso ran for Mayor against Karen Bass, he called for increasing the fire department’s budget.

A big part of the reason he lost is simply because he was white. I watched focus groups in 2022 and the most racist people were white liberals in Los Angeles. When they discussed the mayoral race, the white people overwhelmingly said they couldn’t vote for a white man and had to vote for a black woman because she was black.

The Latino men and women in separate focus groups were much less racist. They wanted to know about their policies.

It was the radical Left that invented the racist idea that white people alive today should feel guilty about things white people did in the past. Racist white guilt led people in Los Angeles and California to vote against a guy who would have prevented those fires.

And so, over the next few weeks, when you hear Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and the Democratic Party tell you that there’s nothing they could have done to prevent the fires from destroying Los Angeles, don’t believe them.

It’s time for California to grow up and move beyond the juvenile Leftism that has destroyed the state and destroyed Los Angeles. We can’t trust our leaders to run anything. It’s not just incompetence. It’s that they really don’t care.

It’s time for Californians to demand new leaders — ones who aren’t beholden to the radicals who control the Democratic Party. . Called it. Here's @MayorOfLA claiming that the $17.5 million she cut from the budget " really did not impact what we've been going through over the last few days."
Jan 8 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
The media is ridiculing Trump for saying that wind turbines are killing the whales. But they are. There were 12 whale deaths off the East Coast in December alone. The North Atlantic right whale species will go extinct unless the Trump administration acts to end the slaughter. The science is clear. The increased wind industry boat traffic is behind the whale deaths. Scientists have also documented illegal, high-decibel noise, which separates mothers from babies. The Biden administration is covering up the evidence for money.

saverightwhales.org/media
Jan 6 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Justin Trudeau has resigned. He framed himself as an honest, caring, and compassionate leader. He was not. He falsely smeared his critics as Nazis. He justified freezing bank accounts using faked intelligence. And he spread disinformation while demanding censorship. Let's dig in: Image Trudeau spread disinformation to persecute his critics. He froze their bank accounts. He demanded censorship. We have to talk about the malignant narcissism of Justin Trudeau:

Dec 19, 2024 • 4 tweets • 6 min read
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!

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Dec 18, 2024 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
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.
Dec 14, 2024 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
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…
Dec 7, 2024 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
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
Nov 22, 2024 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
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? 🤔
Nov 21, 2024 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
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: