Tim Walz just spread misinformation in service of making the case for government censorship. He said it’s illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s a myth. The expression refers to a *nonbinding* claim in a 1919 Supreme Court opinion that was *overturned* in 1969. Tim Walz had previously claimed that it was illegal to spread misinformation about elections. It’s not. How could it be? If you let the government to censor disfavored views on elections, how would we ever know if the government stole an election?

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1830741329678348704

Massive Free Speech Victory!

Ireland's government has abandoned its proposed hate speech law, which would have allowed the police to enter homes and search phones and computers for wrongthink

This is wonderful news that gives us momentum to beat back totalitarianism worldwide! Big congratulations to @FreeSpeechIre and @griptmedia, which did so much to raise global awareness of this awful, totalitarian proposal

https://x.com/FreeSpeechIre/status/1746854766032846910

“The White House issued a rare rebuke of Brazil Tuesday for banning the country’s residents from accessing X in a free-speech struggle with the platform’s billionaire owner Elon Musk.”

Finally! Yes, this is real

“When it comes to social media, we have been very clear that we think that folks should have access to social media. It’s a form of freedom of speech,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in response to a press-briefing question from reporter Raquel Krähenbühl of Brazil’s TV Globo.

nypost.com/2024/09/17/us-…

Wow — massive free speech victory! Europe’s top censor has quit. This comes a few weeks after he got in trouble for sending an open letter to Elon Musk claiming his upcoming interview with Donald Trump might violate Europe’s censorship laws.

https://twitter.com/thierrybreton/status/1835565206639972734

Here’s the backstory, including media coverage about how @ThierryBreton got in trouble with his colleagues in Brussels. I don’t know that he quit because of this but it may be that @vonderleyen and others felt he had become a liability in their crusade to censor the Internet:

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1823434532718305316

Brazilian President Lula and Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes say they must block X to protect Brazil’s independence. X is a platform for dangerous, false, and hateful words, they say, and many of those words violate Brazil’s laws and Constitution.

But their censorship goes far beyond what Brazil’s constitution allows. The government demanded that X and other social media networks censor and ban individual people, including journalists and politicians. Such bans are immoral, illegal, and unconstitutional. They constitute election interference and undermine democracy by preventing candidates from getting the word out.

I agree that lying is wrong, hate speech is ugly, and there are limits to freedom of speech. We must not allow people to use words that directly result in physical violence.

But everybody lies, everybody engages in hate speech, and the limits to free speech must never include elections. Imagine what would happen if it were illegal to lie: everyone should go to prison starting with the journalists and politicians. As for hate speech, did Lula express hatred when he praised Adolf Hitler? Does he not express hatred every time he speaks of Elon Musk and Jair Bolsonaro?

People blame speech for the chaos of January 6 in the United States and January 8 in Brazil. But the events of those days resulted from inadequate security, not anything anyone said online. And if the government can censor disfavored election information, how would anyone ever know if the government stole an election? 

Democracy and secure elections depend on freedom of speech. The idea that we must censor speech to protect democracy ranks with other Orwellian ideas like “War is peace” and “Slavery is freedom.” For thousands of years, democracy and freedom walk hand in hand, as do censorship and dictatorship.

Everybody knows in their heart that censorship is wrong. We all know that we are imperfect and do not know everything. We know that we rely on others to discover the truth. Why, then, do so many people want censorship? Please subscribe now to support our fight for free speech And to read the rest of the article!

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1832522371862802908

The Washington Post has been attacking @elonmusk for years for not censoring more. Now, amazingly, it is praising him for standing up Brazil’s dictator. “Whatever the threat to democracy that the accounts Mr. Moraes wanted gone might have posed, the threat from one government official limiting the speech of 220 million people is greater.”

Thousands of Brazilians are resisting the order by the Dictators Moraes and Lula. They include journalists and Senators from Left, Right, and center. And people in the federal capital, Brasilia, are able to access X without VPN. Moraes’ immoral censorship crusade is doomed.

https://twitter.com/sf_moro/status/1830401944776556907

✊🏼❤️🇧🇷

https://twitter.com/rogeriosmarinho/status/1829646279338598861

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.

https://twitter.com/anapaulavolei/status/1829909923033203077

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.

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.

Soon, in the UK, you'll be able to report your sexist uncle as a terrorist threat to the police. ha ha look how easy the British government has made it

gov.uk/report-terrori…

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

CBS News is now promoting Kamala Harris meetups. This should be considered a campaign contribution. Disgraceful

https://twitter.com/cbsnews/status/1824442237087805690

“Hound lovers for Harris”

This is disinformation, @CBSNews She didn’t “moderate” her policies on the border, fracking, and inflation, she completely flipped them.

@CBS has officially joined @NBC and @CNN in abandoning journalism for party propagandist

https://twitter.com/cbsnews/status/1824272367452815724

Until just a few months ago, there was still reason to watch @CBSNews

But then, it fired its best investigative journalist for — *checks notes* — doing journalism

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1822785406573875671

You're not only a tyrant, you're an embarrassment to the European Commission. Its President, @vonderleyen, has rebuked you publicly. She should fire you. If you have any self-respect @ThierryBreton, you should resign your post immediately.

https://twitter.com/ThierryBreton/status/1823033048109367549

😂

This is state propaganda not journalism

https://twitter.com/danabashcnn/status/1823065630192308249

Below is the guy who worked in the Biden White House and demanded that Facebook censor accurate information. When he was asked to define “misinformation” before Congress he pretended he didn’t know how. He was later caught on video boasting of his censorship efforts.

https://twitter.com/rob_flaherty/status/1823070173697294708

I thought this was a joke at first but it’s not: Kamala Harris’ campaign is segregating its volunteers by race. These are the people who spent decades smearing their opponents as racists. Why do people tolerate this degrading treatment?

Woke racism means believing that being black is magic. This is no different from the grotesque and childish racism that Martin Luther King and millions of Americans rejected 60 years ago.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1815730597337399476

The @NYTimes alleges that @JDVance put politics ahead of friendship and science by opposing drugs and surgery for kids confused about gender. But independent experts agree with Vance. The ones putting politics before friendship and science are Vance’s former friend and the Times.

Vance called trans “medicine” a “form of experimentaiton.” He was being nice. “Experimentation” suggests blocking puberty, giving hormones, and surgically altering genitals, without informed consent, is guided by science. It’s not. It’s medical mistreatment. Here’s the proof:

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1764799914918490287

Democrats who support Harris appear to think that her being a half-black woman makes her a unique and gifted politician. But Harris is the opposite of unique. She rose to the top by conforming, not standing out.

Nor is she gifted. Throughout her political career, Harris hewed to the demands of Democratic interest groups and the political consultants who serve them. She inherited the political machine created by her former boyfriend, Willie Brown.

As a result, Harris has avoided facing substantial competition, and the one time she did in 2020, voters resoundingly rejected her.

Despite this rejection, Harris was handed a position as Vice President in what was widely perceived as a strategic move by Biden to put a black woman on the ticket.

Holding Harris to low standards reflects the soft bigotry and patronizing attitude of Democrats toward minorities. Because the Party has essentially coddled Harris, she has not been forced to grow as a leader in ways she otherwise might have.

That Harris is now consolidating support as Democrats’ best hope of defeating Trump points to a major legitimacy crisis for the Party, as well as for the media and the federal bureaucracies that are heavily aligned with it.

It was only possible for such an unpopular candidate to gain the Party’s support because, since 2016, Democrats and the mainstream media have gone to extreme lengths to subvert democracy in order to target Trump.

These lengths have included the Russia collusion disinformation campaign, mass censorship of political speech, attempts to criminalize political opposition, and an effort to prevent Trump from running for office again.

All these activities have eroded the legitimacy of the state, the media, and the Party. Their legitimacy depends on public confidence. This confidence diminishes when these institutions so transparently undermine civil rights, fail to meet citizens’ needs and operate without integrity.

The war on democracy led by Democrats, the press, and the “deep state” has, in this way, ultimately helped Trump gain support. At the same time, it has left Democrats without good options to defeat him.

By favoring woke, racialist politics over a substantive political platform and by selecting nominees in an anti-democratic process for three presidential elections in a row, Democrats have been left with an extremely weak candidate.

By consistently showing bias for over eight years, the mainstream media has lost prestige and is no longer in a position to shape and manipulate public opinion in favor of Harris.

And, by weaponizing government against Trump and his supporters, federal agencies have inspired hatred and distrust among many members of the public who may view Harris as the anointed figurehead of this broken deep state bureaucracy. Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video!

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1815470403248357503

After the assassination attempt, the Secret Service said it hadn’t denied repeated requests by Trump’s security detail for more help. It lied. Now the @nytimes and @washingtonpost have confirmed our reporting and vindicated @dbongino. What else is being covered up?



Sources close to President Trump were adamant last week that Trump’s protective detail had made “multiple” requests over the last several months and that the Director of the Secret Service, Kimberly A. Cheatle, turned them down. And, they said, a security expert had warned Trump directly that his detail was inadequate.

The former president’s security detail is far smaller than the one provided to President Joe Biden, which The New York Post first reported yesterday. For example, there was no aerial security coverage, either in the form of drones or helicopters, which may have spotted the shooter before he could fire his AR-15 rifle. The AR-15 has an effective range of 500-600 yards, and the shooter was 200-300 yards away.

“Forget the titles,” said a source close to President Trump. “It’s not how it’s measured. It’s measured by threat level. In 1999, the Pope did an event in St. Louis with bigger security than the president at the time had. That Trump doesn’t have the same security protection as Biden… you’re asking for this guy to get killed.”

Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) claimed on X, "I have very reliable sources telling me there have been repeated requests for stronger secret service protection for President Trump. Denied by Secretary Mayorkas.”

Former Secret Service officer Dan Bongino and journalist Tucker Carlson warned last year that Trump’s security was inadequate.

“I've told you this repeatedly,” said Bongino on his podcast in August 2023. “I'll tell you again. I'll tell you tomorrow, and I'll remind you the day after that. I did this for a living for 12 years…. Donald Trump's life is in absolute danger. Anyone telling you otherwise is full of crap.”

On Fox and Friends this morning, Bongino said, “There have been repeated requests to increase the security footprint around not just the residences of Donald Trump, but the body [of Trump] itself, and they have been rebuffed.”

A few days after Bongino and Carlson warned of an assassination attempt, NBC News published an article headlined, “Tucker Carlson stokes conspiracies, claims the U.S. is 'speeding towards' assassination of Trump.”

The NBC story mentioned the Bongino podcast episode and said Bongino had made his assertions of rising threat “without evidence.”

I’m afraid I have some terrible news. The governor of America’s largest and richest state has just signed a law that puts 10 million children and adolescents in grave danger of medical mistreatment.

The media headlines have it wrong. They claim that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s new law protects children by stopping public schools from outing their new gender to their parents.

It does just the opposite. It makes children vulnerable to irreversible and lifelong medical abuse and mistreatment. And it is all based on the pseudoscientific idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies and that we can change a person’s sex through drugs and surgery.

For any of this to make sense, you have to understand what’s happening in Britain. Several years ago, the government appointed a well-respected pediatrician named Hillary Cass to investigate whether it was ethical to block the puberty of children, give them opposite-sex hormones, and perform surgeries on their bodies to make them feel better about their gender. Dr. Cass came back a few weeks ago and said no, absolutely not.

Around the same time, the British government banned puberty blockers nationwide. And, just a few days ago, the new Labor Party government affirmed that it would maintain the former government’s ban.

In her report, Cass said that the so-called “social transition,” whereby a child adopts the identity of the opposite sex, is not a neutral act and has psychological consequences. This means it is the first step toward medical intervention.

What Gavin Newsom has done is actively prevented schools from informing parents that their children have been put on a medical pathway.

This is an outrageous attack on the rights of children and parents. Children have a right to go through puberty. No adult should be able to block their puberty. And parents have a right to know if their child thinks that they are the opposite sex or were born into the wrong body.

We have seen with leaked internal documents of the leading gender medicine group, WPATH, that these medical interventions, namely puberty blockers, hormones, and surgery, are not only irreversible but result in sterilization and loss of sexual function.

Children or adolescents are simply not mature enough to understand the effects of so-called “gender-affirming care.” They cannot, in other words, give their informed consent.

The new law creates the grave risk that activist teachers, students, and outside groups will convince their children that they were born into the wrong body, and hide their “social transition” from parents, which will lead to harmful medical mistreatment.

As such, the law that Newsom just signed is the opposite of what both children and their parents need. We need schools to immediately warn parents if their children think they are the opposite sex.

After all, this is a diagnosable psychiatric condition known as “gender dysphoria.” And if your child has a psychiatric disorder, whether anxiety, depression, an eating disorder, or gender dysphoria, you have a right to know.

And schools must stop teaching children, or allowing other people to teach children, the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing ideas that it’s possible to be born into the wrong body and possible to change one’s sex.

As such, either the legislature, the courts, or a ballot initiative will be required to nullify Newsom’s law. Until then, it is important to spread the word to parents that California public schools are fundamentally unsafe for the millions of children who attend them. The politicians — @GavinNewsom @EleniForCA @AGRobBonta @XavierBecerra @JoeBiden @KamalaHarris — must immediately stop this grotesque violation of human rights.

The whole world is watching.