Michael Shellenger: The Never-Ending Battle Against Censorship

Michael Shellenberger has warned European lawmakers about an effort by both Europeans and Americans to censor us all. I highly recommend his entire article and video. Excerpt from an article that is definitely not hyperbole: "Within Three Years, The Most Intolerant People On Earth Could Control The Internet."

What is the Censorship Industrial Complex? The model isn’t that complicated to understand. The government chooses people whom they call “researchers” to serve as censors. These are government-funded individuals who often come from the intelligence community and foreign policy establishment. They work at non-governmental organizations funded by governments or at universities funded by governments. They conduct “fact checks” to serve as “trusted flaggers.” These “trusted flaggers” demand censorship by social media platforms. It’s all done in secret.

They’re looking to censor narratives. This is essential because, as decades of good cognitive science have shown, people understand and retain information through storytelling. We think in terms of stories, not bullet points. And so they were out to censor whole narratives. From the Stanford censorship project on COVID, the “Virality Project,” they said they wanted to censor “true stories” of vaccine side effects.

Why? Because it might “fuel hesitancy.” In other words, they want to control your behavior. They don’t want you to receive true information that might lead you to not get the vaccine.

If that isn’t totalitarianism straight out of 1984, I don’t know what it. These people were on the verge of passing legislation in the United States that would’ve authorized the National Science Foundation to choose these “researcher” censors.

I’m presenting slides to Europeans and the world for situational awareness into what totalitarian politicians and bureaucrats have planned because this is still going strong.

Stanford helped the US government censor COVID dissidents, and then they lied about it. You might be detecting a pattern. They’re really not interested in censoring “misinformation.’ They’re very interested in censoring true information.

The censors flagged an Israeli preprint which came out in December, 2020 and found, lo and behold, that natural immunity is a real thing. In fact, it’s more protective than the vaccine.

But the censors flagged somebody’s Google Drive. “See the following Google Drive links being used to compile testimonies about vaccine shedding, Covid videos, showing side effects and whatnot.” Google then removed that content from that person’s Google Drive. You don’t control your Google Drive.

Contrary to Stanford’s claim that the project did not ask social media platforms to remove any content, they privately said they did. And we know that many hundreds of thousands of tweets and Facebook posts were removed, even though they were a hundred percent accurate. In fact, in 2021, Stanford’s “Virality Project” flagged accurate claims that the World Health Organization did not recommend vaccinating children.

The people who spread the misinformation are the people demanding the censorship. They claimed Covid couldn’t have come from a lab, that the Covid vaccine prevented infection, and that natural immunity didn’t exist.

The only solution to hate speech and misinformation is free speech. If you censor false information, how would anybody get the true information? The whole point is the debate.

They lied when they said false information travels faster than true information. It’s a completely bogus study and involved six seconds of content on Twitter.

Who are these people? As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees at Twitter that they called them “Bu alumni.” They created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.

Intriguingly, we discovered that the general counsel of the FBI — arguably the second most powerful person of the FBI, or maybe the first, if you think, consider that what their actual job is to decide what the FBI can and can’t do — resigned from FBI in early 2020 and went to Twitter to take the deputy general counsel role.

Isn’t that interesting? Somebody in one of the most powerful legal positions in the world would take a junior legal role at a social media company. Why would that be? ...

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Iran NOT in the News . . .

This is a collection of some posts I made on X today:

I'll start with John Cleese:

It would be simple if US corporate media would simply tell us what's going on, but that's not what they consider their job to be. They have gone almost completely silent because they're trying to figure out how to spend this because the inconvenient to their ideology.

Tonight in Iran:

Elon Musk comes to the rescue with Starlink

How the Corporate media has covered past revolutions:

And all of a sudden this happens. The DNC must have sent out the memo that it's now a good thing for Democrats to criticize Hamas. Incredible lock-step obedience in one of the least organic 180s I've ever witnessed.

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Report Card for 2025: Campus Censorship

It's as certain as death and taxes. Whoever is in power WILL TRY TO ABUSE THE FIRST AMENDMENT. Here's the 2025 campus score card for Trump era, 2.0, the inverse of what happened in the Biden era. Keep in mind that discrimination on campus is only one slice of a much bigger pie. Government censorship goes on in other places too. Trump has been a mixed bag, to be sure. Since his most recent election, for instance, the government jaw-boning and censorship of social media has diminished, but yet we do have this substantial problem on campus that has been goaded on by Trump. As Nat Henthoff famously wrote: "Free speech for me, but not for thee."

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EU Directly Attacks the First Amendment

The EU is trying to destroy the First Amendment. It is an attack on the United States. Greg Lukianoff of FIRE quotes this article by the Editors of The Free Press:

“The stated reasons for the fine are a lack of transparency, a violation of advertising rules, and misleading users with “deceptive” design. The real reasons have little to do with those allegations, and everything to do with the kind of speech the EU wants to suppress: perspectives that have not been filtered through bureaucrats, academics, or media professionals; views that go against the received wisdom of policymakers; and views that have not been vetted and found to be acceptable by governments. Any company that utters the wrong kind of speech should now know that the meter is running.”

Mike Benz has been explaining that the actions of the EU must be considered a direct assault on the lives of all Americans:

This is the day I’ve warned the Trump Admin every day for 7 years would come, since 2018’s EU Disinfo Code, to 2019 when the DSA was floated in concept, to 2020 when it became a formal draft EU law while I was at State, to its 2022 adoption, to its 2025 mandatory Disinfo Code.

I keep telling you exactly what to do and exactly what bad things will happen next if you think you can ignore this and not do anything, and each thing I keep saying will happen next literally keeps happening next and happening exactly as I told you it would if you didn’t act.

How could anyone in the admin be surprised the EU censorship law would fine/extort X ??? That’s WHY they made the law, whose enforcement teeth JUST kicked in this summer! This is like letting a flesh-eating cannibal sleep on your chest then being surprised it bit your heart

My lovely DC policymakers who are doing so much good, this €120M fine is N-O-T-H-I-N-G compared to what happens in 2026, 2027, 2028 if this — the first fine — isn’t smacked the fuck out of the air hard, mercilessly and with a message. Is @USAmbEU briefed enough to be armed?

BTW, what has Hillary Clinton been up to? Jonathan Turley explains:

Heritage Foundation exposes Hillary Clinton was directly behind getting the European Union to use their Digital Services Act to pressure Elon Musk and America back into censorship ‌

Hillary Clinton flew overseas for a meeting to facilitate this against America ‌

“They (The European Union) gathered in Berlin, and it was the most anti-free speech gathering I've ever been part of — Hillary Clinton was there, and she really fueled the anger. ‌

When Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, she called on the EU to use the infamous Digital Services Act, which is one of the most anti-free speech pieces of legislation in decades. And she called upon the EU to use the DSA (Digital Services Act) to force the censorship of American citizens, force people like Musk to censor.

It's an extraordinary act by someone who was once a presidential candidate” ‌

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