December 7th 2024

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.

Over the last two years, we have been reporting on the alarming rise of censorship by governments around the world and speaking out against it. If you’re an American, you might not think this should bother you. But in every one of these nations, the people pushing for censorship made clear that they wanted to censor the entire Internet, not just in their own countries. The picture you get is of nations working together to make censorship global not local.

Free speech advocates have won a number of important battles. In the last few months, Senators in Ireland and Australia rejected censorship legislation, while the executive branch of the European Union forced its top censor to step down after he warned Elon Musk not to speak to Donald Trump on X. We are more aware of the strategies that the Censorship Industrial Complex of politicians, government agencies, supposedly nongovernmental organizations, and the media use, around the world, to demand ever-more censorship by Internet and social media companies.

But it’s also clear that elites worldwide view expanding censorship of online platforms as a must-have, not a nice-to-have feature of global governance. After a week back home in California after returning from Australia, I flew to Brussels, Belgium, to speak to the European Parliament at the invitation of MEP Fernand Kartheiser. There, I learned that the entire European Censorship Industrial Complex remains in place, complete with its Star Chamber of “trusted flaggers,” which are the organizations and people chosen by the EU government to identify wrongthink and demand that Meta/Facebook/Instagram, TikTok, and Google censor it.

As in Brazil, those Big Tech companies are going along with it because they must, as organizations serving the interests of shareholders, not free citizens. And the EU has also made clear that it intends to enforce its draconian agenda by confiscating other assets belonging to Musk and any other social media companies and their owners who do not comply with censorship orders.

“For decades,” notes the Economist in an article this week about Elon Musk’s conflict with Europe over censorship, “the EU has had free rein to regulate businesses within its borders in ways that often went on to be adopted across the world, a phenomenon known as the ‘Brussels effect.’”

I am confident that free-speech lovers will ultimately prevail. Our cause is both righteous and popular. Sixty-one percent of Republicans and 30% of Democrats oppose government censorship of online platforms. Simply pointing out that “Fighting misinformation and hate speech” is, in reality, “Government censorship” has proven effective everywhere, as it breaks the hypnotic trance imposed by censorship advocates. And advocating for censorship has proven bad for the careers of everyone from Ireland’s justice minister to the top Censorship Industrial Complex operative working from the Stanford Internet Observatory, which terminated its censorship project earlier this year. There are good reasons for optimism.

We are doing our part. In Brussels, I delivered a message, “Back off!” to the European Commission, the EU’s executive branch, and its President, Ursula von der Leyen. But it’s not enough. The whole bureaucracy remains in place, including the provision within the EU’s Orwellian “Digital Services Act” to demand censorship worldwide, not just in the EU. And so it’s increasingly clear to me that defunding, demoralizing, and ultimately ending the Censorship Industrial Complex will require a significant amount more time and effort, as our opponents are not giving up.

Top Democrats, media personalities, and progressive philanthropists made that clear both before and after the November elections. The Brazilian government forced Musk to ban hundreds of individuals from the platform or face total confiscation of Starlink assets and the destruction of all Musk businesses in the eighth-largest economy in the world. Britain and Germany are both engaging in new demands for censorship, including the direct imprisonment of people for posting distasteful but nonetheless harmless content online.

And massively expanding censorship remains one of the highest priorities if not the highest priority of the elites behind those governments. Davos’ World Economic Forum (WEF) earlier this year named misinformation as the number one global risk. The United Nations has made misinformation one of its top risks. And Bill Gates, the largest private funder to the World Health Organization, as well as the WHO itself, have both called for mass censorship by governments of online platforms, with Gates openly disparaging our First Amendment, similar to how Barack Obama did in 2022.

Why is this happening? Why have they decided that this is a must-have rather than a nice-to-have?

We must censor the Internet to counter the spread of misinformation, say global leaders. But only free speech, not censorship, can counter misinformation. The real reason they want mass online censorship is so they won’t keep getting called out for spreading disinformation.

===Michael Shellenberger