Michael Shellenberger
@shellenberger • 1,410,142 subscribers
CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship & Free Speech @UAustinOrg : Dao Journalism Winner : Time, "Hero of Environment" : Author, “Apocalypse Never,” "San Fransicko"
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Progressives call them "homeless encampments," but they are open-air drug scenes. Ask the homeless themselves what their lives are like, and they will tell you it's about feeding their fentanyl & meth addictions and being victims of violence by other addicts and dealers.
Michael Shellenberger225,771 次观看 • 2 天前
CBS “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley and his former colleague Sharyn Alfonsi say Bari Weiss is destroying “60 Minutes”, the most prestigious program in American television news. For more than half a century, the CBS newsmagazine has defined investigative television, drawing tens of millions of Sunday-night viewers with its ticking stopwatch, its ambush interviews, and a roster of correspondents treated as the closest thing American journalism has to royalty. Alfonsi warned late last month that “the wall between editorial independence and corporate interest at CBS is being methodically torn down.” Pelley went further yesterday, confronting Weiss’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, at a staff meeting. When Bilton told the room that Weiss “loves 60 Minutes,” Pelley shot back that “she’s murdering 60 Minutes,” that “she does not love this place,” and that “she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.” Pelley told Bilton, a technology journalist, that he held “slender qualifications” for the job. Cecilia Vega, another ousted correspondent, framed Weiss’s firings as “censorship, both imposed and self-driven,” and “dangerous for democracy.” But a review of the last two decades of “60 Minutes” reveals that the program has been inaccurate and partisan on many major issues, including the border, transgenderism, climate, species extinctions, Russiagate, and the Hunter Biden laptop.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, read the full story, and watch the full video!
Michael Shellenberger51,584 次观看 • 1 天前
The man behind the digital ID push is Larry Ellison, owner of Oracle, CBS, CNN, and, soon, TikTok. He wants data centralization and total surveillance. "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly watching & recording everything that's going on." Terrifying.
Michael Shellenberger10,686,702 次观看 • 8 个月前
Many Democrats say they want to understand what happened. Few genuinely do. That's because, at some level, they know they're guilty of having participated in a witch hunt in which they falsely accused their fellow Americans, and even their friends & family, of fascism & racism.
Michael Shellenberger27,589,787 次观看 • 1 年前
BRAZIL IS ON THE BRINK I’m reporting to you from Brazil, where a dramatic series of events are underway. At 5:52 pm Eastern Time, today, April 6, 2024, X corporation, formerly known as Twitter, announced that a Brazilian court had forced it to “block certain popular accounts in Brazil.” Then, less than one hour later, the owner of X, Elon Musk announced that X would defy the court’s order, and lift all restrictions. “As a result,” said Musk, “we will probably lose all revenue in Brazil and have to shut down our office there. But principles matter more than profit.” At any moment, Brazil’s Supreme Court could shut off all access to X/Twitter for the people of Brazil. It is not an exaggeration to say that Brazil is on the brink of dictatorship at the hands of a totalitarian Supreme Court Justice named Alexandre de Moraes. President Lula da Silva is participating in the push toward totalitarianism. Since taking office, Lula has massively increased government funding of the mainstream news media, most of which are encouraging increased censorship. What Lula and de Moraes are doing is an outrageous violation of Brazil’s constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. At this moment, Brazil is not yet a dictatorship. It still has elections and the Brazilian people have other means at their disposal to confront authoritarianism. But the Federal Supreme Court and the Superior Electoral Court are directly interfere in those elections through censorship. Three days ago I published the Twitter Files for Brazil. They show that Moraes has violated the Brazilian Constitution. Moraes illegally demanded that Twitter reveal private information about Twitter users who used hashtags he considered inappropriate. He demanded access to Twitter's internal data, violating the platform's policy. He censored, on his own initiative and without any respect for due process, posts on Twitter by parliamentarians from the Brazilian Congress. And Moraes tried to turn Twitter's content moderation policies into a weapon against supporters of then-president Jair Bolsonaro. I say this as an independent and non-partisan journalist. I'm not a fan of either Bolsonaro or Trump. My political views are very moderate. But I know censorship when I see it. The Twitter Files also revealed that Google, Facebook, Uber, WhatsApp and Instagram betrayed the people of Brazil. If such evidence is proven, the executives of these companies behaved like cowards: they provided the Brazilian government with personal registration data and telephone numbers without a court order and, therefore, violating the law. When Twitter refused to provide Brazilian authorities with private user information, including direct messages, the government attempted to sue Twitter's top Brazilian lawyer. When I lived in Brazil in 1992, I was very left-wing. At the time, Lula and the PT's slogans were “Without fear of being happy”. In recent days, I have spoken to dozens of Brazilians, including professors, journalists and respected lawyers. Everyone tells me they are shocked by what is happening. They told me that they are afraid to speak their mind and that the Lula government is complicit in creating this climate of fear. Brazil belongs to the Brazilians. It is not my country. As such, there are limits to what I am capable of doing. But I can say things that many Brazilians do not feel safe saying: Alexandre de Moraes is a tyrant. And the only way to deal with tyrants is to confront them. It is up to Brazil’s senators to confront the tyrant. And it is up to the people of Brazil to demand that their senators do so.
Michael Shellenberger33,884,235 次观看 • 2 年前
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.
Michael Shellenberger28,540,758 次观看 • 1 年前
Controversy has erupted over Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming film adaptation of Homer’s poem The Odyssey, which arrives in the wake of a contested 2017 translation by Emily Wilson, a classics professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Critics of Wilson’s translation argue that she has rewritten Odysseus from a hero into a morally suspect figure. Nolan cast a black actress, Lupita Nyong’o, to play the Mediterranean woman Helen of Troy, prompting criticisms of hypocrisy and racism from Elon Musk and others. It is inconceivable that Hollywood would today use a white actor to play a black character, and yet the media applauds when white characters are played by black actors. Isabella Reinhardt, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Austin, and my colleague, disagrees with some of Wilson’s choices. For example, Wilson translates polytropos, which Homer uses to describe Odysseus, as a “complicated man,” where Robert Fagles, in his 1996 translation, renders it as a “man of twists and turns.” The choice is representative of Wilson’s depiction of Odysseus as something other than heroic. Reinhardt, who recorded a podcast with me last week, received her PhD in the same Penn classics department where Wilson teaches. “I do think Odysseus is not a perfect hero,” says Reinhardt, “but he is the hero. Her translation strays into a negative view of Odysseus that’s not entirely warranted....” Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the full article, and watch the full podcast!
Michael Shellenberger229,586 次观看 • 10 天前
Already by the 1970s, top energy analysts knew abundant natural gas would displace coal, resulting in lower emissions. And so Malthusian scientists, in order to create their outlandishly apocalyptic scenarios, demonized them as climate deniers and drove them out of the IPCC.
Michael Shellenberger157,858 次观看 • 7 天前
In his new letter, Zuckerberg goes beyond what he told Rogan. He says FBI specifically warned of disinfo re: Hunter Biden & his client, Burisma, the Ukrainian nat gas company. It's hard proof that the FBI illegally interfered in the elections. Someone should go to prison for it.
Michael Shellenberger23,826,120 次观看 • 1 年前
The Dirty Little Secret About Homelessness Is Also The Key To Ending It The US Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments about what cities can and cannot do to end homelessness. "What if there is a bed available in the Gospel Rescue Mission, but Ms. Johnson, a person, doesn't want it? Doesn’t wish to leave their pet. Her Rottweiler's not permitted there. So that is a difficult question for a person and a difficult policy question..." What everyone agreed on was that homelessness is a difficult problem. "Many people have mentioned this is a serious policy problem… So, the policy questions in this case are very difficult….Martin speaks in terms of someone who is involuntarily homeless and that raises all of those policy questions… We usually think about whether state law, local law already achieves those purposes so that the federal courts aren't micromanaging homeless policy…" I think most people listening to the Supreme Court would agree: it isn’t going to solve homelessness. That is a job for state legislators. So why haven’t they? Why has homelessness gotten worse? The answer that many homeless advocates give is that it’s because we don’t have enough homes, and poverty has increased. But neither is true. Poverty has steadily declined since the 1980s, when homelessness first became an issue of public concern. And very few people are on the street simply because they can’t afford the rent. The evidence is overwhelming that the majority of people on the street are there because of untreated mental illness or addiction, which leads people to use all their money to support their drug habit and be high, rather than work. People who can’t afford the rent but are able to work and aren’t in the grip of addiction or untreated mental illness find a cheaper place to live, move somewhere cheaper, or live with family and friends. It’s true there aren’t enough shelter beds, case workers, group homes, and psychiatric hospitals to care for the homeless. But a big part of the reason for that is that advocates for the homeless have, for 40 years, demanded that funding for dealing with the homeless go into giving people private studio apartments rather than building sufficient shelter beds. They call this “Housing First,” and its record is awful. Few stay in housing, and many die because it fails to treat the cause of the problem, addiction, and untreated mental illness rather than the symptoms. Studies find that cities that prioritize basic shelter over expensive housing reduce the deaths of homeless by 3-fold. And so in LA, homeless die at a rate 3 times higher than New York because living inside protects people from murder, drug overdose, and car accidents. Making matters worse, homeless advocates, along with the ACLU, have opposed expanding psychiatric hospitals, and mandatory care in general, because they believe it’s worse to mandate hospitalization for people who are dangerously psychotic or manic than to simply leave them on the street. But it’s not. Last year, 112,000 Americans died from drug overdose and poisoning because we failed to mandate treatment. Two of my friends from high school would still be alive today had we mandated they get treatment for addiction rather than letting them die. What is happening on homelessness is a record of failure. The number of drug deaths quintupled from 20,000 in 2022 to 112,000 last year. That’s more people dying per year than died in Hiroshima. Homelessness is not a fundamental problem of housing. It’s a problem of enabling addiction and untreated mental illness, both of which lead people to give up on work, lie, steal, cheat their families and friends, and live on the street, where they turn to petty crime to sustain their drug habits. This seems cruel to many people, which is why homelessness has gotten worse. In other words, the reason homelessness has gotten worse is because we’ve enabled it, and subsidized it, rather than funded treatment and recovery. Nobody has subsidized homelessness more than California, Washington, and Oregon. And it’s been in those states that homelessness has worsened the most. Why? The homelessness groups really believe it’s more cruel to mandate care than to let people die on the streets. But there is an ideology behind this, too. It’s the idea that people suffering from addiction and mental illness are victims of society or the system, which is fundamentally evil. And, according to their logic, to restore justice in the world, we must give victims whatever they want, including the right to camp anywhere and use hard drugs, even if it results in their death. You might call this "pathological altruism. Think of the Kathy Bates character in Misery. Or of the mother who poisons her child in order to have a sick person to take care of, like in “Sixth Sense.” It’s no coincidence that the same people who believe this also think civilization is evil and should be replaced by something more akin to primitive anarchism, like the kind romanticized by intellectuals since Rousseau. The alternative to this dystopia is tough love. We need to give people the care they need, but that’s not through enabling addiction and illegal behavior, but rather enforcing laws and mandating care, as an alternative to jail, when they are broken. It’s not enough to do what many Republicans want to do, which is to enforce laws and recriminalize shoplifting and hard drugs simply. We need to do that, for sure. But states must also have caseworkers, group homes, and psychiatric hospitals so there is an alternative to jail, and so states can provide people with the specialized care where it’s available, which simply isn’t going to be in many of the small towns, like the one at the center of the Supreme Court hearing. The dirty little secret about homelessness, which is also the key to ending it, is...
Michael Shellenberger29,147,382 次观看 • 2 年前
Odysseus isn't really a hero, a progressive 2017 translation implies. But he is, and the moral of his story is in part about the importance of property rights, which are foundational to Western civilization. Little wonder, then, that the academic Left wages war on "The Odyssey."
Michael Shellenberger164,708 次观看 • 9 天前
It's All Much Worse Than I Thought The corporate media are all-in on government censorship Over the last three years, we have come to learn of the role that our own government officials have played in demanding censorship by social media platforms. Some of this censorship was overt, particularly as it related to COVID. However, some of it was also done in secrecy, as we discovered in the Twitter Files. Many of us thought that once we had uncovered the censorship, governments would be sufficiently embarrassed to stop doing it. And to some extent, that has been the case. But now, governments around the world are stepping up their efforts to demand more censorship. Last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation quietly announced it had resumed its outreach to social media companies. Scotland’s Police could even investigate comedians under a new hate speech law if someone complains about a joke. Major media outlets are currently working with government-funded censorship activists at the University of Washington and Stanford Internet Observatory to demand greater censorship in the name of “saving Democracy.” Without a doubt, those of us who have uncovered censorship have had an impact. On “60 Minutes” last Sunday, the government-funded advocates of censorship at the University of Washington said they have stopped demanding censorship of social media platforms. Simply drawing awareness to who is demanding censorship and who is funding them has weakened their power. But governments, government-funded NGOs, and the news media have been relentless in their demands for a crackdown on speech they deem hateful and false. At the Supreme Court last week, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed unironic concern that the First Amendment restricts the government’s ability to censor. And everyone from the New Yorker to the New York Times to NBC is suggesting that the only people who are worried about government censorship are Trump supporters, which is obviously false. The 60 Minutes segment was particularly shocking. Lesly Stahl never mentioned the mass censorship of accurate information about COVID’S origins, COVID vaccines, and lockdowns. She falsely suggested that shining a light on the censorship activists was tantamount to persecution. And she suggested that if the government didn’t do more to censor misinformation, Trump supporters would overthrow the government, which is a form of disinformation aimed at scaring people into giving up our first and most fundamental freedom. There are many reasons why they are doing this....
Michael Shellenberger21,896,156 次观看 • 2 年前
They said the government was by and for the people, and the media was free. They weren't. Deep state actors controlled them. Then, after the populist revolts of 2016, they turned the tools of regime change, including disinfo, censorship, and lawfare, against the American people.
Michael Shellenberger11,994,419 次观看 • 1 年前
The governor of America’s richest and most populous state yesterday doubled down on his new law, which requires that schools hide a psychiatric disorder known as gender dysphoria from parents. California Governor Gavin Newsom claims his law “protects the child-parent relationship” and prevents the government from “inappropriately intervening in family matters.” This is disinformation. Newsom knows full well that his law prevents schools from telling parents when their children have come to believe that they are the opposite sex and were born into the wrong body. This is dangerous because the next step is for doctors to give those children and adolescents puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and the final treatment, surgery. Parents in California should know that Gavin Newsom has put their children in danger. Why is Gavin Newsom doing this? Doesn’t he want to be president? It’s true Gavin won’t ever be elected president now. Voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania won’t elect a president who enables such mistreatment. So what’s driving him? You may have heard the expression, “Good times create weak leaders.” This expression suggests that when things are going well, we elect politicians who aren’t capable of doing anything. It’s rational when you think about it. When things are going good, you don’t want to change anything. Gavin Newsom is the weak leader born from good times. He was born into a close relationship with the billionaire Getty oil family. He was spoiled as a boy and has never worked for anything other than to advance himself. Gavin Newsom is such a weak leader that he caved into activist pressure he should have protected children. The problem with weak leaders is that they create bad times. That’s what Gavin has done. He has increased homelessness by 40% in just four and a half years. He’s letting people with schizophrenia die from fentanyl overdoses and be sexually assaulted in tents on the sidewalks. And now he’s let activists prey on California’s children. Instead of hospitalizing people psychotic from schizophrenia and meth, Gavin’s government is helping them smoke fentanyl and meth on the street and die. Instead of doing cognitive behavioral therapy with adolescents with gender dysphoria, anxiety, and depression, Gavin’s government is putting them on puberty blockers, giving them hormones, and performing surgeries. Behind Gavin is a pathological desire to care for people. That means creating more sick people. Call it Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. This is what progressives are doing. They are affirming mental illnesses and psychiatric disorders rather than treating them. Think of the Kathy Bates character in “Misery.” California is creating and affirming psychiatric disorders. The public health departments are funding and enabling drug addiction and homelessness. And the schools are promoting gender dysphoria. The good news is that this reality is now visible for everyone to see. Elon Musk shared my video yesterday, and now 20 million people have viewed it. I have received requests from media all around the world, even in California, where publishers, editors, and journalists have championed Gavin Newsom’s destructive and inhumane policies for 30 years. We are organizing a movement to fight back. Please add your name to our list of people working to Save California. Gavin Newsom will never be president, and he won’t be governor for much longer, but it’s up to us to smash the pathocratic bureaucracy he created and replace it with one dedicated to caring for people, not mistreating them. We need to fight back against California’s disinformation about what he’s done. Please sign up and subscribe to Public now. Most of all, we need to get the word out that Gavin Newsom is lying about what he’s done. He’s not protecting the child-parent relationship, he’s weaponizing the government to attack it. Change is coming. As the nation’s richest and most populous state, California has no excuse for its gross mistreatment of children, adolescents, and vulnerable adults.
Michael Shellenberger17,193,661 次观看 • 1 年前
The House of Representatives impeached President Donald Trump on December 18, 2019, after a White House whistleblower went public with evidence that Trump abused his powers by withholding military aid to Ukraine in order to dig up dirt on his rival, Joe Biden. In the complaint, the whistleblower claimed to have heard from White House staff that Trump had, on a phone call, directed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to work with his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, to investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. The whistleblower who triggered the impeachment was a CIA analyst who was first brought into the White House by the Obama administration. Reporting by Drop Site News last year revealed that the CIA analyst relied on reporting by a supposedly independent investigative news organization called the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), which appears to have effectively operated as an arm of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which President Trump has just shut down. The CIA whistleblower complaint cited a long report by OCCRP four times. The OCCRP report alleged that two Soviet-born Florida businessmen were “key hidden actors behind a plan” by Trump to investigate the Bidens. According to the story, those two businessmen connected Giuliani to two former Ukrainian prosecutors. The OCCRP story was crucial to the House Democrats’ impeachment claim, which is that Trump dispatched Giuliani as part of a coordinated effort to pressure a foreign country to interfere in the 2020 presidential election, which is why the whistleblower cited it four times. In a 2024 documentary that German television broadcaster NDR made about OCCRP’s dependence on the US government, a USAID official confirmed that USAID approves OCCRP’s “annual work plan” and approves new hires of “key personnel.” NDR initiated and carried out the investigation with French investigative news organization Mediapart, Italian new group Il Fatto Quotidiano, Reporters United in Greece, and Drop Site News in the United States. However, according to a Mediapart story published the same day as the Drop Site News article, NDR censored the broadcast “after US journalist Drew Sullivan, the co-founder and head of the OCCRP, placed pressure on the NDR management and made false accusations against the broadcaster’s journalists involved in the project.” On December 16, Drop Site’s Ryan Grim posted a link on X to the 26-minute-long documentary. “NDR, Germany’s public broadcaster, is facing a censorship scandal and has defended itself by saying it never killed a news report about OCCRP and its State Department funding — b/c no report was ever produced to kill,” said Grim. “That was absurd — and dozens, maybe hundreds, of journalists knew it to be false, and now of course, someone has leaked it.” The journalistic collaboration revealed that OCCRP’s original funding came from the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the State Department, and quotes a USAID official who says, “Drew’s just nervous about being linked with law enforcement,” referring to Sullivan. “If people who are going to give you information think you’re just a cop, maybe it’s a problem.” OCCRP does not operate like a normal investigative journalism organization in that its goals appear to include interfering in foreign political matters, including elections, aimed at regime change. Sullivan told NDR that his organization had “probably been responsible for five or six countries changing over from one government to another government… and getting prime ministers indicted or thrown out.” As such, it appears that CIA, USAID, and OCCRP were all involved in the impeachment of President Trump in ways similar to the regime change operations that all three organizations engage in abroad. The difference is that it is highly illegal and even treasonous for CIA, USAID, and its contractors and intermediaries, known as “cut-outs,” to interfere in US politics this way. OCCRP threatened to file a lawsuit against Public in response to questions we sent. “The premise of your article is factually false and defamatory,” wrote Miranda Patrucic, the Editor in Chief of OCCRP, over email. “The claim by Dropsite News and partner media that USAID has control over editorial appointments has been disproven and we suggest you read our response to that.” But neither OCCRP nor anyone else disproved Drop Site’s allegations and Drop Site stands by them. And the evidence does not support OCCRP’s claim of journalistic independence.... Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative reporting, to read the rest of the article, and to watch the rest of the video!
Michael Shellenberger11,197,537 次观看 • 1 年前
Years Of US-UK Military And Intelligence Planning Behind Sweeping Brazil Censorship, Evidence Suggests _Secret evidence, specialized spy units, and permanent bans on populists were key tactics developed by government operatives_ Late last night, the Judiciary Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives released over 500 pages of confidential Brazilian court documents relating to censorship demands on X, formerly Twitter. The Committee had obtained them from X through its subpoena powers. The documents show a single Superior Electoral Court (TSE) Justice, Alexandre de Moraes, demanding permanent bans on over 150 elected officials and journalists. De Moraes demanded these bans in secret processes, without explanation or means of appeal, and across social media platforms. Given the dependence of elected leaders on social media, these demands for bans may constitute electoral interference. In one case, De Moraes demanded that all major social media platforms, including at least one, Twitter, which did not publish the offending material, ban a federal Congressman, Marcel Van Hattem. The TSE had claimed that Van Hattem had criticized the election results. Not only had Van Hattan’s video not been related to the elections, but it was also a criticism of the Labor Department. It was released one day before the election. In many ways, Brazil’s sweeping censorship system is unique to Brazil. Brazil’s Censorship Industrial Complex is located in the judiciary rather than in the executive branch, as it is in Europe, in the European Commission, and the U.S., in the Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, National Science Foundation, and other agencies. However, in other ways, Brazil’s censorship simply reflects the most advanced form of the Censorship Industrial Complex vision created by US and UK government officials, particularly ones working for the military and intelligence agencies. Our work revealed that current and former agents from the US Department of Defense, the CIA, the Department of Homeland Security, and the British Ministry of Defense all developed comprehensive censorship programs. The Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation have been caught funding the creation of censorship tools, including AI-based ones, for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms to engage in mass censorship. Beginning in early 2017, several military and intelligence agencies and agents from the US and UK governments developed similar censorship tactics that Brazil's Superior Electoral Court (TSE) was caught using. Those tactics included…
Michael Shellenberger15,722,850 次观看 • 2 年前
Elon Musk Is All That Stands In The Way Of Totalitarianism Last night, around 8 p.m. local time in São Paulo, Brazil, Federal Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes announced a criminal investigation into Elon Musk, the owner of X, formerly known as Twitter, for allegedly spreading disinformation, obstructing justice, and allowing people who De Moraes had banned from social media to freely express their views. De Moraes said he would fine X twenty thousand dollars per day for every banned person Musk allows to speak. As such, De Moraes has taken Brazil one step closer to being a dictatorship. What’s more, the events of the last few weeks make clear that Elon Musk is the only thing standing in the way of global totalitarianism. Without free speech, there can be no democracy. If X goes down, we must continue to fight. We can continue to communicate through email and other social media platforms, such as Facebook. But email is no substitute for social media platforms' capacity to share information with millions of people. Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, abandoned his principled free speech position in 2020 after three years of relentless pressure from activist NGOs, Democrats, and corporate advertisers. Today, Facebook actively represses the spread of news. The mainstream corporate news media have never been more corrupt and totalitarian. With few exceptions, they spread government propaganda as a matter of policy. Nobody demands censorship more than the corporate media, which benefit from governments shutting down their competitors. Governments are either not protecting free speech or actively participating in the war upon it. Last month, the US Supreme Court held a hearing where justices made clear that they were fine with the US government pressuring social media companies to censor. Last week, the Scottish government implemented a law to crack down on so-called hate speech, including jokes by comedians. In Ireland, the government wants the power to send police into people’s homes to search computers and phones for hate speech. In Canada, the governing Liberal party wants the power to send people to prison for life for things they’ve said. And the European Union has empowered a tiny group of bureaucrats to decide what is true and false and engage in mass censorship. All of this is happening at the very same moment that my colleagues and I have revealed that government intelligence organizations are working through NGOs to interfere in elections by spreading disinformation about populist activists and political candidates. In other words, governments are demanding censorship in order to protect their ability to spread disinformation. Making matters worse, governments are directly financing corporate news media. The current Brazilian government is spending 30 times more than the previous government on media advertising in order to spread its disinformation. I never in my life thought I would live to see the rise of totalitarianism in Western countries. A powerful minority of educated elites around the world are demanding the censorship, persecution, and incarceration of their political enemies. Naturally, they are doing so in the name of saving democracy. I am shocked and embarrassed that I used to call many of these totalitarians friends and allies. The only explanation is that they are in the grip of mass psychosis after years of media propaganda and government disinformation falsely claiming that populist political movements are undemocratic. The fact that the future of free speech rests upon the shoulders of a single individual is not something any of us should want. I do not think that this is a responsibility Elon Musk wants. He would be a far richer person had he never bought Twitter. He would also be living a more peaceful life. After Musk bought Twitter, the Biden administration and the Democratic Party declared war on him. Various government agencies filed multiple frivolous lawsuits against Musk and his companies in ways very similar to the war the Brazilian government is waging against X. What all of this reveals is that, until Musk bought Twitter, we didn’t really have freedom of expression. The US government felt that it controlled both the corporate news media and social media companies. We saw in the Twitter Files that the FBI orchestrated a disinformation and censorship campaign in order to protect Joe Biden. Starting with the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, operatives working for the US Department of Defense and the British Ministry of Defense sought to hide their censorship and disinformation efforts as “cyber security.” After that, the US Department of Homeland Security and the Stanford Internet Observatory engaged in a mass censorship effort around the 2020 elections and Covid. It is today clear that intelligence and security agencies have been working together around the world to gain control over social media platforms in order to discredit, prosecute, and incarcerate populist leaders. The evidence is now overwhelming that the FBI and Secret Service are covering up evidence related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot in Washington DC. And there is still much we do not know about the eerily similar riot in Brazil’s capitol on January 8, 2023. There is much we need to do to fight back....
Michael Shellenberger15,773,490 次观看 • 2 年前
“You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater!” How many times have you heard advocates of censorship say that? Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz repeated it last night in his debate with Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. In so doing, Walz spread misinformation. It’s not illegal to yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s a myth. The expression refers to a 1919 Supreme Court opinion superseded by the 1969 Brandenberg v. Ohio decision. Tim Walz had previously claimed that spreading misinformation about elections was illegal. It’s not. How could it be? If the government censored disfavored views on elections, how would we ever know if our elections were truly free and fair? I debunked Walz’s claim on X last night, and it’s happily now been viewed over 10 million times. As satisfying as that is, it’s still not enough. If Walz and Harris get elected, they may attempt to ramp up the censorship we have been documenting and denouncing. As such, all of us who care about freedom of speech must push ourselves to find ways to persuade our fellow citizens of the benefits of free speech over censorship. Now, you might not feel like making the case for free speech personally to friends and family, and you certainly don’t need to. But many people have emailed me over the last three years expressing dismay at how many Democrats they know are in favor of free speech. I share their dismay. Support among Democrats for government censorship of online misinformation grew from 40% to 70% between 2018 and 2023. It was shocking to testify before Congress on free speech issues last year only to discover how many Democrats wanted more censorship. And so I made this video for people looking for a way to talk to friends and family about censorship, one of the greatest threats to our democracy. After working on free speech issues three years ago, I realized that I had taken my support for free speech for granted. I had forgotten that my parents and others had taught me the importance of free speech. It wasn’t something that came naturally. I still remember when my father explained to me why the Supreme Court let Nazis march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. I remember being shocked by this and thinking such a thing lacked compassion. Only gradually, over several years, I saw the wisdom of free speech, not simply in allowing fundamental human expression but also as the best response to lies and hatred. That raises a few questions: Will the same approach that worked with me work with people today? Who needs to be persuaded, exactly? And what appears to move them? Over the last few years my colleagues and I have read through the public opinion research, interviewed, and spoken with hundreds of people in the West. One significant finding is that the people in favor of censorship today tend to be more female than male and more on the political Left than Right. And I’m happy to say that I finally feel confident in explaining what moves them to favor free speech and more opposed to censorship. The research on support for free speech is mixed. Initially, older adults were more inclined to favor restrictions, but polling by the Pew Research Center shows that this gap has closed. Similarly, a 2022 Knight Foundation survey indicated that younger people, while valuing free speech highly, have become more supportive of limiting online harmful content. However, a recent 2024 survey of Australians found that younger people were more supportive of free speech and against censorship than older people. The main reason women and people on the left are more supportive of censorship appears to be to reduce harm. This is consistent with the research by psychologists Jonathan Haidt and others that where conservatives tend to hold a broader set of traditional values, progressives have reduced the number of core values they hold strongly to just one: compassion. Earlier research found people on the Left also hold the value of freedom, but it is notably selective, as rising Democratic support for censorship shows. “Women are more supportive of illegalizing insults of immigrants, homosexualindividuals, transgender individuals, the police, African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jewish people, and Christians, and are more supportive of banning sexually explicit public statements and flag burning,” noted psychologist Cory Clark in Psychology Today in 2021. “One likely reason for this pattern is that women are more averse to interpersonal harm and have a relatively stronger concern for protecting others.” So, to move people to support free speech, we should first appeal to compassion since it’s the core value of Democrats, progressives, liberals, and people on the Left today. After you anchor people in compassion, you can make the intellectual case for why free speech is more compassionate than censorship. This approach is also critical to avoid triggering cognitive dissonance, which is the discomfort individuals feel when they realize they hold contradictory beliefs or are confronted with information that challenges their existing views. If people feel attacked or cornered, they often respond by doubling down on their beliefs to reduce this discomfort, a phenomenon known as "motivated reasoning" or "defensive processing." Avoiding accusatory language, empathetic listening, and framing the conversation around shared values can prevent defensive responses and encourage reflection. “If you must present evidence threatening to the audience’s worldview,” wrote a team of psychologists in 2016, “you may be able to reduce the worldview backfire effect by presenting your content in a worldview-affirming manner.” Readers of Public may recall what I discovered when interviewing people on the streets of Dublin, Ireland, about free speech. Simply slowing people down and forcing them to engage in “slow thinking” rather than “fast thinking” made them more receptive to free speech arguments. Slowing people down allows them to relax, remember the past, and imagine potential futures. And simply asking questions demonstrates respect and triggers a feeling of obligation by most people to offer truthful answers. How you approach the topic will depend on whether you’re talking with a friend or relative or moderating a presidential debate, but it should include affirming shared values. You might say, “There’s been a lot of debate about censorship and misinformation. Most of us, myself included, care a lot about protecting vulnerable people and countering bad information while protecting people’s right to free speech. I’m curious how you think about these issues, and I wondered if I could ask you how you think about them.” Assuming you get permission to go further, here are the three key questions I would recommend... 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Michael Shellenberger10,563,804 次观看 • 1 年前
BREAKING: Congress is considering stripping sovereign immunity of EU censorship officials, prohibiting social media from enforcing censorship orders, and enabling private lawsuits against foreign entities, says Rep. Jim Jordan echoing remarks made by Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers and Darrell Issa
Michael Shellenberger1,596,445 次观看 • 3 个月前
Brazilian Judge Pushes Nationalist Conspiracy Theory To Weaponize Federal Police Against Defenders Of Free Speech Brazil’s Federal Police discuss me in new report commissioned by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes Yesterday, a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice, who is also the President of the Superior Electoral Commission, lashed out angrily at X owner Elon Musk. At an event heavily promoted by Globo News, Alexandre de Moraes claimed that Musk is part of a vast extremist conspiracy to undermine Brazil’s sovereignty and democracy. He claimed that Musk was an “irresponsible mercantilist” motivated solely by profits who had “united” with “extremist Brazilian politicians.” But there is no evidence of any conspiracy. Musk did not know I would publish the Twitter Files Brazil. Nor did the Brazilian politicians who reacted to them. And many of the politicians and journalists who de Moraes is demonizing as “extremist” are advocates of freedom of speech, including the right to criticize de Moraes. It’s true that some of the people who de Moraes is censoring have urged a military intervention and have made unsubstantiated claims about elections and Covid. I do not agree with many of the statements made by the people whom de Moraes has censored. But freedom of speech means nothing if it does not protect people and ideas you disagree with. If we aren’t going to allow people to criticize democracy, elections, and vaccines, how will we ever know if they are bad? If people are spreading false information about democracy, elections, and vaccines, the best way to deal with the false information is with accurate information, not censorship. The real extremist spreading disinformation here is de Moraes. If Musk were solely motivated by money, then he would not have stood up to de Moraes, which resulted in the Brazilian government halting all advertising on X, the resignation of X’s top lawyer in Brazil, who feared for his safety, and may result in de Moraes shutting down X in Brazil. He is not simply demanding that social media platforms censor specific content by controversial journalists and politicians. He is demanding that all social media platforms ban them for life. He often does so through secret hearings without the right of appeal. In fact, it’s all much worse than that. You can’t be a politician or journalist if you can’t communicate on social media. And so de Moraes is not just violating the Brazilian constitution’s protections of free speech, he is also attacking the freedom of the press, destroying careers, and interfering in elections. De Moraes has acted unilaterally to invent entirely new laws. He is thus interfering and taking over the role of Congress and of the president. That means he is behaving like a dictator. And now de Moraes has weaponized the Federal Police, including against me, for publishing the Twitter Files in Brazil. The Federal Police delivered two reports to de Moraes, one on April 18 and the other on April 19. The reports consist of a gigantic conspiracy theory, suggesting connections and relationships that simply do not exist. The reports single me out and suggest it is somehow suspicious that I only have paid for one subscription on X, which is to Elon Musk. But there is nothing suspicious about this. I am paying Musk, not the other way around. And, as the Police report notes, Musk takes a percentage of the revenue of the people who subscribe to my content on X. And the reports claim that people who de Moraes had demanded be censored had gained limited access to communicate on X, in particular through X’s Spaces, which allows for live conversation. In other words, de Moraes is totally obsessed with silencing his enemies. It’s not enough for X to have blocked profiles. He also doesn’t want them to be able to use their voice. It helps that the Brazilian government directly pays the Brazilian news media. The new Lula government increased government funding by 60% for Globo alone. Globo is the biggest media in Brazil. It has been demanding more censorship and running propaganda for de Moraes. De Moraes is a brutish authoritarian. His censorship is as bad as the censorship imposed by Brazil’s military dictators. He is seeking, as a judge, to eliminate particularly politicians and journalists from public life. This is hardly the first time de Moraes has weaponized the Federal Police. And in calling Elon Musk a foreign mercantilist, de Moraes is using the exact same kind of nationalist rhetoric that he has attacked his enemies for using. Why does Moraes have so much power? In Brazil, people told me it was because de Moraes controls so many court cases involving rich and powerful people, including politicians and other judges. The solution is for Brazil’s Congress to open an investigation, known as a Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry (CPI). A CPI can evaluate judicial abuses of power, and that is obviously what is happening here. Under a CPI, Brazil’s Congress could gain access to communications between police and judges or anyone else. A CPI could also hear from the victims of censorship. It could bring light to thousands of cases under secrecy. And it could discover how social media platforms were compelled to obey or collaborate with the regime. Musk has taken extraordinary and historic actions to protect free speech. So, too has the US Congress. Now it’s time for Brazil’s Congress to act against the anti-democratic extremism of de Moraes. It must do so before the extremist de Moraes starts arresting his political enemies and shuts down X, and thus free speech, in Brazil.
Michael Shellenberger12,408,969 次观看 • 2 年前