The government didn’t censor anyone on Covid, say the media. But it did. Facebook’s Zuckerberg even said he regretted giving in to the government's demands. And now, new documents reveal that the Dept. of Homeland Security may have broken the law by hunting down Covid wrongthink. Department Of Homeland Security Illegally Targeted Covid Dissent, New Documents Suggest

DHS’s cybersecurity agency went far beyond its congressional mandate in hunting wrongthink and monitoring emotions

by @galexybrane & @shellenberger
Chris Krebs, founding director of the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of the Department of Homeland Security; President Barack Obama; Jen Easterly, Director of CISA (GETTY IMAGES)

The idea that intelligence and security agencies like the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and others have been involved in the surveillance and censorship of the American people is a conspiracy theory, according to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH), was not a victim of government censorship, says NBC News. There was simply no “Censorship Industrial Complex” or government-coordinated activity that targeted American citizens’ speech and violated the First Amendment, mainstream journalists and commentators agree.

But there was and is a Censorship Industrial Complex. The Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) of DHS expanded its mandate in January 2017, during the final days of Barack Obama’s presidency, to cover election infrastructure as critical infrastructure. This would eventually entail protecting “cognitive security” by combating mis- and disinformation. DHS asked four government-funded think tanks to flag “misinformation,” which was often simply political speech that Democrats didn’t like, and together with DHS urge social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to delete, suppress, or censor it in some other way. In 2020 and 2021, the four government contractors worked hand-in-glove with DHS and other government agencies to pressure social media platforms to engage in political censorship.

Defenders of those efforts say they weren’t engaged in censorship and that the Supreme Court agrees with them. Representatives from these Big Four counter-misinformation NGOs say they did not censor anyone, nor could they, since they didn’t operate the social media platforms. They simply did what anyone could do which was to flag misinformation to the social media companies. No government agency ever threatened to harm a social media platform that refused the offers of help from NGOs engaged in counter-misinformation. And the Supreme Court ruled that government officials have long been free to try to persuade the publishers, reporters, and editors at newspapers and thus were and are free to do the same with social media platforms. “CISA does not and has never censored speech or facilitated censorship,” a Senior Advisor for Public Affairs told Public. “Such allegations are riddled with factual inaccuracies.”

In truth, the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured” Facebook to censor “certain COVID-19 content including humor and satire,” said Meta/Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in August. “I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Senior Facebook executives worried that the Biden administration would not help Facebook deal with its problems complying with European regulations if it didn’t censor vaccine hesitancy.

And CISA did not refute any of Public’s allegations; it simply dismissed them. That may be because there is no dispute over the basic facts of the situation. DHS and the censorship NGOs persuaded the social media giants to give them unique and special status for flagging disfavored election and Covid content in 2020 and 2021 through a special ticketing (Jira) system. Ordinary members of the public not only did not have access to this system, nobody outside the small government-organized censorship clique knew it existed.

The head of the Stanford censorship program said its function was to “fill in the gap of things the government couldn’t do.” And there was virtually no separation between CISA and Stanford’s flagging and censorship operation. CISA’s Director and the Director of one of the Big Four censorship groups texted each other “with some regularity,” according to a staffer. A CISA official named Brian Scully was in a Signal messaging group with at least one Stanford intern and Twitter’s content team.

It has been a mystery about when exactly CISA began its push for censorship. Ostensibly, CISA didn’t ask the four censorship NGOs to create the “Election Integrity Partnership” until mid-2020, and those NGOs did not come up with the idea to create the “Virality Project” on Covid until late 2020, after the elections.

Now, newly obtained documents provided to Public by the America First Legal reveal that CISA began its hunt for disfavored speech about Covid-19 as early as the week of February 18, 2020. The new documents, obtained from litigation by American First Legal against the State Department and CISA, show that the latter agency had Covid censorship on its mind long before it decided to focus on election censorship. The documents thus provide the missing link in CISA’s operation to chill disfavored speech.
“Incredibly, the evidence is that CISA relied on a dangerous, anti-American blob of ‘authorities’ to closely monitor what the American people were saying,” said Reed D. Rubinstein, America First Legal’s Senior Vice President. “CISA was created to protect the homeland from terrorists, not to protect incompetent federal bureaucrats.” While the monitoring of social media narratives may seem innocent, it is the crucial first step in the process of demanding censorship.

These new documents expose the early extent to which the US government repurposed the homeland security apparatus, including DHS’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) for domestic control. The documents show that CISA may have sought to counter information from Bhattacharya, despite claims by the mainstream media recently that the government never tried to censor him. And the new documents come at a time when the in-coming Trump administration has its eyes set on defunding government censorship activities, including by CISA and the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC).

CISA’s early monitoring of Covid narratives may constitute a violation of what’s known as the Supreme Court’s “major questions” doctrine, argues America First Legal, which holds that government agencies must not stray from the specific legal authorities given to them by Congress. The Supreme Court has rejected claims by government agencies to have authority over issues of “vast economic and political significance” without clear congressional authorization. And CISA arguably had no congressional authorization to monitor such Covid-related speech, which was unrelated to cybersecurity, infrastructure security, or election security. As such, CISA may have indeed broken the law.

Why, then, did it do it? How did an organization supposedly focused on cybersecurity end up tracking and orchestrating the censorship of disfavored Covid information?

Please, subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism and to read the rest of the article!

x.com/shellenberger/…

Biden says there’s no “sense of danger” in the repeated invasions of the air space above homes and military bases by unidentified drones. That’s a ridiculous and terrifying lie. Of course there is. Protecting our air space has been one of America’s highest priorities for 80 years

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1869155843289334109

From Biden to Mayorkas to DOD spokesperson, the US government officials are flagrantly lying to the American people and nobody knows this more than US military base commanders and the men and women who work in the military.

Biden officials @AliMayorkas & John Kirby said, " We have not seen drones penetrate restricted airspace" and "There are no reported or confirmed drone sightings in any restricted airspace," but US officials have reported drones at Langley, Edwards, Earle, & many other sites. Drones penetrated restrict airspace at Langley, Norfolk, Edwards, and Nevada National Security Site.

This was heavily reported and so it's very odd for Kirby to make his claim on Thursday and for Mayorkas to repeat it on Friday.

wsj.com/politics/natio…

There is an epidemic of white police officers killing unarmed black men, we must block the puberty of children born in the wrong bodies to prevent them from killing themselves, the Russians control Trump through a sex blackmail operation, the Covid vaccine prevents infection, millions or billions will die from starvation and harsh weather from climate change, there's no way a Covid virus could have escaped from a lab, mass migration improves societies with no trade-offs, it's best for addicts if we give them hard drugs to use in special sites downtown, we need the government to fight misinformation online in order to save democracy, Biden is sharper than ever, Kamala is 100% prepared to be president, and anyone who disagrees is racist, sexist, and/or fascist.

While many Americans are increasingly and at least partially aware that all of the above are lies, we are still a long way from coming to grips with their enormity, their monstrous consequences, and the totalitarian ways in which the mainstream news media, many employers, and governments demanded that we believe them. Current and former heads of state, our most-trusted journalists, and full professors at Ivy League universities created and propagated those Big Lies, repeatedly, for years, even after they had been thoroughly debunked, sometimes within days or hours of them being made, by people who ruling elites then sought to bankrupt, shame, and ostracize.

There has not yet been a proper accounting of the very many abuses of power, including the Big Lies, by elected officials, the media, and other governing elites during the Woke Reign of Terror (2013 - 2024). That accounting will need not only to thoroughly debunk all of the major lies, it will also need to explore why elites created and perpetuated them, why so many people believed them, why they lasted for so long, and what can be learned from them, both separately and how they worked together as a whole, constituting the worldview of the people who run Western societies and nations. Historians, sociologists, psychologists and many others will, for centuries, study the Work Reign of Terror as a uniquely irrational and self-destructive period in America's history. Hopefully something good, including wisdom, courage, and improved self-governance, will come out of those studies and reflections. Woke Religion: A Taxonomy

The Australian PM @AlboMP wants global censorship to counter misinformation. But only free speech can counter misinformation. Please share this to affirm your opposition to his awful bill!

https://twitter.com/theipa/status/1859835740814815726

Was the censorship bill a head fake to jam through Digital ID? 🤔

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1859479459897966742

I am concerned about the impact of social media on children, but this bill is a Trojan horse to create digital IDs, which is a giant leap into the totalitarian dystopia depicted in "Black Mirror," and already in place in China. And @AlboMP has proven censorial and untrustworthy.

https://twitter.com/AlboMP/status/1859343019327226088

Spot on:

https://x.com/PaulineHansonOz/status/1859405625643631044

Lovers of free speech just scored victories in the US, EU, and Ireland. But now we’re in pitched battles in Britain & Australia, which is at dire risk of trying to censor the entire planet. This is about all of us, so I’m flying down. Share this to show solidarity. LFG!!!

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1856063723976192504

I am headed directly to Canberra to meet with other free speech lovers and the wise and just representatives of the Australian people, who I am confident will kill the @AlboMP governments aggressive and hostile assault on the freedom that enables democracy and all other freedoms.

Australia belongs to its people and it is up to them and their representatives to decide whether they want to remain a liberal democratic nation or instantaneously become a totalitarian one.

But it is the duty of friends of Australia to bluntly warn that @AlboMP is pushing a censorship law that would not only end free speech for Australians but also be viewed as a hostile assault on the free Internet worldwide by people in other nations, including in the US, its best ally.

x.com/shellenberger/…

Trump's nominees are weird, say elites. But it was the elites' weird ideas that caused wars, addiction/OD crisis, Covid lockdowns, trans madness, censorship, and worse. Trump's nominees trigger the covert narcissism of elites who are rightly defensive at their appalling record.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1857934857424482805

Democrats act like they’re starting to get it, but they’re not. Their problems are all much worse than they realize. It’s not just that the Party is leaderless. It’s that the Party and the establishment institutions upon which it relies are discredited with half the country and are about to become more discredited with even more Americans as the truth fully comes out about censorship, Covid, weaponization of government, the transgender medical mistreatment scandal, and much else that the media and elites have lied about over the last 20 years. The media isn’t what people thought it was. It was never a reflection of reality. It was a reality distortion machine and propaganda industry in service of maintaining the narrow interests and power of a tiny group of decadent and psychologically disordered elites and their deeply deformed, dishonest institutions. Some might be reformed but others are too far gone to be saved.

x.com/RNCResearch/st…

The media says Trump's nominees are dangerous, but they're not. Their positions and priorities are well within the mainstream. The threat they pose isn't to the American people, it's to the pathocrats who created and worsened our border, public health, and foreign policy crises. Over the last few years, the American people have come to believe that our establishment institutions are at least partly responsible for a series of self-inflicted wounds. Our health and medical establishment either failed to address or enabled declining life expectancy, a mental health crisis including an addiction epidemic, and a botched response to Covid. Our military and foreign policy establishment unnecessarily started and prolonged war and conflict in the Middle East and violated civil liberties at home in the name of fighting terrorism. And liberalized migration laws have depressed working-class wages, swamped the ability of cities to absorb the new migrants, and created a humanitarian disaster on the border.

Given all of that, the President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations make sense. As Border Czar, Thomas Homan will take strong action to close the southern border and deport criminals. National Director of Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard will bring greater skepticism to foreign military entanglements and calls to restrict civil liberties for national security. And Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will stand up to the corporations that most everyone agrees have put self-interest before the public’s interest on everything from drug safety to food quality.

We shouldn’t be surprised that some of them hold views that many of us disagree with. The main criticism of Trump’s nominees is that they have dangerous and fringe views. Homan said he would deport whole families. Gabbard said the Russian-backed Syrian dictator was not America’s enemy. And Kennedy espouses marginal and unsubstantiated views on everything from nuclear power to 5Gs.

But Homan has made clear his focus will be on deporting criminals, not families, whatever one thinks of Gabbard’s position on the Syrian conflict, it’s obvious from the context that she made her remarks in service of her loyalty to the US, not Russia, and Kennedy has said, repeatedly, that he won’t ban vaccines.

And throughout history, most real reformers and innovators have held fringe views and have had aspects of their personalities that are problematic. In most cases, those flaws or idiosyncrasies proved to be a small price to pay for their willingness to overcome the many obstacles required to achieve serious reforms of deeply entrenched institutions. This is true not just of Homan, Gabbard, and Kennedy, but also of Defense Secretary and Attorney General nominees, Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, respectively. The accusations the media has made against the two men are so far unsubstantiated by the available evidence.

And none of the allegedly wrong views or bad deeds of Trump’s nominees outweigh the potential of the nominees to reform the institutions that are directly responsible for the invasion of Iraq, prolonged occupation of Afghanistan, entanglement in foreign conflicts, corporate capture of the FDA, the weaponization of government, Covid school closures, authoritarian and gratuitous Covid vaccine mandates, unhealthy diets, the addiction crisis that kills 100,000 Americans per year, the humanitarian disaster along the border, and the mistreatment of children with pseudoscientific transgender medicine.

Strong leaders committed to reforming America’s military and foreign policy establishment, its public health, food, and medical establishments, and its immigration and border security establishment are precisely what the American people wanted when they voted for Trump. If those nominees pursue destructive agendas in lieu of doing their jobs, we will be the first to call them out for it. But the establishment has no ground on which to stand...

Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning reporting, read the rest of the article, and watch the rest of the video!

Over the last decade, Democrats & the media said that those of us who opposed DEI, racial quotas, and open borders had gone “far right.” We hadn’t. Rather, Democrats and the media had gone far left. We are only now emerging from 10+ years of extreme, psychopathic gaslighting. Make no mistake: it was the mainstream news media that induced the mass psychosis that radicalized Democrats into believing that the US had somehow become *more* racist, against all available evidence.

None of @RobertKennedyJr 's views "have any value whatsoever," say the media. But even the author admits RFK's right about fluoride, raw milk, and the danger of Big Pharma. Elites are freaking out because they know RFK will hold them accountable for their gross abuses of power. This article is downright nasty: "But RFK Jr. is indeed a grade-A crank. Why should he have input on anything?"

Anything? Really?

"Let’s not pretend that Kennedy’s views have any value whatsoever."

The author is guilty of the obnoxious and over-the-top rhetoric he accuses @RobertKennedyJr of.

I don't agree with RFK about nuclear and vaccines, but it's wrong and gratuitously malicious to say Kennedy's views have no "value whatsoever" and to suggest he shouldn't have "input on anything."

Even the author admits that RFK is right about excess corporate power. "I’m ready to acknowledge the merit of Kennedy’s frequent claim that medical regulators are beset by conflicts of interest."

But then the author completely misrepresents his views, saying "Kennedy sounds less like a reformer and more like someone trapped in a web of conspiracy."

That's just false. Kennedy's views of Big Pharma are little different from the conventional, Ralph Nader-influenced views of the Democratic Party from 1962 to 2016.

Kennedy is criticizing the revolving door between Big Pharma and the government, which is the opposite of a "conspiracy" or a "theory."

RFK's whole problem with the revolving door is that it's legal and right out in the open, i.e., the opposite of a conspiracy, which is secret and (usually) illegal.

It is notable that the author never mentions the disastrous Covid lockdowns, abusive vaccine mandates, and other abuses of medical power.

His entire focus is to attack the people who rightly denounced the over-reaction.

The author is particularly disrespectful toward two of the people who were most right about the disastrous Covid lockdowns — @DrJBhattacharya @MartyMakary @VPrasadMDMPH — and most courageous in speaking out against them.

The US and Australia have had a strong relationship for decades. Why, then, is Australia's Prime Minister @AlboMP attacking our relationship by pursuing mass global censorship, overtly aimed @elonmusk & X, which under previous management had banned @realDonaldTrump ?

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1856063723976192504

Do the people of Australia know that their Prime Minister is undermining their nation's historically special relationship with the United States? Why would @AlboMP be doing this just days after the election of @realDonaldTrump, which was made possible by free speech on X?

They call it the “Democratic” party, but it’s not. They rigged 2016 for Hillary to beat Bernie. They got Klobuchar & Buttigieg to quit for Biden in 2020. They got Biden to quit for Kamala in 2024. Now they’re trying to get Sotomayor to quit for Kamala. It’s an authoritarian party 😳

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.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1854279901697728787

Red Scare's @annakhachiyan is right: many of the people who loudly declared their fellow Americans racists and fascists are covert narcissists who now feel wounded and exposed by Kamala's defeat. At some level, they know they're guilty of witch-hunting and, per usual, are projecting.

https://x.com/annakhachiyan/status/1695794130876559852

Pure, perfect projection. The lack of self-awareness is awe-inspiring.

FWIW, I don’t think the cope will continue. The loss of the popular vote, the rightward movement of every state, and the threat of long term dominance by a nonracial working class party will force a significant correction in message in 2026.

NBC last night aired a Trump message after a NASCAR race in an apparent effort to comply with the "equal time" rule after sparking controversy when it put Kamala Harris on SNL.

"A source familiar with the matter told the [Hill] Reporter the appearance was related to providing Trump with equal time."

It's a big victory that NBC acted. It shows that the public pressure we all brought to bear worked. X is game-changing. It's also further proof that NBC knew it was guilty.

But NBC still knowingly broke the law and interfered in the election, and it is still not in compliance with the law. That's because NBC promoted Harris and Kaine within seven days of election, the time was not comparable, and the other candidates, including Senator Tim Kaine's opponent, did not get comparable time.

There is no way that the time was comparable. The SNL skit was funny and humanizing and created by the best minds in television. The Trump campaign had to cobble something together at the last minute.

And, as of now, over 9 million people have watched the clip on YouTube. There's no way that 9 million people will see the Trump message that NBC put on after NASCAR.

As @BrendanCarrFCC notes, "The FCC adopted the seven-day rule to avoid gamesmanship by candidates (usually gamesmanship by the candidate seeking the Equal Time in the exemplar case) and for orderly planning (usually for the broadcaster)."

And, he notes, "NBC structured the SNL candidate appearance (just hours before an election) in a way that denies all other candidates their one week procedural right."

Finally, by law, NBC was required to give equal time to @HungCao_VA @RobertKennedyJr & @DrJillStein and it didn't.

NBC continues to act as though it is above the law. We should accept it as a victory that it felt the need to give Trump some time after NASCAR, but we should not let up the pressure.

Please, share this post to send a message to Congress and the FCC to hold @NBCUniversal accountable!

✊❤️ Over the last week, we have seen the news media engage in disinformation, election interference, and dirty tricks:

— The media made unsubstantiated claims that Trump admired Hitler, which was always ridiculous;

— The media, en masse, falsely claimed that the Trump rally in New York was "fascist" and that a comedian told a "racist" joke about about Puerto Rico;

— The media claimed that the Trump team had "fully embraced" vaccine skepticism;

— And the media falsely claimed that Trump had called for the assassination of @Liz_Cheney

For seven years, the media has demanded mass censorship, by it and the US government, of social media, including X. They are still demanding it.

They have justified their demands for censorship by citing alleged "election misinformation," "vaccine misinformation," and "election interference.

And yet now, just in the last week, the media have engaged in all three.

It's only thanks to @elonmusk's purchase of X that the public has achieved, for the first time, true freedom of speech on the Internet.

It has allowed independent journalists to expose media disinformation in real-time.

For that reason, the media are obsessed with shutting down X. If @KamalaHarris is elected president, that's a real possibility.

I reached out to multiple people at CNN and NBC yesterday to request comment on their disinformation and election interference. None have responded.

It's clear that they believe they are not only above the law, they don't have to comply with their own demands for honesty and accuracy.

x.com/shellenberger/…

The producer of Saturday Night Live said neither Harris nor Trump would appear on the show "because of election laws." Last night, about 60 hours before polls open, he put Harris on the show in a warm & humanizing sketch. He and NBC violated the equal time provision of the law. On October 1, 2024, Hollywood Reporter published this article. It said, "In a recent interview ahead of the show’s 50th season, SNL creator and long-running maestro Lorne Michaels revealed that he hadn’t reached out to the real-life candidates, and he didn’t intend to before the 2024 election. 'You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions.'"

Biden didn't call Trump supporters "garbage," the media said. But he did. And now two officials and an internal email reveal that the White House press office altered the transcript after it "conferred with the president" in direct violation of the Presidential Records Act.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1851584816421933447

After the head of the White House Stenography Office found out that the Press Office had altered the transcript to change what Biden said, he sent an email complaining of “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices.”

The Presidential Records Act prohibits altering official transcripts, which is what the White House did. And the alteration makes no sense. The White House is now claiming Biden was referring to the racism of Trump's supporters, but the transcript refers to "his supporter's." These manipulations come after:

— media falsely claimed comic at Trump rally called Puerto Ricans garbage

x.com/shellenberger/…

— owner of WaPo @JeffBezos pledged to earn back lost public trust

x.com/shellenberger/…

— prosecution of Trump under Presidential Records Act

The New York Times says Biden only "appeared" to call Trump voters "garbage." That's disinformation. What Biden said is clear from the video. And now the White House has altered the official transcript in a potential violation of the Presidential Records Act THREAD

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1851587482560680352

This is disgraceful. Whatever you think of the joke made at MSG, it was about literal garbage, not people.

https://twitter.com/gabegutierrez/status/1851407148535750873

Puerto Rico has been struggling with a solid waste problem for more than a decade, as @AOC of all people should know.

https://twitter.com/shellenberger/status/1850716103993176220