Morning Wire - The Rise of Global Censorship with Michael Shellenberger | 10.19.24

Episode Date: October 19, 2024

Investigative journalist Michael Shellenberger explains the growing global censorship movement, the powerful elites driving it, and the urgent fight to protect free speech in the digital age. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Birch Gold: Text "WIRE" to 989898 for your no-cost, no-obligation information kit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the last month, Bill Gates, as well as two former U.S. Secretaries of State, came out in favor of censoring American speech. This comes on the heels of some of the most restrictive speech laws passing in pure nations. In this episode, we sit down with an investigative journalist on the forefront of the free speech movement to discuss the roots of the industrial censorship complex and how to beat it. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's October 19th. And this is a Saturday edition of Morning Wire. It's stressful knowing you can't control the elections outcome,

but you can take control of protecting your savings by diversifying into gold with Birchgold group. Birch gold will help you convert an IRA or 401k into a physical gold IRA, safeguarding your hard-earned wealth. Text Wire to 98989898 to get your free, comprehensive info kit on gold investing. Trust Birch Gold, as I do, to protect your savings and secure your financial future. Again, text Wire to 989898-98 today. Joining us now to discuss the increasing calls for censorship is CBR chair of free speech at the University of Austin, Michael Schellenberger. Michael, thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for having me. So you have been following very closely the topic of internet censorship. We've reported on your work extensively on this show. When you look at all the different ways information is being controlled, ranging from legislation to fact-checking to throttling of social media, etc., it starts to look like a, multi-headed hydra here. What, in your opinion, is the most current front in this battle right now? Boy, there's so many fronts it's hard to choose. I mean, sometimes we think that we're winning because there is strong support for free speech, both in the United States and around the world, and then something new will crop up. So we're constantly feeling like we're fighting the

hydra cut off one head and another one pops up. I mean, just over the last weeks, we've seen first Bill Gates comes out with a Netflix documentary calling for AI-powered censorship to censor disfavored views on COVID. He also talked about censoring people for so-called harassment, including mentioning his daughter. The week after that, we see John Kerry, the former Secretary of State, complaining that the First Amendment is an obstacle to fighting misinformation. And then Hillary Clinton, also former Secretary. Secretary of State came out and said that social media is an obstacle to what she said was total control. I don't know if it was a slip of the tongue or if she said the quiet part out

loud, but either way, you look at that series of events and it's hard not to wonder if there's something going on here that people are maybe planning for a Kamala Harris victory. What's clear to us is that censorship for a particular group of people, say the global elite, everybody from the United Nations to the European Union to the World Economic Forum to the Democratic Party, they view censorship of social media as a must have, not a nice to have. And I think that's the thing that's so terrifying about this moment is that they seem to view this as one of their highest priorities. You know, this is a very different Democratic Party than the one that certainly that I grew up with. Now you mentioned Bill Gates, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton.

What's the galvanizing principle driving this? Is there an end goal? Yeah, I mean, that's something that we're asking ourselves every day. I mean, on the one hand, it just feels like this is just a major part of the project of the ruling elites, that this is essential to how they want to govern. And I think it reveals something really important about the media system that we had before the Internet, which is there was a significant amount of control over the media and the discourse. And then you fast forward to the social media revolution of the last, you know, 10 or 20 years.

And what gets communicated sort of privately or in ways that are sort of what you might call a limited hangout where some deep state types are revealing their true views, you start to get a sense in which they want to get back the kind of control that they had and feel that they lost. And so it really changes our view of the last 80 years and makes you wonder how much stuff was really being covered up up until now. So there's a true desperation on the part of ruling elites that I think we didn't really anticipate even after we started working on this a couple of years ago. Now, we're seeing a variety of anti-speech initiatives across a variety of Western democracies. Would you say there's evidence that these are actually related, as in these individuals are part of, some sort of club, for lack of better word, or would you say they are just ideologically related, as in springing from the same well of thinking, or are they separate? Great question. I think the first thing to say is, you know, there's a lot of Americans that ask,

you know, why should we be worried about what happens in Europe or in Brazil or in Canada? Those are different countries. They don't have the First Amendment. We shouldn't be worried about them. We think there is a strategy, including involving people in the United States, the people that really want the censorship, or what you might call the censorship industrial complex, which are these NGOs and academics and politicians and news media companies. We think that they want to see more censorship abroad so that they can then get censorship here. And I think that works both as this idea that, well, it's going to be easier for social media companies to just have a single censorship standard worldwide rather than nation-specific. So you get Europe, you get Brazil,

suddenly you're talking about a billion people. And then the question is, are the social media companies really going to want to have separate content moderation, which is a kind of a euphemism for censorship? But they're going to have a separate set of rules here. So I think that's part of it. You see very similar tactics being used around the world. And sometimes very similar organizations. You also see a similar private funding from George Soros in particular, Pierre Omidyar, Craig Newmark, and they fund fact-checking NGOs that then claim that certain things are factually untrue. That seems innocuous enough, but then that becomes the pretext for demanding censorship of social media companies. You see advertiser boycotts demanding that advertisers stop supporting social media right now.

Obviously, it's X, but they went after Facebook before that. And also, sadly, seeing involvement of military intelligence and security agencies, you know, we uncovered a censorship operation in the United States called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League that was directly involved with the Department of Homeland Security. We also uncovered an effort by so-called former CIA people to try to take control of content moderation at then Twitter. So it does appear to be coming, a big part of this does appear to be coming from what we call the deep state. Now, do you think, and I'm specifically thinking about the Bill Gates documentary you mentioned, where he basically comes out and makes a direct appeal for censorship, do you think that this group has been successful in selling this idea to people? Or do you think this remains broadly unpopular and will remain unpopular? Another super important question. As you can imagine,

it all depends on how you frame and ask the question. And what's interesting is that we think that the public opinion on this questions is basically the same across the Western world. I've interviewed people now all over the world, Britain, Ireland, Brazil, United States. And if you ask people, do you think that the government should play a role in fighting misinformation and hate speech? You can get pretty significant majorities. It's definitely skewed on the left. So you saw a big increase from 2018 to 20, 23, we saw the percentage of Democrats who support government censorship of so-called misinformation

on social media platforms rise from 40% to 70%. We think a huge percentage of that has to do with this idea promoted by the media over the last eight years that misinformation was what got Donald Trump elected. There's also been a huge effort to persuade people that so-called hate speech online results in real-world violence, which we could talk about some more, but there's really never been any good social science to support any of that. Now, if you ask people the question, could you imagine people in government abusing their powers for political reasons, you also get a large majority of people. So we've kind of boiled it down to three questions. We think you should ask

people that say they support so-called fighting misinformation or censorship. The first is, have movements in the past for independence or human rights, have they benefited more in the past from censorship or from free speech? You can also ask, can you imagine the government abusing its powers to censor speech for political reasons and then follow up and just say, all else being equal, you know, what do you think is going to be better for democracy, free speech or censorship? Just actually using the word censorship and calling it what it is is also quite effective because, of course, the people that are demanding censorship, they never call it that. They say fighting misinformation, countering hate speech. It all sounds very innocuous. Like who could possibly be against

fighting misinformation? I, as a journalist, I spend most of my days fighting misinformation. I mean, daily wire. You guys go out there and you debunk misinformation. But we do it through free speech. We don't do it by going behind closed doors and demanding that social media, companies censor our political opponents or people that we disagree with. So that's the difference is that there's something very hypnotic about this discourse of misinformation and disinformation, people that puts people in a trance and they actually lose sight of what's being proposed. It's actually uncannily like George Orwell described in 1984, where you sort of hypnotize the population to accept what is essentially a to,

totalitarian measure to control people's thought and behavior. Now, looking at the few examples you mentioned, Australia, there's Brazil, of course, have the United States, in which case it's the Democratic Party that's supporting this. Would you say this is exclusively a left-wing phenomenon or does it transcend left and right? A super fascinating question because, you know, if you look at the history of free speech, let's just say the last 250 years, it's mostly a case of conservatives demanding censorship and the left or liberals demanding free speech. And it makes sense because conservatives are about protecting tradition, about protecting morals, about moving slowly.

You don't want a lot of chaos and disruption that really radical forms of speech would unleash. The worst censorship in American history, at least in the 20th century, I should say, occurred in the early part of the 20th century, really in the 1910s to the 1930s, mostly a crackdown on socialists and, anarchists and anti-war activists. There was something called the Sedition Act. And it was, you know, basically used to disrupt not just free speech as much, but really gatherings, you know, socialist movements. I mean, they arrested thousands of people. It's an incredible period that people don't really know much about. So now you fast forward to today. And it's clearly, it's the Democrats that are demanding censorship. I've testified on censorship now four times in front of Congress, once in front of the Senate. And you just, I mean, I would be stunned to listen to Democrats.

demanding censorship because I'm a Gen Xer born in 1971. I mean, for me, the left was the big advocates of free speech. The free speech movement came out of Berkeley in the early 60s. It was the left. So it's very disorienting. So what's driving it is clearly counter-populism. And so you can find instances, both in the United States and in Brazil, and I think we'll see it in Europe too, of radical left, populist left, being censored. Interestingly enough, there's now a left-wing anti-mass migration new political party in Germany. The media is already labeling far left just for having an anti-mass migration agenda. I mean, if you pull back and you just look at what does the deep state globalizing ruling class want right now?

They want to control the information environment. It's not just censorship, of course, because there's also the flip side. They want to fund state propaganda. They want to do so-called media literacy, which is basically brainwashing children and schools to only accept government views. Their biggest priorities are really around allowing mass migration and having control over the information environment. And those two things appear to be really intertwined. Now, last question.

What do you think the answer for this is? I would guess that the Founding Father's solution is just eternal vigilance. which is what you're embarking on. Is there also a policy solution? Definitely eternal vigilance. You know, as you get older, you go, wow, all the cliches are true, and eternal vigilance is absolutely essential. So is sunshine is the best disinfectant. I mentioned the other one, just calling it what it is, calling at censorship. There's other things that we need to do. I mean, we are building a free speech movement around the world. I mean, amazingly, there isn't one, in part because the sorosification of the free speech

NGOs, I mean, really the Soros funding of these NGOs that used to be pro-free speech, they've now then become advocates of censorship. I mean, you see ACLU, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, they're on the wrong side of this. So we're needing to build a free speech movement. I think there is a legislative solution that's pretty straightforward, which is that if you are a social media platform, which means that you accept what's called Section 230 designation to the 1996 law that gave social media companies that really limited their liability for things like defamation or fraud or whatnot gives them very special privileges. I think if you accept those privileges in your social media platform, then you must allow

users to moderate their own legal content. The platforms could still promote certain content that they want to promote, but there shouldn't be censorship of legal content, obviously illegal content, obviously illegal content, child exploitation and fraud and obvious defamation or immediate incitement to violence with immediacy being the key word there, those things should still be illegal and those are the limits to free speech, but all legal content in my view should be up to the users. I'd love to see that legislation pass in some future Congress. I'm skeptical that we could get majority support for it, but maybe at some point in the longer term, I think we're going to have

to go and fight and win a bunch of these battles over the next several years before we really can get to a place where Congress may take action. All right. Well, Michael, thank you so much for coming on and thank you for the work you're doing. Thank you. Appreciate you guys. That was Michael Schellenberger, CBR chair of Free Speech at the University of Austin and Independent Journalist. And this has been a Saturday edition of Morning Wire.