Michael Shellenberger: Exposing the censorship industrial complex | SpectatorTV

you know at least in the Spanish Inquisition you had a chance to respond to your interrogator so there's something pathological about this on the one hand they're so arrogant as to think that they should decide what the BBC and other news media are allowed to cover and what people should be exposed to and then they're so insecure and so small that they refuse to stand for public debate with me this is how you get to totalitarianism [Music] hello and welcome to martial matters of me monster martial at The Spectator today I had the pleasure of being joined by Michael schellenberger who as well as writing the Books San Francisco uh apocalypse never as a history as an environmentalist uh was also ran as a Californian gubernatorial candidate um and actually has the dubious honor of being my first return guest to Marshall matters but since our lot we last spoke which I think was in October November last year you've had incredible uh run and you're you're sort of life and career has taken another kind of swing and as well as building up publicly on your newsletter you're also one of the Twitter files journalists along with Matt Tybee very wisely Fang Dave Swagg others David I've had the pleasure of speaking with him as well and um only last I think week or two weeks ago you exposed what has been called for the last three is a conspiracy theory about patients zero being at the Wuhan Institute for virology and it's so there's there's lots to discuss but Michael thank you so much for coming to speak with me today Winston's pleasure thank you um so actually the reason you're in London is you're doing this event with your co- Twitter files journalist Matt Tybee as well as Rusty Rockets himself Russell Brand at Central Hall Westminster exposing the uh censorship industrial complex for people who have no idea what the censorship industrial complex is how would you describe it well to answer that question you really have to go back to the beginning of the Twitter files so we were invited in I mean really it was as you mentioned mataibi Barry Weiss were invited by Elon Musk um and his associates into Twitter to figure out what was going on because we knew that there was pretty significant censorship of disfavored voices mostly conservative voices but other voices too for several years and and Elon was committed to some transparency on as to what was happening so we were given a pretty broad access to emails and internal messages through Slack and at first it was sort of a picture and we published a series of things about there was just a lot of what you would call woke culture 99 of political donations from Twitter Executives had gone to Democrats and so they were censoring things like you know a one user Megan Murphy wrote in response to a trans debate she wrote you know but men aren't women though and she was de-platformed for tweeting that Graham Lincoln the British comedian who I've also had on the show had exactly the same tweet men aren't women though and were suspended from Twitter yeah so that was so that was clearly a cultural strong cultural and political bias but then we started seeing something else that was very strange which was requests from the FBI to de-platform people and people from the Department of Homeland Security the DHS which was the coordinating body created after 9 11 in the United States and that was very chilling to start to see basically law enforcement and intelligence agencies demand that people be censored effectively by Twitter Executives how is that working is they were sending emails to uh those at Twitter demanding specifically things take that and there was payment there was money involved right well right I mean this is all of this is of course hugely contentious and in fact your uh conversation with the Telegraph reporter because what was happening here in Britain was very similar I mean we were reading these stories that were coming out of the telegraph that had been coming out of the telegraph the last several weeks so the Defenders of this practice say look this is just you know government officials flagging violations of Twitter's terms of service what could possibly be wrong with that well you know there's a lot wrong with it um there was a bit you know basically the government officials both in the UK and in the United States who were who were requesting censorship of users we're getting Priority Access so it wasn't sort of an equal opportunity thing they were right there so you see the the Twitter is creating a bias towards government demands for censorship the United States we have even stricter protections of speech than you do in Britain though they're very strong here too but for the United States it you can't the government cannot interfere in the rights of people to express themselves except for in a very limited number of cases basically around incitement to violence and fraud and so even having the government requesting censorship by Twitter Executives is in my view and the view of many legal Scholars a violation of the First Amendment of the Constitution so then um then the money this was I was the first to report on this is that we then started to see in 2020 Twitter started to accept payments from the federal government for its efforts this was legally Justified as the expense of Twitter Executives having to engage in these activities and there's a law that allows for compensation if you're helping on a federal investigation or a law enforcement investigation the social media Executives can be compensated for it but it's a clear conflict of interest you're paying people to engage in censorship and so there was a lot of debate about that and whether it was justified but to make a long story short it was widespread it was a very intensive and coordinated activity by multiple government agencies in the United States in the UK requesting censorship on Myriad issues we mentioned transgenderism climate change covid was a huge one I mean maybe the most egregious is where White House officials demanding that Facebook censor people for sharing true stories about vaccine side effects this is particularly offensive it should be particularly offensive to progressives in the United States because there have been a huge effort to require pharmaceutical companies to name the side effects of their drugs in their television ads and here people were describing the side effects of this drug um to them on themselves and you had the government demanding that it'd be censored it was the demand was made that it'd be censored not because it was misinformation not because it was disinformation but because it was true information that might lead to vaccine hesitancy to a reluctance on the part of people to get vaccines so we're we're now we're in 1984 or well territory so that's sort of Mal information Mal information true information that's inconvenient exactly that results in that make results in behaviors that we don't like well at that point I mean you could justify censorship of anything and so you're dealing with I mean involve the philosophers here I mean because any idea could lead to a bad outcome sure absolutely and we know that you know people make up all sorts of reasons for different kinds of behaviors and people defend behaviors retroactively occurring for different reasons than they had at the time I mean you know there's a whole long tradition the philosophy of language that looks at how people reason and so you basically giving a very broad justification for censorship and it just as you might imagine it just spiraled out of control and you saw abuses of power right away and I hasten to add we struggle ourselves to find the right language to describe the kinds of things that we were seeing on the one hand it's censorship and in some ways that's the easiest to understand but there was also propaganda and disinformation being spread by government officials one of the twists what's the difference between propaganda and disinformation well that's a also a very good question and it's not clear that there's a very good answer to it propaganda on the one hand is just government public relations at the simplest level disinformation is what we call propaganda by other governments that we don't like but even that word got what we saw was government contractors in the United States and government former government officials including former CIA officials saying well we're now we were concerned about Russian disinformation in the 2016 elections already by 2018 you saw the same people saying well it turns out that actually most of the disinformation is coming from ordinary Americans so suddenly we have a turning inward of a word that by the way had been used in context of warfare so one of the most famous examples of of disinformation disinformation that those of us in the west support was the use of the ghost Army in World War II so that it we made it look like we were going to invade or that the Americans were going to help the Brits to uh invade Europe and fight the Nazis across the the channel instead of course we did it through Normandy but they created this fake ghost Army that was disinformation or what we might call psyops psychological operations so disinformation which was just used to describe Russian efforts to sway the 2016 elections very quickly then became turned Inward and that's one of the themes of this work is that we saw people that had been involved in the war on terrorism after 9 11. I had a huge amount of success reducing and fighting terrorism around the world suddenly you have this huge apparatus for fighting terrorists that had nowhere to go and it's it turned inward after 2016. partly in reaction to brexit partly in reaction to the election of trump and so this is a this was a very disturbing Trend and so we start to see the intelligence and security agencies of the United States officially and unofficially get involved in suppressing mostly populist mostly conservative voices but also some left-wing anti-war voices dissident covid dissidents and one of the things I wrote about was the effort to basically run a disinformation campaign around the hunter Biden laptop which surfaces in October 14 2020 a New York Post article what we saw were former government officials including many former directors of the CIA we saw a former FBI officials including work ones working at Twitter the Jim Baker Jim Baker the former the former Chief counsel for the FBI took a deputy Council role at Twitter internally making the case that the hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation which by the way is a crazy conspiracy theory when you consider here they had Russia they had 100 binds laptop they had the subpoena from the FBI confiscating the hunter Biden laptop in December 2019 and when was Jim Baker the CIA Jim Baker leaves Jim Baker arrives at Twitter in the summer of 2020. so he would have known about the hunter Biden well we don't we don't know we don't know ostensibly there is compartmentalization of information you know need to know but I mean he was I mean general counsel of the FBI is arguably as powerful as the Director they need to be involved in multiple FBI operations to make sure that they're legal that's the role of the one of the roles of the general accounts of the FBI is to make sure that the FBI is not breaking the laws that are supposed to constrain them so the FBI confiscates the hunter buying laptop in December 2019 they give the computer store repair owner who had the laptop and it gave it they gave him a subpoena which is almost like in that case it's almost like a receipt that we have it we have the receipt signed by Hunter Biden dropping the computer off the New York Post publishes both of those in their coverage and then you get this cockamamie conspiracy theory suggesting that somehow the Russians had hacks Hunter Biden's computers and then put them on a computer I mean the more straightforward stories that Hunter Biden at the time well-known alcoholic and addict dropped the computer laptops in his bathtub or in a pool so you have basically former government officials ostensibly former government officials and by the way one of the things that you hear when you interview people in the intelligence communities they say nobody ever leaves the intelligence Community well that's interesting that's interesting because I just want to talk about the case of Jim Baker for one second because it would be easy for uh people looking uh for examples of collusion to just be like oh look there's a revolving door between government and big Tech take Jim Baker he was there back and forth but it's also possible is it not that he could have just had that job you know ended that and gone in for a different industry is it what evidence do we have there's a really revolving door or or that there's really collusion there in in the sense that the same people are going back and forth well in the Twitter files I did on on the hunter buying laptop so if people want to look at look at it they can just Google you know shellenberger 100 buying laptop so yeah you did that was part seven of the Twitter cards and you did part four which was uh January 7th yes and then part seven which was FBI in the underbidden laptop yeah yeah and we can come back to the the decision to de-platform Trump because obviously it's a massive moment in the history of social media but in the case of the underlying laptop I mean you I mean so first of all Jim Baker had been in and out of the FBI so that revolving door had already occurred he'd gone in and come out went back out came to Twitter and what was so striking is that the team that was assigned the task of deciding whether or not the New York Post article about the hunterbind laptop violated Twitter's terms of service they came back and were very clear that it did not violate their terms of service therefore there should be no censorship or restrictions on that tweet or on that account the case then was made internally in Twitter to censor it anyway and it was made by Jim Baker he made it most forcefully he made it in multiple instances both in internal Communications in a Google doc where they were discussing and shaping a kind of response to it he was very strenuous by far the most strenuous person making the case that it was Russian disinformation on the basis of absolutely nothing on the basis of total speculation of just kind of word salad basically to censor it and he ultimately won out and you know I always you know the way that bad things happen often is by telephone so that there's no record of them so the fact that we have such extensive written suggestors I have to assume I think it's fair to assume there was a lot of phone calls going on as well but um it was after Jim Baker's intervention that that Twitter Executives did decide to censor the New York Post article I also this comes back to this earlier point I wanted to make which is that to understand what's going on here it's Not Mere censorship it's also always disinformation and censorship or what the people involved in this call an influence operation or an information operation so the censorship of the hunter Biden laptop tweets by the New York Post were so significant in my view not simply because it restricted access to that content because but because of what it communicated it was saying that Twitter felt that this was disinformation and so for me at the time I was a Biden voter a Biden supporter or I thought Trump was chaotic and and was like many Democrats at the time felt it needed to go I looked at the hunter buying laptop and I also thought that it seemed like it was two two or three weeks before the elections it was you know Rudy Giuliani was involved in it it was New York Post rather than the New York Times uh you know like many uh liberals at the time I had a very snobby view of the New York Post and so when the when Twitter and Facebook said that they were censoring the content for me that was another black mark and another reason to think that it was not true or that it was not accurate so the censorship itself is part of the influence operation even though the native one points out people that defend the decision they say well Twitter lifted the censorship um after a few days and that's true but I think the stigma remained on the content so it led it gave people reason like me uh gave people a reason to believe that it was in fact Russian disinformation when it wasn't it was actually exactly what it appeared to be there's another aspect of it which which is sort of typical about this and I think important to understanding how a lot of this operates is the Russian disinformation aspect itself and this is something that taibi I believe in the truth Falls explains the Hamilton 68 Group which was then the foundation of Jacob Siegel's phenomenal piece uh exposing the censorship more broadly and and the the Russia disinformation is in fact a hoax and that's that's the kind of thing that I think is still not quite understood I wonder I wonder what your your opinion on that was on on the rush or maybe how would someone who doesn't understand that the Russia hoax how could you explain it to them well the easiest way is you go back I mean you look at 2016 there were efforts by people with ties to the Russian government to do basically two things run ads on Facebook and also have fake accounts or what are sometimes called bot accounts to try to influence the election everybody who's looked at this every independent scholar who's looked at this say they cannot find any effect of either the advertising or the fake accounts they were just drowned out by so much other Communications on those couldn't find the effects of it but I I thought that that we had agreed that there probably were Russian Bots yes but that there were not many of them exactly right but then the Hamilton 68 group what's important about that is is that that was a government-backed group specifically designed to spread the disinformation that there was a that there was Russian disinformation that's right right that's right so so but just to sort of back up you have a after 2016 you have this allegation that Trump won with the help of the Russians there was never any evidence to show that the that any Russian involvement had any impact on any voters you know do you give a sense of it most Republicans uh got their news from Fox News not from Facebook but even the communications that we could tie to Russia just were trivial I mean it's just a just in a wash of information online so but it was it was grossly exaggerated to start with then you get to 2018 and one of the most important figures in the censorship industrial complex named Renee diresta a former CIA fellow at least allegedly former then at Stanford and also at a political organization that did campaigns for Democrats does senate intelligence testimony um testifying to some and grossly exaggerates the effect the Russians and then you get to this thing called Hamilton 68 which is part of a think tank called The Alliance for securing democracy and what Tai my colleague mataibi discovers is that what they were doing was calling genuine users Russian Bots as a way to discredit them and to get them censored on Twitter or more importantly I would argue it was a way to generate a lot of news media coverage I mean dozens maybe hundreds of news articles were written claiming that Russian Bots were active on Twitter and really trying to get people to see Trump's supporters populists populist right type users trying to get them to see them as Russian Bots this is a really important aspect I hope we can come back to this is the the Legacy Media is complicit complicity in the complex of it all because it's and and also now saying there's no even though this stuff has been exposed not only are they ignoring their participation in it uh but they're they're well there's no attempt to correct the record uh they'll ignore the story completely as with the Twitter files huge story Legacy Media pretty much ignored it there's very there was very little reporting of it well worse than that they participate in it I mean if you I mean really the dark view of it is that they were participating in the disinformation and to give you a sense of it knowingly you think well that's interesting because that gets into questions of intention which are hard to read but I mean I the the moment that the the scariest moment for me in the Twitter files was stumbling across an aspen Institute Workshop that they called a tabletop exercise which involved all of the major news media New York Times CNN Washington Post NPR Daily Beast wired participating alongside the so-called trust and safety professionals that's what we call sent the main sensors at Facebook and Twitter in an aspen Workshop in the summer of 2020 to basically coordinate how they are going to cover and not cover potential Hunter Biden scandal around barisma the natural gas company that he worked for and the Scandal that by the way is the on the laptop it there's an email which says thank you and this is too Hunter Biden from I think the one of the advisors on the barisma board saying thank you for the opportunity to meet your father right that the the 10 for the big eyes the China that's a China right thing and but then Biden has denied ever meeting so we don't actually know that Biden met anyone on the barisma board but that's the there's the one email which says thanks the opportunity to meet your father sorry yeah well and I mean look I mean the the 100 buying laptop what it shows in a nutshell is his son and uh Hunter Biden and and and the president's brother just engaging in influence peddling whilst Biden was VP well Biden was vice president and now we're in the midst of a huge new Scandal the United States alleging uh direct criminal bribery involving the president and there's a huge conflict between the Congress and the FBI to try to get some of the documents and The Whistleblower and the witness to it but basically yeah you see these two family members the Son and the brother selling access to the father with some idea that that they will be able to influence his decision making I mean that's why people would pay for the influence um and disturbing stuff I mean it's not I think that the people that sort of wave it away they kind of go well that's how it works in Washington but it's not how we should want it to work in Washington and even if it were entirely legal it may it probably shouldn't be or at least it should be something that voters should know about rather than you shouldn't censor the story let them know about it that's yeah that's the or spread propaganda about it misleading people about it so yeah but this um the participation of the news media in some ways it's the main event in the sense that the the decisions by Twitter and Facebook are certainly important but it's you've got this when you have the entire mainstream news media telling you that the hunter buying laptop is not what it appears to be it's it's you have to be I mean it basically allowed for swing voters the people that would determine the election yeah to dismiss this very important uh piece of information and but what was creepy about it was that here they were it was orchestrated so you saw all of these news media with the social media Representatives engaged in these this Zoom conference calls where they were basically planning how they were going to not cover or cover in a manipulative way this big story and this this has to do with What's called the Pentagon papers principle The Pentagon Papers Of course is the very uh famous decision by Daniel Ellsberg who just passed away to uh when he was a defense department analyst to steal I think it was in 1969 a set of documents from the Pentagon showing that the United States was losing the war in Vietnam it was considered a very courageous decision by The Washington Post the New York Times to publish these stolen documents it was the subject of a Steven Spielberg movie called the post about the Washington Post decision to do this this was considered a Triumph for the First Amendment these documents had been stolen um Daniel Ellsberg risked prison to steal these documents in order to get out this very important truth that the US was losing not winning the war in Vietnam what you saw in that Hunter Biden Workshop in the summer of 2020 was an effort to undermine this very fundamental journalistic principle that you should publish those documents even if they were stolen the journalists should be protected under the First Amendment to publish those documents even if they had been acquired illegally by a source so what we saw was in that workshop and then also in a prior white paper by a Stanford Think Tank an attack on the Pentagon papers principle and the attack was basically the following it was you must not emphasize the content of those documents you should instead emphasize how they were acquired so if some negative information were to come out about Hunter Biden before the election you must emphasize that they were almost certainly the result of a Russian Hack and leak operation as opposed to maybe Hunter Biden just dropped his laptops in his bathtub and and then took them to the computer store wow that's another level I mean in in this country we had uh recently Isabel oakshaw who was hired as the Ghost Rider for the health secretary during the pandemic man Matt Hancock and she published or handed over the his WhatsApp messages which included him saying he wanted to scare the pants off the British public as a way of controlling them to get through the pandemic and the response that she got was that instead of the other journalists being like wow look at what the government were doing they went for her and the ethics of of her leak right which is it's the thought that the priority is to hold the government to account first and foremost okay sure there's problems with the ethics of you could there's an interesting conversation to have but it's not the first conversation you have you actually discuss what that Bloody government were doing well it's it's I'm your right to make that comparison it's I mean I'm shocked by how when I see these things happen here in the UK we follow it pretty closely and it's identical basically to what's going on so what you what you're seeing are basically state propagandists within the government in the United States and in the UK trying to change shift the focus for journalists and that's always happened that's what state propaganda's that's what their job is um but what's shocking about it is to see the way the journalists are participating with the state as opposed to having a much more skeptical or even antagonistic role in this in the Spielberg movie about the pending on papers there's this sort of defining moment where Catherine Graham the publisher of the Washington Post has an argument with the defense secretary um Robert McNamara and their friends you know they have dinner parties together it's very Clubby and he gets very angry at her and threatens her and she stands up to him I mean that's sort of the that's sort of what it means to be an independent journalist well here we we see the government behaving thuggishly with the journalists and the journalists sort of going along with it and I think it has to be understood as well as part of the elite Panic after 2016. Trump derangement syndrome is a very real thing in Washington and among you know not just liberals in general but really Elites who I think thought that Trump and brexit combined represented a threat to the liberal world order so is is that the core of this huge phenomenon you think it's Trump derangement system that's that's the thing at the very Roots that's motivating that's that's the the energy let's say behind the censorship industrial complex I think so I think that there was it was preceded by what Martin Gurley calls the Revolt of the public Unleashed by the internet in general and by social media in particular so I mean suddenly I mean you see this moment in 2016 where Hillary Clinton refers to Trump supporters as the people you could put in a basket of deplorables the unwashed you know the math the rabble there's some sense in which Twitter and Facebook are allowing Ordinary People to speak ugh horrible right these you know these these common people with their typos and their poor language and their crude ways and so there was a kind of disgust at the ability of the masses to speak in the ways that they were able to with the rise of social media and then and then of course attributing Trump's rise and attributing brexit same thing uh to the to social media which you know ironically or not ironically most Scholars do not attribute uh I don't actually know about brexit um but they do not attribute Trump's Victory to social media it is something a lot of people would say he took advantage of Twitter and certainly gave him a way to do that but ultimately uh I think most political scientists think that Trump wins by uh really some powerful debate performances embracing a more Nationalist and populist message and so I think you have a deliberate or or accidental misattribution of Trump's success to social media the reason it might be deliberate is because they wanted to gain control over these Technologies and they basically did achieve that after 2016 mean you saw incredible you know it's one thing to try to control all the major news media but you're talking about like 12 powerful news organizations or two or three if you just look at the New York Times Washington Post but when you then can only when you only have really two Facebook and Twitter to really as a choke hold on the entire discourse and also as a means of of spreading propaganda or disinformation uh it's a whole new ball game there was a lot of talk in the 2016 election that Facebook was how yeah he won do you do you think that um how did you get the information earlier you said this earlier in the conversation about the Facebook uh having being in contact with with government because you Twitter was exposed but how how have you got that about Facebook how do you know what's going on there so Facebook yeah well that's a great question I'm glad you asked so the Twitter files was not the only uh Source way to understand what was going on inside the social media companies the other thing that was going on is that the Attorneys General the top attorneys for the states of Louisiana and Missouri sued the federal government for censorship by federal government employees by putting pressure on Facebook and Twitter and so they achieved a bunch of Discovery their right to get emails and whatnot so we have this we have these emails from the White House to Facebook demanding more censorship and we also have the same people are the same people are doing the same making the same demands on Twitter very aggressive government officials Rob Flaherty Andy slavitt are the other two officials they're a little bit like the Matt Hancock here I think uh calling berating Facebook and Twitter Executives that they're not censoring enough and in that lawsuit we start to see uh Facebook bending we've seen those files bending to the will of the White House you have to remember after 2016 elections when Democrats start saying that Facebook is the social media is to blame for Trump's victory Mark Zuckerberg the creator of Facebook just thought that was ridiculous and he said so it was absurd to him that Facebook could have had that role but you saw the pressure was so intense on Zuckerberg between 2016 and 2020. by 2020 many senior Executives had come from not just American intelligence and security agencies but also from British ones and there's always a justification for it because these are people that were good at doing investigations these are people that are are they understand what's going on in places like Myanmar where Facebook had been abused to to contribute to attacks on the rohingya so there's always some sort of justification for it but you start to see basically the capturing of Facebook and Twitter by us and UK intelligence Services ostensibly retired officials but again if you believe what people in the intelligence Services tell you nobody ever really retires yeah I I'm gonna ask a question which might be a bit too much mental gymnastics but I I but I wondered whether you think when we mentioned right at the beginning of this conversation 9 11. 911 the Patriot Act getting leading to Stellar Wind that if you take that sort of trajectory is linked once we're starting to by wanting to protect the people and what that sort of policy turns into uh recall you know through the Telecommunications uh watching everyone and looking over everyone as Snowden uh revealed and I wondered whether you saw that as analogous to what's happened here with the Russian disinformation uh that's the original that's the 911 thing which has then led to this sort of idea that yes the policy we need to cut this stuff out or whether that's part of the same story whether whether whether Patriot Act um Stellar Wind inter the Russian hoax is that is there a lineage that these are all connected oh for sure it's it's a single unbroken chain from 9 11. the only other piece I would add to it is this idea from Peter turchin that we're dealing with the overproduction of Elites we have a lot of Highly Educated people with nothing to do in our societies and when the overproduction of Elites meets the counter-terrorism world and they succeed wildly in the war on terrorism you have suddenly a bunch of people that don't have anything to do they start to sort of turn inward um and then 2016 provides a kind of new you know uh reason for existence well I should actually add color to that because it's more analogous than that even because you had that's when Isis started to make serious gains in Syria as well as um the uh movement in Ukraine uh the name of which I've forgotten uh so where those movements were using social uh media uh so so this is actually very similar I think to the 911 situation very similar and in fact Isis came up a bit in our research too one of the main leaders uh though we've we're always drawn to because she was one of the smartest people in the room when there was Aspen workshops and other venues people talking about so-called Russian disinfos this person Renee daresta the former CIA fellow her whole story which I always found very suspicious was that she was just uh an internet entrepreneur and became concerned about anti-vaxxers online but then the next thing you know she's involved in battling Isis for the White House it was a very uh rapid rise to the top let's say from somebody who claimed to be just a mere hobbyist so for sure the battling of Isis recruitment online was also one of the uh predecessor activities to to the big event in 2016 but actually you can go further back than 9 11 and think this is what Jacob Siegel does is he goes back to uh um McCarthyism oh for sure yeah what do you think about um the global engagements the gec which is the sort of Obama's agency um the counter disinformation campaign what are the leading uh groups of disinformation that we should be focused on well that is definitely one of them the global engagement center it's a it can be overwhelming honestly Matt taibi and his team created a list of 50 censorship organizations these are both government agencies but also government-funded contractors think tanks groups like Aspen Institute I worry you could very quickly uh get into alphabet soup here within with a huge number of organizations but what I think is important to remember too is that there's something called the five eyes Nations which at the heart of it is really the United States and Britain comes out of World War II where we do joint surveillance together and it's includes Canada Australia New Zealand as well as as more Junior partners of it but nonetheless as important to engage in surveillance one of the aspects of five eyes that we've always known about is that Nations will spy on each other's citizens to evade the restrictions of not spying on each other's citizens so one of the groups that has Target me personally is a British organization called The Institute for strategic dialogue has been funded by the defense department in the past has been funded by the British government in the past and is now out there claiming that I'm a climate denier or a climate delayer both of which are absolutely untrue well I've not had that term climate delay well the idea is that I'm suggesting that we don't need to do something about climate change anybody who knows my history over the last 10 years knows that I'm one of the most high profile Advocates of nuclear power in the world have advocated for building nuclear power plants in Britain keeping them operating the United States and building new ones around the world so in part because of climate change so the idea that I'm a climate delayer is just disinformation in their own language um I just did a piece yesterday where I pointed out that these people that want to censor me and by the way the point of writing a report attacking me as well as Bjorn lombborg and Jordan Peterson as climate deniers and climate delayers the whole point of that is to de-platform me and prevent organizations like the BBC or the New York Times from interviewing us or having us included that's fine it's a college assassination it's a conservative assassination it's very specific as soon as I saw this report of course I asked to interview the people that wrote the report to have some sort of conversation with them so they would correct the record they have absolutely refused and so what I've pointed out is there's something quite pathological about this you have the people that are demanding that I be censored refuse to stand in public conversation or even in a podcast interview with me this is you know at least in the Spanish Inquisition you had a chance to respond to your interrogator so there's something pathological about this on the one hand they're so arrogant as to think that they should decide what the BBC and other news media are allowed are allowed to cover and what people should be exposed to and then they're so insecure and so small that they refuse to stand for public debate with me so while we're here in Britain I intend to go to their offices and directly confront them and demand that they have a meeting with me because this kind of behavior is unacceptable this is how you get to totalitarianism you know people point out well Michael you're still free to have these conversations you're you have a Twitter account and you're still out there I am actively being censored on Facebook at this very I wanted to ask about that so how specifically is Michael schellenberger being censored right now I'll give you I'll give you just I'll give you one recent example we just broke the story of who the first three uh people who got sickened by covid were they were three people working in the Wuhan Institute of virology we have from multiple sources within the US government the names of these individuals we broke the story with Matt taibi as a joint project with racket in public we've had incredible access to whistleblowers and Witnesses because we stood up to members of Congress who berated us publicly and people trust that we will protect our sources huge story on Twitter it had been viewed according to the the public count over 5 million times I shared it on Facebook and five people total not five thousand not five million five people total had shared it with me with under a hundred comments I mean it's an explosive story and it was absolutely being censored and suppressed on Facebook we know that I've been I know that the moment I was censored on Facebook because it happened when my book apocalypse never came out in 2020 similarly the people that the the Facebook Executives refused to meet or respond or even acknowledge my existence during the censorship the subcontractors that that orchestrated the the hit on my reputation refused to speak with me it's it's really I it's not just wrong and I I condemn it but there's something quite pathological about this um our societies the whole principle of free speech is that even the even people who are wrong uh that the society is made better by having the debate this is Voltaire I mean this is uh you know I will defend to the death your right to be wrong publicly it's all the more frustrating in your country and mine your country obviously with the Second Amendment uh sorry the First Amendment uh uh in the Bill of Rights and in here you know this is the country of John Mill writing Ariel pagitica and in in the 17th century this this these are the Nations that should be bastions of free speech we've somehow forgotten that the significance and the importance of it and it's it's shocking to me well this this kind of gets at the knob of it which is you know why is this going on and we keep coming back to 2016 or the rise of the internet but there is something else here which is that there is cancel culture cancel culture precedes the censorship industrial complex by many years cancel culture is the idea that you should not speak that your words create harm we followed very closely the the controversy here with Catherine Kathleen stock in the attempt to prevent her from speaking at Oxford the intervention by your prime minister that she should be allowed to speak her wonderful remarks about the the right to offend and the importance of that I mean I find myself slightly bewildered and disoriented by having to make the case for free speech yeah something that I I would have thought would have been so basic or even sort of cringe to have to speak out about Free Speech because it just seems so obvious I mean who would need to defend Free Speech but here we are in a situation where we have to tell young people in particular that they are they should not be protected from things that they find offensive that being offended is part of being alive uh having negative emotions having negative reactions feeling angry feeling upset this is part of what it means to be fully human and the idea that adults or somebody should protect you from that it's absolutely absurd and but what we've seen that's so disturbing is the tapping in to that extreme culture of intolerance by the censorship industrial complex so you can sort of see on the top as an inorganic censorship industrial complex 50 big organizations powerful government-funded organizations at the bottom is the support it is supported by a lot of people absolutely and we see it now attorney it's of it evolves it's very adaptive so we see the censorship industrial complex first they say we have to worry about Russian disinformation then they say we have to worry about covid then they say we have to censor dissident views on climate change now what we're seeing and this is the article today in unheard as we see the United Nations we see former president Barack Obama which breaks my heart we see many world leaders we see the European Union claiming that there is some increase of hatred in our societies and some increase of hatred online look our societies are more Western societies are more tolerant of racial religious and sexual minorities than they've ever been I mean by orders of magnitude I mean imagine your grandparents uh imagine how homosexuality was dealt with in our societies I one of my favorite statistics is that in 1958 four percent of Americans approved of the rights or the approved of whites and blacks uh being able to marry today it's over 96 percent who say that uh white and black people should be allowed to marry the level of Tolerance is incredible by any historical or global standard and yet here you have prominent leaders suggesting that the people are some somehow filled with hatred and that the online environments are somehow full of hatred I think it's an absolute case of psychological projection they're the ones who they absolutely hate when you hear Hillary Clinton saying they're deplorables yeah when you see the this this condemnation of ordinary people for expressing genuine aspirations for self-government we saw it here I mean we saw with brexit right that anybody who sort of supported brexit uh was somehow a racist somehow intolerant I find it uh very troubling it makes me very upset and angry because I I think it you're calling somebody you're totally misidentifying uh their motivations and you're suggesting you're finding the worst possible uh motivation possible thing to say about somebody um so we talked a little bit about the UK and and you mentioned Kathleen stock and so I actually uh Richardson has appointed a free speech Czar which is Arif Ahmed and so there is suggestion that the current government under Rishi do have an appreciation for free speech at the same time there's the Online safety bill which is going through The House of the House of Lords at the moment which is being debated which would hand I as far as I've understood it give power to the tech companies of California to decide what can can't be uh published which brings us to the back right to the beginning of this conversation um and also what's happening now and I believe some of your team are in Dublin because there is the criminal justice incitement to violence or hatred and hate offenses Bill 2022 which is about to go through which again is reducing speech deemed hateful not just inciting violence but zoomed hateful but then what is hateful does it is does me hating hate is that hateful right where's the where's the where's the bounds of that yeah what coming in from American and City what's your what's your opinion of these things that are going on over here extremely disturbing and all of it happening simultaneously we've created a document that's available to the public and people can find it on our website at public where we just document what's going on in all these different countries it's very scary so it's happening everywhere it's happening in the EU it's happening in Britain it's happening in Ireland Brazil Canada United States in every country there's a slightly different angle to to it and we are still trying to figure out exactly what the pattern is but it's clearly coordinated we know it's coordinated because we see things happening simultaneously similar justifications being used for censorship similar cast of characters it's World economic Forum it's Jacinda Arden from New Zealand this uh the Christ Church Massacre then led to a call for greater censorship she then now is at Harvard heading up their censorship Center we see it Stanford yes she is Stanford just announced a news they already had two censorship organizations they just announced a third one so we're seeing it at think tanks we're seeing it in top universities uh we're seeing that people that in the revolving door out of these intelligence and Military and security organizations so it's happening everywhere Ireland is shocking I mean it would that law would allow the police to go into your home search your phones and computers if they find so-called hateful materials determine that you are guilty until proven in this and guilty of a plot to disseminate those materials I mean Ireland I mean I mean people you know Brits no Ireland Americans we love going to Ireland I mean the friendliest most tolerant people in the world I mean what's this idea that somehow there's been some eruption of hatred I mean it's quite disturbing because and I I will say though I know it won't we have we can't we can't leave it with us but I will say the pushback is also working just simply describing these efforts we you know we for example that we we saw Obama claim some big increase in hate I've noticed that now the message there's been a few claims that there's yes there's more hate on online and we all get unheard that there isn't we don't agree with that well okay so here's a great moment here the uh a BBC correspondent in the United States uh secured an interview with Elon Musk James Clayton James Clayton sat down with Elon Musk uh to put it mildly Mr Clayton was not prepared for this interview he walks in and he just repeats this claim that anti-Semitism had increased on Twitter since Elon Musk had taken it over where did he get that claim from The Institute for strategic dialogue in the very same organization that's that's spreading lies about me hmm he uh I I took me I went as soon as he said it as soon as this went viral I read the report it took a matter of minutes for me to find that they were classifying tweets critical of George Soros in the world economic Forum with no mention of Judaism or jewishness or anything or even of just tweets critical of George Soros in the world economic Forum they had classified as anti-semitic garbage in garbage out is what we call that kind of analysis but that's pervasive in California there's a California initiative to crack down on hate online and they claim an increase of hate incidents well you look at the data in which you realize is that they are not accounting for a reporting bias meaning that there's been an increase of reports of hate online does that mean that there's been an increase of hate online well of course not you can easily imagine that when you start tracking a phenomenon the people tracking it get better at detecting the phenomenon over and over again in fact psychologists have written a major research has been done on this which is called concept Creep meaning that we know that what people consider harmful speech or hateful speech is increasing so the very same the we see it the reaction to having Kathleen stock speak at Oxford this demand from students that she be censored we see that in the culture this cancel culture this culture coinciding with the intolerance from the rise of social media the reinforcement of your pre-existing beliefs so what we're seeing is so this is yes it reinforces us yeah we need more censorship look at the hate that's going around this is just it's just a cycle and it just doubles everything down and the social fear that's created you know my I've uh uh people in my family who are Zoomers in their early 20s when black lives matter happened they felt incredible pressure from their friends to put a black Square on their Instagram why don't you have a black furnish room why don't you have a black lives matter sign in your yard is that because you're a racist I mean it was a Culture of Fear this is a McCarthy's you know it's it's The Crucible it's witch hunts it's it's the attacks on uh on on Parker on Parker on Julie J keen and this this this fear that I will be accused manifesting as me accusing others so the accusation of racism or transphobia the accusation of that upon others as a defense mechanism to protect myself from being accused social media of course magnifying and intensifying it that's one thing and that's disturbing you would want your your leaders your cultural political social leaders to push back against that and say hey let's all calm down a bit you know we're all more tolerant than we've been in decades anybody who has any historical memory will know that to see them then taking advantage of it and using it as a pretext for censorship is very chilling very disturbing we need to call it out in every instance and I will say it does seem to work uh since our efforts began on this and we started calling out this Global effort to impose what I think has to be called a kind of totalitarianism a kind of censorship of the kind that George Orwell warned against I do think it's had an impact and so what we've seen now is including on the United Nations their social media posts they start talking about uh how there's a lot of hate as opposed to making the claim of an increase of hate because they knew they don't have that it's still disturbing for them to go around there hate hate hate you know it's like who's the hater here exactly yeah you know what is the United Nations doing yeah an organization where the Declaration of Human Rights very explicitly protects free speech and they're supposed to be you know spreading brotherly love what is the United Nations doing here yeah spreading this idea that hatred is rampant when there's no evidence for it and demanding censorship um so yeah I mean I do think it hasn't I think the re the I I took great uh hope from the prime minister's intervention on the Kathleen yeah stock I think it suggests that you know later today or and over this week I'm looking forward to interviewing ordinary britons on the streets asking how would you feel if the government were secretly reading your direct messages because that's where this is headed how would you commit sure yeah but to do so legally I guess to have some legal justification for it I don't think Ordinary People want that we saw with the Edward Stone oh I would challenge you on that because the old me would have been I've got nothing to hide I'm happy with the government and what I have changes I no longer trust the government and and see how they act I don't want them really because I don't want them but yeah if we're fighting terrorism or we're fighting whatever the body is at the moment I'm happy to for you to read my uh thing so I think most people probably don't care that was a tragedy of Snowden he was he said my greatest worry is that I will sacrifice my life for this and no one will care and that's pretty much what happened no very people give a damn I think in the abstract I think that's true if I haven't done anything wrong what I should I be worried about but I think if you ask people would you like to know if if somebody taking an experimental drug that's being prescribed for your children is experiencing side effects would you like to be informed about that or would you rather that the government just censor that information I think most people would say yes I would like to know I would like to know what the consequences of experimental drugs are I would not like to have a small number of experts would you like the government to decide whether you can hear a full range of arguments for or against whether Britain should be part of the European Union I think most people would like to see a broad range of arguments so but I think it gets back to their the point where we started with which is that we find ourselves in a strange situation of having to make the case for freedom of speech I do think and I do think there is a difference with surveillance which is that I do think people after 911 in particular accepted a fair amount of surveillance of their Communications in order to prevent a terror attack you have many more cctvs in Britain you know than we do in the United States there's much more tolerance of that in Europe than the United States and I think there's uh you know there's some justification for it and there's certainly you can get we can get very paranoid but I do think that when it starts to get into censorship and somebody else deciding what information I should be allowed to read and write I do think it goes too far and I do think the public will be with us but I do think it's also take some effort and that's why we're here that's why we're so we came to Britain is that we felt that this was something that needed to be a joint U.S UK effort we see our governments cooperating in quite negative ways and we felt like we needed some sort of societal response to say hey let's get back to kind of what started this whole Western Civilization thing in the first place which was that Ordinary People should be allowed to have voice you know Winston I mean one of the things I'm not a First Amendment expert by any means I'm not a constitutional scholar I don't know much about the history but one thing that comes out when you read the histories of the period is there's always a question of is Free Speech sort of instrumental for democracy is it something that you just sort of need to have so people know how to vote the right way in a democracy or so you can have free markets or is it something much more fundamental and something much more what we call natural right Thomas Jefferson in our Declaration of Independence called an inalienable right given by God not by not by a piece of paper that's an important Point by the way given by God and I think that's part of the bigger problem we're seeing is that God is dying again and so we don't agree in that so we don't have that underlying concept to bind us all together but maybe that's another conversation for another podcast absolutely but I will say atheists uh have long been able to make a justification for it as a natural rate as something or even if you want to get fully postmodern it's a rate that we establish we articulate we we demand of ourselves but for me I find myself much more in the latter Camp it's not just a means to an end free speech for me it's like eating or breathing I mean to be deprived of it and it really helps to be deprived of it to realize how precious it is that this this this idea that we should be able to express our own thoughts and that we should have a right to hear what other people think it touches something much deeper in me at least than just oh it's a way to have a functioning democracy or a functioning free markets it's about being human it's why it's a fundamental human right according to the United Nations according to the American Constitution and not just something that we allow you to have because it makes things work better I can sense you're trying to pull this conversation together but you're I don't want to be the next James Clinton because you are a bit like musk and that there's so many interesting things that you're up to and you've done that uh that I could easily miss them and there's a couple of things I wanted to do sure quickly ask you about if if time permits uh um firstly uh about Twitter I followed the Twitter files closely anyone I think who is skeptical or cynical about Legacy Media which pretty much ignored the whole thing uh was following it on Twitter and we could see by the numbers of people who were engaged on Twitter that it was a big story but being on the inside on the other side of the curtain and and uh what was the atmosphere like was it excitement when you took pulled up to the the Twitter HQ in San Francisco was just like oh my God this is this is the or were you like were you cynical about that what what was it like it was thrilling you know I mean you yeah we got I mean so I came in through berryways uh I did not know Elon Musk and in fact I'm maybe the the person the journalist who has been most critical of Elon Musk for the supply chains to me you have I am yeah and it had been for 10 years in fact I criticized Elon Musk directly in Apocalypse never and so about solar panels I remember that about the solar panels and you may know that the solar panels in China are being made by uyghur Muslims who most of whom are in concentration camps the supply chains for lithium batteries is very not mostly one to three million of them but yeah sorry yeah exactly um so yeah it's a very it's not great you know the the supply chain for producing oil and gas has high paid workers many of them are unionized in much more safe conditions uh people have seen anyway I could go on about it but I have criticized uh Elon Musk in the past for that but his taking over of Twitter was clearly done for the right reasons people may know that he massively overspent to buy the company certainly could afford it he's the world's richest man the right reasons you mean not for money clearly but rather it was mission driven he was he's a free speech guy absolutely wanted to say I don't want to suggest that he's not I mean obviously he has powerful business interests and and we should be cautious around how those are represented on the platform yeah that's how dedicated to free speech has since been yeah it's a little bit absolutely and I've testified to Congress now on this twice first time on the censorship but the second time on big Tech and my view just to get it out before we get into uh Elon and Twitter a little bit more is that the solution to this is is transparent mandatory legally required transparency by the social media platforms so Facebook and Twitter the First Amendment so one of the things is that it doesn't allow it doesn't it it prevents you from being forced to say certain things and so you can't compel speech it's it's that's another kind of censorship so it's a so you can't compel Twitter and Facebook to allow you to say certain things but you could compel them to be transparent about what kind of censorship they're engaging in um who's being censored but also who's being de-platformed who's being de-amplified meaning having their content spread that should be open and I think there should be a right to respond so I should have a right to know how I'm being censored by Facebook and I should have a chance to respond that means I can go on other social media platforms I can criticize Facebook in fact I've done this on other platforms and and try to make my case elsewhere um so I put that out there I think Elon and Twitter should should be required to have that level of radical transparency I will say and of course I've or maybe not of course but I've also said this to Elon directly multiple times he that he should be more transparent about the decisions are being made and he has been more transparent than the previous owners he complied with the Turkish government request to censor Turkish journalists there's a legitimate debate to be had about whether he should have done that but when he because the alternative was that Twitter would be taken down completely in turkey that's right and they had lost it they had appealed many times in the courts in the Turkish courts and lost and to his credit he did publish on Twitter they tweeted out the actual legal documents and the names of the people that were being censored that's a huge improvement over what Twitter had done before and certainly what Facebook was doing but inside Twitter I mean you know Elon himself is uh a very intense personality I mean it's a little bit I mean you know uh what you see is what you get I think with Elon he's a very intense personality he's making jokes all the time you know some of which are more successful than others but certainly uh he's a major Joker he loves to make jokes so his ship posting isn't just reserved for Twitter oh no he's no it's on edge Lord IRL as well okay no I mean there were certainly moments we're seeing there because we're getting the files and we're like we don't know how long we're gonna you know you feel a little bit like you've just uh it's like a smash and grab situation you know you're trying to is that right so you you comment you're at the computers presumably you had an engineer or something someone to help you I mean I don't know how tech savvy you are and and and you're kind of how did that work what was what was the actual process yeah we would put in these search requests and of course but this at this point there was three kind of well-known journalists you know Barry Wise Man taibi me but we also had our colleagues with us so there's at times there was a room of you know seven or eight people plus the Twitter staff making many many requests them coming in uh with the files um I saw no evidence that anybody had gone through the files before they gave them to us they were just doing these searches and these were very large document uh drops and so we were going through you know thousands upon thousands of emails and internal messages and it was yeah we're a sweaty conference room you know uh did you you didn't know what you were looking for exactly we didn't know well we did in the sense that we were there were there were there had been events so for example the 100 by laptop was a huge decision and Matt TYB covered that already by the time I came in I saw things around it that I felt like I needed to take a second crack at it so I did a second round on the hunter by laptop um a month or a month after I think uh Matt did Barry Weiss looked at some of the key people who had been de-amplified we discovered that there were secret blacklists they were actually called that called uh uh blacklisted basically um for deamplification one of whom was uh you know Jay bhattacharya who's a very famous uh critic of covet skepticism a professor at Stanford we did the Trump do platforming this was a major event so you have January 6th is the famous Capital riot January 7th there's a lot of internal debate and really the decision is made at that point really a decision to de-platform Trump even though the Twitter staff themselves had decided that Trump's tweets had not violated their terms of service and this was one of the patterns of behavior is that Twitter was just making up stuff as they went along and to some extent that's understandable that's what happens to your new company but you hear they had a terms of service that everybody agreed to and they were just finding justifications to kick Trump off the platform and then the final decision was made on January 8th and so when I got in there Barry and Matt had decided to split up January 6th 7th and 8th they gave me what I think they thought was the less important date which was January 7th but sure enough it turned out to be uh an important date because it was where you could see the staff trying to kind of invent justifications to de-platform Trump so those were some and then and then and then at then the moment and really the floor dropped out from under us is when we started to see all of these government officials FBI officials DHS White House making demands on Twitter and that was when Matt started in particular because he had had so much experience looking at the military industrial complex he started to look at the role of these orchestrated campaigns like Hamilton 68 to basically demean ordinary Twitter users as Russian Bots then it goes full circle again or goes background again I should say because you go to Congress for the hearing and you are grilled and this is the people elected to uphold free speech in America are then grilling you for exposing censorship of the government I guess the government themselves trying to hide their their dirty work but you guys look like you're having fun you and Matt well no no Barry wasn't there you're kind of looking each other giggling at this you know you were asked if it was a some sort of threesome it was it seemed farcical and amusing to you well it was amusing to me in part because they were going after Matt they had already demonized me Democrats and progressives had already demonized me in 2020 around apocalypse never where I say climate change is real it's not the end of the world we're going to solve it with natural gas and nuclear power that was already heretical and so they felt like they'd already done their number on me so they needed to focus their attention on that type he's also a much bigger personality as three times more Twitter followers than I do um very successful substack writer very famous in the United States and so they really focused all of their energy on Matt and when they kind of came to me the famous moment in that hearing was that the the member of Congress they kept trying to kind of make it seem like there was something wrong with us doing the Twitter files like there was something improper or maybe illegal about it the night before when a government agency uh the the they had released the members of Congress had released documents showing that this Federal Trade Commission which regulates Twitter and other social media companies had basically been demanding that Elon Musk reveal who all the reporters were who were involved in the Twitter files as though we were doing something wrong or illegal and so one of the members of Congress kind of clumsily was trying to figure out my involvement and she said well Elon invited you in I said no you know it was actually Barry Weiss had invited me and then she said she said so then it was a threesome and the whole room just erupted into laughter because you have to remember they're up on you know they're up above you you know you feel like you're kind of down and small you know looking up at these members of Congress and they're sort of accusing you and and DC is a very unfunny place in many ways very Square place and so but the room just erupted into laughter I knew enough from uh having listened to comedians to know that you should always let the laughter die down before you respond and I said there was many more people involved than that and that got another huge round of of laughs and it was uh it was and of course you know Barry Weiss is a very famous lesbian she's maybe one of the most famous lesbians in the United States her wife is Nelly Bowles they both worked at the New York Times and when this went viral on Twitter Nelly responded in all caps how many more people were involved so you know it really went on and on like that Elon was delighted with it because he's a big prankster and gangster and and so and there had been some conflicts and controversies and but it felt like at that moment all all was forgiven and I think it I think the Democrats it was the Democrats because one Republican I think who was properly challenging those Democrats yeah um but do you think the motivation of those Democrats so going into that firstly they're obviously completely ill-prepared for they they didn't seem to know the topic whatsoever but they almost took you as the enemy so there was no good faith what's their motivation you think are they trying to protect their colleagues are they trying are they is it Trump derangement Syndrome again is it there's almost must Arrangement syndrome yes in America they just assume oh he's badly now is it that tribe but what what do you think what the the energies at play there in that uh I mean the sad part of it is that the Democrat the truth is they want more censorship they want more censorship by online platforms of disfavored views of what they consider hate speech of the so-called deplorables I mean this is I I genuinely it is genuinely sad because I was raised Democrat I was very Progressive uh radical left as a young man you know when I graduated from high school the Supreme Court had a ruling that you could burn the American flag Republicans were aghast this the Democrats felt like it was a victory for free speech ACLU defended the right of neo-nazis to March through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors in skogy Illinois so the Democrats and liberals were the party of free speech for most of my life and that really starts to change with the rise of cancel culture and wokeism in the in the really the late in the 2010s or so and so the Democrats yeah they want to see they want to see more censorship is it an indication that they have power you think because it's if you're in power you're the one who wants censorship if you're not in power yeah you don't you want free speech so that's right do you think it's just maybe a simple black and white sort of scenario I think it has to do with that I think I mean look if you want to get really deep in it I think wilkism is an effort to create a new secular religion as a substitute religion and so there's a there's a fervency here there's a dogmatism there's a a kind of an intolerance of in a sense that words are sort of magical and they have a kind of magical spiritual power to them there's all these taboos that you're not you know you can't say that trans women aren't real women that's a taboo thing to say you know it's taboo to suggest that you could turn your that ISO you know it's it's it's taboo for me to say that I can't make myself a woman but I could make myself a black man that's totally taboo even though it's arguably less ridiculous there's taboo to say that climate change isn't the end of the world these words have a kind of uh there's so much heaviness in the in the language heaviness and inconsistencies yeah yeah and so I think there's there's some of that is just irrational I mean by all accounts the Democrats lost that Congressional hearing you know they're here berating journalists accusing us of not really being journalists uh that you know the very moment that we were testifying in front of Congress the IRS sent an agent to Matt taibi's home we know that the IRS investigation of Advantage began the day Christmas Eve day December 24th the day that he wrote a Twitter files thread describing CIA involvements in this in Twitter files in the case against him they actually the Irish case against they sort of included some of his written materials so it's clear harassment wow so it's a tax as well I mean it's it's taxes FBI it's the intelligence Community it's big government it's or it's it's and and then also it's coming from a big swath of the population it's it's an abuse of power so this is the comp the censorship industrial complex is indeed complex it is it is complex it it involves a lot of different and involves you know that we it comes from Eisenhower's famous warning about the military industrial complex which was really a warning about government contractors and Military contractors having too much influence over the decisions of members of Congress or the executive branch so yeah it's it's coming from all all sources I mean I think that that was a very dark moment in Congress to be to have those attacks it had that levity in it but I think the Democrats they just went too far and so we saw many many on the left on Twitter from very Progressive Publications who themselves reacted to this at the end of the day journalists don't want to see other journalists uh you know being persecuted in that way I do think there were kind of some sense of self-interest kicked in but I think we're at the beginning of that I think we need some serious engagement with the public and and with members of Congress to remind ourselves that you know these the tables turn very quickly on this kind of thing and you start going after journalists the next thing you know you know Republicans might be in power and start abusing These Quiet these institutions it seems like an obvious point to make but obviously one that needs to be made so Michael uh this is just the beginning of you explaining the censorship industrial complex you're in London central or Westminster this Thursday with Russell Brown and Matt Toby uh two lefties who again seem to be uh believe in the importance of of maintaining Free Speech uh and I'm sure they have a whole Bunch extra to add to this as I've already said several times complex issue um what uh can you expect what's your hope for that event and moving forward in Practical terms well first Winston we're grateful to you for all your support in helping to pull it together you've been an absolute Jewel to work with and it's been a real pleasure making friends with you over the last several months it's been a great pleasure and yeah I mean we want people to show up um and be there and participate for us this this the the burden of protecting freedom of speech can't rest on the shoulders of Elon Musk as broad as those shoulders are certainly can't rest on my shoulders or Matt taibi or Russell Brand we do need a proper Movement we are starting to find each other I was very happy to see that the British government had also been engaged in surveillance of Carolyn Lucas I guess the head of the green party of Britain somebody with whom I disagree on most issues certainly nuclear and natural gas but I do think that there's an F there's a there's an opportunity here for people that are from various political Persuasions to see that Free Speech really should be a common cause for the people so our hope is that we'll have that event on Thursday night we are gathering a smaller group of free speech leaders on Friday and the our aspiration is to have a free speech Alliance to battle against the axis of censorship which is spreading its tentacles Across the Western World and Beyond wonderful well I wish you all the best of it thank you for coming back to Marshall matters and I hope the next episode maybe we can get into UFO's [Laughter] proposing God indeed Michael schellenberger thank you for speaking with me today thanks for having me [Music] thank you foreign [Music]

Channel: The Spectator

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Length: 80min 8sec (4808 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 20 2023