Censorship Industrial Complex
Lockdowns Codified a World of Violence

From the Brownstone Institute
During the misnamed and mostly preposterous debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a moderator fact-checked Trump’s claim that crime is up. In contrast to his claim, he said that the FBI reports that crime is down, a claim that likely struck every viewer as obviously wrong.
Shoplifting was not a way of life before lockdowns. Most cities were not demographic minefields of danger around every corner. There was no such thing as a drug store with nearly all products behind locked Plexiglas. We weren’t warned of spots in cities, even medium-sized ones, where carjacking was a real risk.
It is wildly obvious that high crime in the US is endemic, with ever less respect for person and property. As for the FBI’s statistics, they are worth about as much as most data coming from federal agencies these days. They are there for purposes of propaganda, manipulated to present the most favorable picture possible to help the regime.
This is certainly true of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, which have been shoveling out obvious nonsense for years. Professionals in the field know it but go along for reasons of professional survival. In truth, we’ve never had a real economic recovery since lockdowns.
Crime is up. Literacy is down. Trust has collapsed. Societies were shattered and remain so.
Only a few weeks following the officious fact check at the debate, we now have new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The Wall Street Journal reports: “The urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.”
The report isolates the “post-George Floyd protests” because no media source wants to mention the lockdowns. It is still a taboo subject. We somehow cannot say, even now, that the worst abuses of rights in US history in terms of scale and depth were a disaster, simply because saying so implicates the whole of the media, both parties, all government agencies, academia, and all the upper reaches of the social and political order.
The problem of political division is getting alarmingly serious. It’s no longer just about competing yard signs and loud rallies. We now have regular assassination attempts, plus even an extremely strange appearance of a bounty put on a candidate’s head by an official agency.
Surveys have shown that 26 million people in the US believe that violence is fine to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. Where might people have gotten that idea? Probably from many Hollywood movies that fantasize about having killed Hitler before he accomplished his evil plus the nonstop likening of Trump to Hitler, and hence one follows from another.
Liken Trump to Hitler and that is the result you produce. Just as the lockdowns and pandemic response acted out the Hollywood production of the movie Contagion – a perfect example of life imitating art – many activists today want to play a role in a real-life version of Valkyrie.
What’s next, the real-life version of “Civil War?”
There is private violence, public violence, and many forms in between including vigilante violence. Rights violations against person and property are the desiderata of our times. This springs from the culture of our times which has been heavily informed and even defined by the deployment of state violence in service of policy goals, at a scale, scope, and depth never before seen.
There were moments following March 12, 2020, and for the next two years, when there was no way to know for sure what was allowed and what was not, who was enforcing the orders (much less why), and what would be the consequences of noncompliance. We seem to have been subject to a range of coercive edicts but no one was sure of their source or the penalties for noncompliance. We were all introduced into the real-world workings of martial-law totalitarianism, which took forms we somehow did not expect.
There is probably not a living soul without some bizarre story. I was thrown out of several stores for issues of mask compliance even though it was unclear whether there were mandates. It all depended on the day. There was one store where the proprietor was laughing about masks one day and enforcing them the next, following a threat from an angry customer that he would call the police.
Businesses that tried to reopen were closed by force. Violence was threatened against beachgoers. Churches gathered in secret. House parties were extremely risky. Later, refusing the shot meant being barred from the office, though once more it was not clear who precisely was enforcing the order and what the consequences would be for noncompliance.
When CISA – about which no one knew anything because it had been created only in 2018 – sent out its sheet about which industries were essential and which were nonessential, it was not clear precisely who would make the determination or what would happen if the judgment was wrong. Where was the enforcement arm? Sometimes it would appear – threatening visits from inspectors or checks by police – and other times not so much.
On that day, I was riding back from New York City on the Amtrak and suddenly found myself overwhelmed with the possibility that the train could be stopped and all passengers thrown into a quarantine camp. I sheepishly asked an employee about the possibility. He said “It’s possible but, in my view, unlikely.”
That’s what it was like for years ongoing. Even now the rules are unclear, and this is especially true when it comes to speech. We are merely feeling our way around a dark room. We are shocked when a vaccine-critical post stays up on Facebook. A video on YouTube that mentions censorship might stay up or be taken down. Most dissidents today have been demonetized from YouTube, which is nothing but an effort to financially ruin our best creators.
Censorship is the deployment of force in service of state power, and other institutions connected to state power, for purposes of culture planning. It is exercised by the shallow state, in response to the middle state, and on behalf of the deep state. It is a form of violence that interrupts the free flow of information: the ability to speak, and the ability to learn.
Censorship trains the population to be quiet, afraid, and constantly stressed, and it sorts people by the compliant vs the dissidents. Censorship is designed to shape the public mind toward the end of shoring up regime stability. Once it starts, there is no limit to it.
I’ve mentioned to people that Substack, Rumble, and X could be banned by the spring of next year, and people respond with incredulity. Why? Four years ago, we were locked in our homes and locked out of churches, and the schools for which people pay all year were shut down by government force. If they can do that, they can do anything.
Censorship has been so effective that it has changed the way we engage with each other even in private. Brownstone Institute just held a private retreat for scholars, fellows, and special guests. One very special guest wrote me that she was completely shocked at the freedom of thought and speech that was present in the room. As a mover in the highest circles, she had forgotten what that was like.
This censorship coincides with a strange valorization of violence that we are presented with from all over the world: Ukraine, the Middle East, London, Paris, and many American cities. Never have so many held video cameras in their pockets and never have there been so many platforms on which to post the results. One does wonder how all these relentless presentations of destruction and killing affect public culture.
What purpose are all these soft, hard, public, and private exercises of violence serving? The standard of living is suffering, lives are shortening, despair and ill-health are main features of the population, and illiteracy has swept through an entire generation. The decision to deploy violence to master the microbial kingdom did not turn out well. Worse, it unleashed violence as a way of life.
“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” wrote Frédéric Bastiat, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”
That is precisely where we are. It’s time we talk about it and name the culprit. Liberty, privacy, and property were already unsafe before 2020 but it was the lockdowns that unleashed Pandora’s box of evils. We cannot live this way. The only arguments worth having are those that name the reason for the suffering and offer a viable path back to civilized living.
Censorship Industrial Complex
Is free speech over in the UK? Government censorship reaches frightening new levels

From LifeSiteNews
By Frank Wright
Instead of changing policies which threaten the collapse of Western civilization, the liberal-global governments prefer to make public opposition to their politics a crime.
The UK’s crackdown on free speech continues, with two online platforms withdrawing over censorship concerns – whilst liberal-critical speakers are banned from entering Britain, and even arrested on arrival.
Following the introduction of laws which could see online platforms fined millions of pounds, free speech social media company Gab and video sharing platform Bitchute have withdrawn their services from UK users.
As Reclaim the Net, a UK-based online freedom campaign group, said on March 28:
“The British government has begun aggressively extending its censorship regime beyond its borders, invoking the sweeping powers granted by the Online Safety Act 2023 to demand compliance from foreign-based platforms.”
Bitchute withdrew its services from UK users “over online censorship laws,” as the Free Speech Union reported on April 10. Gab’s statement, published on its UK domain, said the company was acting to protect British users from being jailed for posting on its platform:
After receiving yet another demand from the UK’s speech police, Ofcom, Gab has made the decision to block the entire United Kingdom from accessing our website.
This latest email from Ofcom ordered us to disclose information about our users and operations. We know where this leads: compelled censorship and British citizens thrown in jail for ‘hate speech.’ We refuse to comply with this tyranny.
The UK government claims its laws support “online safety” – but as Reclaim the Net explains, “critics argue … the term … is being used as a smokescreen for state-sanctioned thought control.”
The future of information in Britain looks bleak, as one UK commentator said, promising a “TV version” of the internet – sterilized by UK government media watchdog Ofcom:
“Unless the White House really forces Britain to do it, Ofcom will not be abolished, because the mainstream parties approve of it and no party that doesn’t will be allowed anywhere near power.”
Millennial Woes concludes that there is likely a “hit list” of further online platforms to be taken down in order, beginning with video outlets Odysee and Rumble, the messenger service Telegram, then the free speech publisher Substack – and on to Elon Musk’s X.
Woes warns:
“If allowed to continue in its current mode, Ofcom will take down the platforms it wants to, then tame the others by hook or by crook. The Internet in Britain will be a homogenised, redacted farce – a pathetic ‘TV version’ of what people in more civilised countries have.”
Cambridge professor arrested
The charge of “state-sanctioned thought control” is reinforced by the arrest – on Good Friday –-of a Palestinian Christian and Cambridge University professor at London’s Heathrow Airport. The reason for Professor Makram Khoury-Machool’s detention was that he has spoken out against Israel’s war in Gaza, as reports from the UK said.
“Keir Starmer’s long and intensifying war on pro-Palestine, anti-genocide speech through the misuse of the Terrorism Act … has continued to escalate,” noted UK outlet Skwawkbox, which covers stories such as this – neglected by the mainstream press “because it doesn’t fit their agenda.”
Professor Khoury, whose speech was criminalized under anti-terror laws, had in the past co-founded an anti-extremism institute in 2016 at Cambridge University.
British left-populist George Galloway responded on X (formerly Twitter), saying the arrest of this “gentle, devout moderate academic father” suggests that the “government has declared war on its own citizens, that liberty is dead in this land, and that Britain is no longer a safe country.”
Galloway’s warning of “It can happen to you. And it will” came a day after reports that a French philosopher noted for his outspoken criticism of mass migration had been banned from entering the UK.
French anti-migration speaker banned
Renaud Camus is the author of The Great Replacement – coining a term now used to describe the liberal-global policy of the replacement of Western populations via mass immigration.
The “great replacement” is routinely “debunked” by the ruling elite as a “conspiracy theory.” As Camus once said to Britain’s Matt Goodwin, “How can it be debunked when it is evident in every street?”
He was due to speak at a “remigration conference” in England on April 26. Organized by the nationalist Homeland Party, it is dedicated to the discussion of policies similar to those now being enacted by the Trump administration.
According to the Daily Telegraph, Camus was denied entry to the UK by government order.
In an email seen by The Telegraph, the Home Office informed Mr Camus that he had been denied the electronic travel authorisation (ETA) needed to enter Britain.
‘Your presence in the UK is not considered to be conducive to the public good,’ the email read.
The Telegraph reports that Mr Camus, “who is gay and has advocated for non-violence,” supplied one convincing explanation for his treatment:
[He] told The Telegraph that ‘of all the European governments guilty’ of allowing unchecked migration, ‘the British government is one of the guiltiest’.
‘No wonder it does not want me to speak,’ Mr Camus added.
The fact the British government is banning speakers who promote policies now being enacted with widespread support in the United States has not only provoked criticism – it may derail UK/U.S. trade negotiations.
Days ago, Vice President JD Vance warned UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer that Britain will get no deal with the U.S. over tariffs if its “hate speech” laws remain in place.
“Sir Keir Starmer must embrace Donald Trump’s agenda by repealing hate speech laws in order to get a trade deal over the line, a Washington source has told The Independent.”
A “Washington source” told the UK-based Independent, “No free speech, no deal. It is as simple as that.”
Vance has been a stern critic of British and European moves towards increasing censorship and the suppression of freedom of opinion, describing it in his February Munich speech as a “threat” to democracy “from within” Western Europe – and one which is led by its liberal-globalist governments.
Vance is reportedly “obsessed by the fall of Western civilisation,” The Independent’s Washington source explained. It is clear that Vance believes that this fall is very much a threat created by the political decisions of governments like Starmer’s.
The use of “hate speech” and “anti-terrorism” laws in these cases shows how the UK state-sanctioned suppression of speech affects anyone – from the left, right, or from the Christian faith – who criticizes the policies of the government.
These are not fringe extremist views, but those held by increasing numbers of ordinary people in Britain and throughout the Western world. Instead of changing policies which threaten the collapse of Western civilization, the liberal-global governments prefer to make public opposition to their politics a crime.
In the case of the British state, its hardline stance to defend its idea of democracy from free speech is now threatening its economic future. The politics and laws celebrated as the guarantee of safety increasingly resemble a form of extremism which will not tolerate debate.
Business
‘Great Reset’ champion Klaus Schwab resigns from WEF

From LifeSiteNews
Schwab’s World Economic Forum became a globalist hub for population control, radical climate agenda, and transhuman ideology under his decades-long leadership.
Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum and the face of the NGO’s elitist annual get-together in Davos, Switzerland, has resigned as chair of WEF.
Over the decades, but especially over the past several years, the WEF’s Davos annual symposium has become a lightning rod for conservative criticism due to the agendas being pushed there by the elites. As the Associated Press noted:
Widely regarded as a cheerleader for globalization, the WEF’s Davos gathering has in recent years drawn criticism from opponents on both left and right as an elitist talking shop detached from lives of ordinary people.
While WEF itself had no formal power, the annual Davos meeting brought together many of the world’s wealthiest and most influential figures, contributing to Schwab’s personal worth and influence.
Schwab’s resignation on April 20 was announced by the Geneva-based WEF on April 21, but did not indicate why the 88-year-old was resigning. “Following my recent announcement, and as I enter my 88th year, I have decided to step down from the position of Chair and as a member of the Board of Trustees, with immediate effect,” Schwab said in a brief statement. He gave no indication of what he plans to do next.
Schwab founded the World Economic Forum – originally the European Management Forum – in 1971, and its initial mission was to assist European business leaders in competing with American business and to learn from U.S. models and innovation. However, the mission soon expanded to the development of a global economic agenda.
Schwab detailed his own agenda in several books, including The Fourth Industrial Revolution (2016), in which he described the rise of a new industrial era in which technologies such artificial intelligence, gene editing, and advanced robotics would blur the lines between the digital, physical, and biological worlds. Schwab wrote:
We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another. In its scale, scope, and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humankind has experienced before. We do not yet know just how it will unfold, but one thing is clear: the response to it must be integrated and comprehensive, involving all stakeholders of the global polity, from the public and private sectors to academia and civil society …
The Fourth Industrial Revolution, finally, will change not only what we do but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we devote to work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. It is already changing our health and leading to a “quantified” self, and sooner than we think it may lead to human augmentation.
How? Microchips implanted into humans, for one. Schwab was a tech optimist who appeared to heartily welcome transhumanism; in a 2016 interview with France 24 discussing his book, he stated:
And then you have the microchip, which will be implanted, probably within the next ten years, first to open your car, your home, or to do your passport, your payments, and then it will be in your body to monitor your health.
In 2020, mere months into the pandemic, Schwab published COVID-19: The Great Reset, in which he detailed his view of the opportunity presented by the growing global crisis. According to Schwab, the crisis was an opportunity for a global reset that included “stakeholder capitalism,” in which corporations could integrate social and environmental goals into their operations, especially working toward “net-zero emissions” and a massive transition to green energy, and “harnessing” the Fourth Industrial Revolution, including artificial intelligence and automation.
Much of Schwab’s personal wealth came from running the World Economic Forum; as chairman, he earned an annual salary of 1 million Swiss francs (approximately $1 million USD), and the WEF was supported financially through membership fees from over 1,000 companies worldwide as well as significant contributions from organizations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Vice Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe is now serving as interim chairman until his replacement has been selected.
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