As part of his tour with the Institute of Public Affairs, global free speech advocate, Michael Shellenberger, outlined the dangers of Australia’s proposed ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ laws, as well as the elites’ censorship agenda at a special event in Sydney.
John Storey:
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the beautiful Fullerton Hotel. My name is John Storey, the director of law and policy at the Institute of Public Affairs. What a fantastic lunch we have here, and to be talking about such an important topic, free speech. And our speaker, who I’ll introduce formally in a moment, is an absolute crusader, international crusader in the cause of free speech, none other than Michael Shellenberger. Michael is the chair of politics, censorship and free speech at the University of Austin. He’s an award-winning investigative journalist. He’s the author of multiple books, some really well-known ones like San Fransicko and Apocalypse Never. He was a candidate for the governor of California. He couldn’t have done worse than their current governor, I can assure you. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Michael Shellenberger.
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, thank you very much. What a pleasure to be here. Thank you all for coming. It’s really, really nice to be here. And I agree with John; I think that we’re going to have a big victory on free speech. This bill is so awful, when you just read it, it’s so shocking. It wants to allow censorship of things that are misleading, not just things that are inaccurate or hateful, but things that are misleading. Well, guess what; anything can be misleading. I was censored in 2020 by Facebook because I pointed out that every single United Nations projection shows more food being produced in the future, that there’s no scenario for apocalypse under climate change. And I was censored because that was misleading, that they wanted everybody to think that it was apocalyptic even though there’s no evidence for it.
I first became aware that there was a whole censorship industry back in 2020, but then it fell asleep for me; I was focused on the environment. Then in 2021, we published in the fall of 2021, a book about homelessness called San Fransicko and the destruction of our prettiest city in the United States. And then I was in the streets documenting the rampant drug use often by mentally ill people, and the city of San Francisco had opened up a supervised drug consumption site in the middle of downtown where people would come in and smoke fentanyl and meth, which are two of the most toxic and intoxicating drugs you can smoke.
And I won’t reveal my reporting methods, but I found myself on the inside of this drug consumption site, and I was effectively arrested; and they confiscated all my cameras and brought me outside. And there was sitting the wife of Barry Weiss, who’s a much more famous journalist than I was. And I think they realised that I was a pretty aggressive investigative reporter when I wanted to get to the bottom of it.
When the word got out that Elon Musk had opened up the Twitter files, they invited me over to San Francisco and to start to go through all the emails and the messages of the Twitter employees. And the first thing we found was maybe not a big surprise, is there’s a very intense left-wing bias among Twitter employees. Over 95% of political donations from Twitter employees were going to Democrats. And it was these moments of, on the one hand, it’s horror at what you’re seeing inside this operation, on the other hand, as a journalist, it’s very satisfying to discover actual blacklists. They had actual blacklists. They were called blacklists. Of course we were thrilled by this. This was a great find. They had names like Jay Bhattacharya, who President Trump is expected to nominate to the National Institutes of Health. Jay Bhattacharya, one of the world’s great epidemiologists, Stanford University, famous for something called the Great Barrington Declaration which argued that the right way to deal with the pandemic is to protect the vulnerable but allow schools to function normally and societies to function normally. He was proven absolutely correct with his analysis. But Twitter still had him on a blacklist in November and December of 2022 when we were there.
And then we started digging a little bit more. My colleague, Matt Taibbi, who also came from the left, from the radical left, he was a Rolling Stone journalist famous for criticising the banks and US military interventions abroad. And we were sitting in the room, and I was reading these emails, and I said, Matt, “I’m seeing some emails here from the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security.” And he was like, “Yeah, Mike, it gets even worse than that.” The hair goes up on the back of my neck, and I’m just like, “This is not what we were expecting.” This is not just about woke ism and progressivism, there is US government intelligence agencies asking for things to be taken down.
One of the most important things we discovered, Matt had already written about this Hunter Biden laptop, which is very famous event in the United States. You might’ve heard about it here. Hunter Biden was overseeing a vast influence peddling scheme for his father and his uncle where Chinese businessmen or Ukrainian businessmen would give him money ostensibly as an attorney, and then the idea would be that that president or then Vice President Biden would do favours approving gas pipelines or whatever they wanted. That’s what the laptop showed is a vast influence peddling scheme of which nobody ever seen. It’s huge, many years, many countries, tens of millions of dollars.
And what we knew was that the laptop had been given to the FBI by a computer repair store owner, because Hunter Biden was also a drunk and a addict and probably dropped the laptops. There was actually a couple of laptops, dropped him in his bathtub or in the pool, one of the two. Took them to the repair store, the repair store owner. He left them there, probably forgot about them. Repair store owner gave them to the FBI, but he wisely kept a backup copy of the hard drive, as he had his right to do legally. FBI had the Hunter Biden laptop in December of 2019. It knew that it was Hunter Biden’s laptop. There was no question about it. Knew that within hours probably, maybe days; you could very easily verify it.
And the controversy was that in October of 2020, Twitter and Facebook censored a story in the New York Post about the Hunter Biden laptop. And that was very controversial. People thought this shouldn’t have been censored. A few days later, they did lift the censorship, but people thought, including myself, that there was something wrong with it because the idea was that it was a Russian hack and leak operation, that it was Russian disinformation. And we thought that because 51 former intelligence officers said that. And that was the end of it. We thought it was just a political dirty trick by the Democrats and their allies and the intelligence community.
Well, lo and behold, we’re reading the Twitter files and we discover these emails about these workshops that the Aspen Institute would hold for journalists and for social media platforms. And the workshops, they occurred in the summer of 2020. And the workshops were aimed at basically brainwashing. The word they would use was pre-bunking, teaching the journalists and the social media platforms to prepare for a potential hack and leak operation by the Russians as it related to Hunter Biden and Burisma. And we discovered these emails and documents, and it was the weirdest feeling. It was very creepy and weird.
Aspen Institute is mostly government funded. It’s always been understood to be close to the intelligence community, but it’s always supposed to be politically neutral. But lo and behold, we are able to discover that the FBI had worked with their allies at the Aspen Institute to run a disinformation operation aimed at distorting the meaning of this laptop. This is very sophisticated work. This is not just typical public relations, this is an advanced effort to programme journalists to dismiss the story when it comes out. That’s obviously illegal as well. It’s a illegal interference by one of our intelligence agents.
… oh, it’s a illegal interference by one of our intelligence agencies, and it’s now come out. We knew that Mark Zuckerberg, the owner of Facebook, had also said that the FBI had come to them in the summer of 2020 to warn against this. So we knew that we were suddenly dealing with a much more sophisticated operation than just merely asking people to take down information. And my colleague, Matt, also discovered a website called Hamilton 68 that purported to identify Russian bots that were manipulating social media platforms, and he just started calling some of the people that had been… And the media wrote hundreds of articles about all the Russian disinformation that was helping Trump and the Republicans. So the more we dug, the more we came to realise that the entire story that the Russians had helped Trump, that they played some significant role, that it was all, not only disinformation, but it was spread by our own, what you call, deep state government agencies.
And I had never thought that free speech was something that we needed to worry about. People will say things. You often hear people say, they go, “Well, the government could never. The government’s so incompetent,” and conservatives kind of agree with that. The government’s incompetent. You think of the government as like the Department of Motor Vehicles or where you go get your driver’s licence. It’s incompetent, and people kind of nod along. Yeah, the government’s not capable of keeping secrets. That’s not true. The government is absolutely capable, and our CIA and FBI are very capable of keeping secrets and running very sophisticated information operations. And the perception that people have of the government being incompetent is absolutely incorrect.
And the more we’ve learned about it, the more we now know that the CIA in 2016 or really between 2016 and 2017 asked the Australians, the British, and other countries to go, and they called it bump. They kind of run into members of the Trump campaign and try to have a conversation with them. And then, they would report back to the CIA, and they would say, “Yeah, we had a conversation with these Trump folks and they’re having some sort of interactions with the Russians, and we should investigate that.” And that was the beginning of the Russia collusion hoax, the idea that Trump was aided by the Russian government. So the entire thing was completely manufactured, whole cloth. Tried to understand if it had something to do with geopolitics, our sources said, “No, it was just a dirty campaign trick that involved the deep state.” And all of this is happening at the same time that we realised that there was this very energetic effort by non-governmental organisations to do so-called fact-checking and flag false information to the social media platforms.
There’s four non-profit organisations, NGOs in the United States in particular, that were doing this in 2020 and then again in 2021. One of them is called the Stanford Internet Observatory, and there was a person… As we read all this information and we saw the emails and we would watch this person on Aspen Institute panels talking about the crisis of misinformation and the need for government regulation, and I was always like, “Boy, she’s like the smartest person in the room, this person.” You see these panels, and you’re like, that’s the one that everyone looks to and defers themselves. “What do you think, Renee?” Well, it turned out that she was a former CIA person, so we start to discover… So the chills keep going up your spine. You’re like, “Who are these former intelligence people?” Because when you interview people in the intelligence community or supposedly out of it, they say, “Nobody leaves the intelligence community.” That’s one of the things they say. You sort of retire, and then you go into some other line of work.
But the CIA has had as its modus operandi since World War II to create front organisations. It’s usually businesses and unions. But since the ’80s, it’s been NGOs. And so, we’re about to come out with a report of 150 people running NGOs demanding censorship around the world with extremely suspicious histories. So this is not a strictly organic phenomenon, the desire for censorship. A lot of it is an inorganic phenomenon supported by governments that are reacting to something. What are they reacting to? There were predecessors to it, but something clearly changes in 2016, Brexit in 2020, the election of Trump in November. There was a reaction from the so-called deep state organisations, CIA, FBI, Department of Homeland Security, fearing a populist revolution, and we had a whistleblower came and give us a trove of documents.
There’s so many different censorship initiatives that it would take all my time to describe them, but one of the things that they do is they hide the censorship initiatives under protecting children. That’s the next move they’re going to make here in Australia. They’re going to pass legislation that will restrict social media for kids under 16. Who could possibly be against it? It’s almost certainly a Trojan horse for digital IDs and censorship initiatives that would expand.
The other thing they did is they would start to redefine cyber security as censorship would be involved in it. The main organisation in the Department of Homeland Security that does censorship is called the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency, and they would say things like, “Well, we have to protect our computer networks against foreign adversaries and hacking and disruptive denials of service. And we also, of course, need to fight misinformation.” That would be kind of how they would blend it all together. So the censorship was sort of an extension of IT work, and they were even recruiting IT people to do this. And when we would watch some of the conversations… Because one of the characteristics of these operations by people either in the intelligence community or that are intermediaries with the intelligence community or what we call cutouts is they do what are called limited hangouts, where they sort of describe a little bit of what they’re doing so that if they are caught, they can kind of try to describe it all as something they’d been really open about.
Two of the people that were involved in this cyber security effort, one of them was a British military person who was a high-level sort of crypto cyber security person, and the other was an existing U.S. military joint command officer. And they did a little limited hangout on YouTube, and we see them talking, and they basically described how after World War II, the U.S. Government was able to control the media conversation. There was a limited number of television networks, a limited number of radios, some powerful newspapers, and the U.S. government was able to control that. Then, you get to 2016, and they feel that they lose control. Now, if you actually read the political scientists, they’ll tell you that really, Trump wins because he wins the debates. He wins the debates with the Republicans, and he wins the debates with Hillary Clinton. She spends more money than he does. It wasn’t like Trump exactly won with Facebook and Twitter, but the intelligence community knew that the writing was on the walls and when that happened, and there was a clear reaction.
In fact, the best book ever written so far on the social media revolution’s impact on politics is a book called Revolt of the Public by a gentleman, a friend of mine, Martin Gurri, who is one of the CIA’s former top media analysts and a wonderful, by the way, person and advocate for freedom of speech and opponent of censorship. But the CIA and the intelligence community had been monitoring this for years. And what effectively happened was for a period of time when social media starts, the CIA and the U.S. Intelligence Community is using social media technologies to support its work in the Arab Spring and then in the colour revolutions. And then, at some moment, I think they realised somewhere between 2011 and 2016 that these technologies are going to come back to the United States and to the developed world and that they needed to find some way to control them.
So I mentioned there’s many other initiatives to describe. Another one we discovered was an effort by, again, former CIA people as well as a board member of the official CIA venture capital organisation, which is called In-Q-Tel, which was attempting to offer content moderation services to Twitter, content moderation is the Orwellian word for censorship, trying to offer content moderation services to Twitter, and they got very close to basically almost taking over Twitter’s content management before Elon Musk bought the company. So these revelations, all this inorganic nature of the censorship industrial complex became clear to us.
… inorganic nature of the censorship industrial complex became clear to us. I testified with Matt Taibbi in front of Congress in the spring of 2023. And it was just Matt and me, but my colleague, Barry Weiss, wasn’t there. And one of the members of Congress, they were doing what they always do, which is they’re trying to make it about us, like we were the problem. It wasn’t that we had discovered a giant US government effort to censor free speech, but it was that we were not really legitimate journalists. And one of the members of Congress was trying to figure out who all was involved in this, and she said… And I said, “Well, it was Matt and me and Barry Weiss.” And she said, “So it was a threesome then.” And the whole room kind of did that which you did. And I said, “Well, there’s many more people involved in it actually.” But there was an air of suspicion that somehow that we were the bad guys for having discovered this.
And this is part of what they’ve been doing, is to say there’s something wrong with the people that are defending fundamental freedom of speech and there was something that we really need to be fighting misinformation. And we saw it a little bit yesterday. We had press conference with the journalists. One of the journalists said, “Well, what are we going to do about misinformation? What are we going to do about all this misinformation?” And there was probably 20 journalists there, or 15 or 20 journalists. I said, “Well, I’m looking at the solution.” The solution to misinformation is freedom of speech. And that’s been the solution to misinformation for several hundred years ever since we stopped having to ask the king for permission to say certain things, petitioning the king. “Can we say this? Can we say that? Can we criticise you on this?” Slowly, the king granting rights.
A revolution in the United States, 1776. We said, “We don’t want to ask the king for permission anymore.” And to get the Constitution done in the United States, we said, “You have to have a Bill of Rights with the First Amendment.” And it’s a very radical moment in the history of free speech. And if you’re interested more in this incredible history, I encourage you to read a new book called Free Speech by Jacob Machangama. You can just… Amazon. Just Free Speech, Jacob. And he describes that all of these debates we appear to be… That people are treating as though they’re completely new conversations, how to deal with false information, how to deal with hatred, these debates have been occurring for 2,500 years. There’s no new arguments on any side of this. We’re just repeating ourselves. And it goes back and forth. And you often see the people that want the censorship. They want to carve out, as John was describing, free speech for the elites, for the professors, for the experts. They should be able to talk with the rabble. They should not be allowed to have free speech rights.
And so that’s fundamentally what it’s about. There is also an organic demand for censorship from the public. We’ve seen it happening. I mean, who knew that cancel culture, this demand by students at universities, that certain people not be allowed to speak, would become the basis for, become the cultural norm for the censorship industrial complex. Among Democrats in the United States support for censorship by the government… The specific poll question is, “Should the US government be involved in fighting misinformation?” That rose among Democrats from 40% in 2018 to 70% in 2023. You don’t see big changes in public opinion like that over such a short period of times on other issues.
The public in the United States and much of the Western world was brainwashed by the news media over the last decade almost, eight years, into thinking that Donald Trump constituted a fascist threat to democracy, that he was installed by the Russians who used social media to brainwash his supporters and that the only solution to it was government regulation or censorship of social media. That’s what’s fundamentally behind it. But there is also something deeper, which is a deeper intolerance in the society. You can see it on left and right, but the demands for censorship are disproportionately coming from the left in the academia, in the NGOs, in the political parties. And it’s an exaggerated sense of certainty of being right. And social media has fueled that because you might have your beliefs and you’ve held onto them, but then you reinforce them every day just cognitively, deepening those grooves in your brain about your own righteousness.
And below that a level, I think there’s the normal tribalism, but for people that have abandoned traditional religions, you end up having a kind of religious zeal. You might call it a wokeism, a new moral order, a new mythological order. The older mythological order was Judeo-Christianity and the Enlightenment. All of us are created equal. We all should have equal justice. We should all have freedom of speech. That’s being replaced by a radically different moral and ethical order. And that moral and order says that all of humankind is divided into victims and oppressors, that you know where you sit by dint of your sex or race or gender or sexual preference, that the moral thing is for victims, everything should be given and nothing required, should be taken from the oppressor class.
And that is the underlying moral order that drives all of it. That’s why Keir Starmer is letting sex offenders and paedophiles out of prison and putting people who put racist memes or social media posts in prison. Another word would be anarcho-tyranny, or we call it… They say two-tier Keir. It’s a radical, radical assault on the standard of equal justice under the law. So every major pillar of civilization is under serious assault in the Western world, equal justice under the law, freedom of speech, cheap energy, meritocracy. The war on meritocracy is that we shouldn’t decide where they go to university or what occupations they have based on their ability but rather on this victim-oppressor hierarchy. And it gets even more Byzantine. I mean, they wanted… The United States, they wanted to make it clear that at first it was this people of colour versus white people. Now people of colour have their own ranking. It’s called BIPOC with Black, Indigenous on top of people of colour and Asians and Jews being excluded from the category of vulnerable people.
It’s a fundamentally dehumanising ideology. It’s a cancer on Western civilization. If it continues to gain power, there will be no more Western civilization. We will be ruled by totalitarianism. It’s a totalitarian ideology. I just had the pleasure and horror of rereading George Orwell’s 1984. I highly recommend it. It feels incredibly contemporary. George Orwell, who as you may all know, was a socialist, a leftist, a brilliant intellectual. That book was influenced by a gentleman named James Burnham, a conservative who had actually been a former Trotskyite himself. See, all the best conservatives were former leftists. I hope you all know that.
James Burnham wrote a book called The Managerial Revolution, which was about how as capitalism gets more complicated and grows, you actually get a larger… You need a larger class of managers and professionals in the society to manage the corporations and manage the government. And Burnham argued that totalitarianism, the next totalitarianism after communism and fascism, would come out of the bureaucracy. It would come out of the professional managerial class, that that class would feel very empowered by their expertise and their duty to rule and they would become tyrannical. And that is where 1984 comes out of. This is not tanks in the streets. It’s the slow march of totalitarianism out of Western democratic liberal capitalism. The seeds of that secular society end up creating its own destruction.
And that’s what we’re seeing. You can define totalitarianism in a lot of different ways. There’s a lot of theories of totalitarianism. One of them is that totalitarianism is the penetration of politics into every aspect of human life. I just spoke with a gentleman here who said he had lost some friends. I have lost many friends. I was kicked off my soccer team because I wrote San Fransicko and was raising concerns about the Black lives killed, the Black lives taken thanks to Black Lives Matter. And I was driven off of my soccer team. That’s the penetration of politics into every aspect of life. It’s not appropriate for the soccer team to talk about-
Every aspect of life. It’s not appropriate for the soccer team to talk about politics. You shouldn’t prejudice people based on their politics for playing soccer. That’s totalitarianism. That’s one of the most important signs of totalitarianism. You would see on X, after this recent election people saying that they should not have Thanksgiving dinner or Christmas dinner or holiday with family members that voted the wrong way. That’s totalitarianism. Another characteristic of totalitarianism is the hunt for heretics, and we’ve seen that. Going back, one of the best studies of totalitarianism starts with the Inquisition. The Inquisition is the Ur-totalitarian archetypal model of hunting down the heretics. And interestingly, a reaction to the printing press, the Gutenberg movable printing press invented in the late 15th century, the Catholic Church for the first 100 years loves the printing press. They’re able to print the Bibles and all the other Catholic information.
And then this guy named Martin Luther gets it and starts printing denunciations of the corruption of the church and it is war and revolution for hundreds of years afterwards. And they’re chasing printing presses all around Europe, and they’re hiding them in the Netherlands and sneaking documents around. Twitter when it was controlled by the deep state swamp creatures was the printing press under the control of the Catholic Church. Elon Musk has liberated the most important media platform in the world. And so if you have any hope for Western civilization comes from this extraordinary liberation of the most important social media platform by Elon Musk. He’s the only person that could have stood up to the deep state in the ways that he did. It took the richest man in the world, one of our main defence contractors, somebody that controls over 90% of the rocket market who has created an extraordinary satellite cellular cell phone service, internet service. Only he could have done that. It’s been such an extraordinary moment. It’s changed my mind about oligarchy. Turns out oligarchy is not all bad. Marx was an interesting character. Marx’s great lie was that there’s no difference between the worker and the entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is only distinguished by his willingness to steal from the workers, which he called exploitation. That’s all. Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs. They were just meaner and meaner thieves, but any worker could have created the iPhone or the assembly line or the electrical grid. These were things that anybody could have done. That’s the big lie of Marx. It’s obviously wrong, but Marx also did tap into this. He inspired a truly great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, who borrowed from this particular passage from the Communist Manifesto, another example of the seeds of somebody’s contradiction being in the prior work. But Marx talked about all that is solid melts into air under capitalism, that technological revolutions can turn societies upside down and Schumpeter is famous for creative destruction and a celebration of the entrepreneur.
It’s only very extraordinary and unusual and strange, difficult, and hard men who are able to unleash this revolution. So if we have any hope, it’s that in this incredible technological transformation, the media in the United States is now dying. The mainstream news media, Comcast has just announced that it will sell its left-wing propaganda network, MSNBC, because it’s just a total failure. To get you a sense of how radical this revolution is, we did a video after this election where I felt, and I was an independent, by the way, I’m a neutral. I am an old-fashioned journalist in the sense I didn’t want to publicly commit to a candidate because if you publicly commit, we know from the psychology that you’re biassed towards that person and I need to cover the President-elect with the same rigour that I’m committed to covering all politicians with. Nonetheless, I felt an enormous sense of release and relief, catharsis. I felt myself breathing differently after the election.
And it’s totalitarianism that was suffocating me, and it was not allowing me to properly breathe. And we recorded a video on it. In fact, there’s a famous or somewhat famous actress, there’s an actress in the United States named Justine Bateman, she was in a TV show called Family Ties, which for us, Gen-Xers was a big show in the ’80s. And she tweeted right after the election, something that was exactly got up my mood, which was she just tweeted, “Decompressing after four years of walking on eggshells.” And that was exactly how those of us, I think, conservatives, people that identified as conservative Republican, they also were victimised. But in some ways you were shielded. You had a beloved community that you were already part of. But if you were a leftist or a liberal or a heterodox thinker, it was the experience of being hunted. That’s what it was like, of being evicted and ostracised and removed from your beloved communities, from your soccer teams and your families and your friends. It’s a brutal, brutal process. I can’t recommend it to anyone.
But nonetheless, we felt this enormous sense of catharsis and release. My colleague who had also been cancelled, she’s 20 years my junior, a brilliant former Oakland school teacher, Covid-pilled. She taught mostly mentally disabled children in the poorest, roughest school district in Oakland. And she saw the Covid School lockdowns would be disastrous for her kids and she spoke out against it and was brutally cancelled by her union, by her friends. And she and I wrote a piece about this catharsis, and I did a video, an emotional video and Elon shared it, and it’s now been viewed 26 million times. The average nightly, I think news viewership of an MSNBC broadcast is around 50,000.
So if you have any hope, it’s that there is this radical printing press in the hands of somebody who is really committed to free speech, who lost his son to Wokeism and the gender cult is absolutely committed to free speech. And so what’s going to happen with Western civilization? We’re on a knife’s edge. If you listen to the academics and know Toynbee and others, all civilizations come to an end. Maybe, but really no civilization has had this commitment to freedom of speech or this awareness of what are the core pillars of civilization. And it turns out the normies like Law & Order. Turns out that working class Latinos and Black Americans, they like police officers in the neighbourhood walking around. They want their kids to learn how to read and write. They want cheap energy, not expensive virtue signalling energy. They want to equal justice under the law because they know the alternative is complete chaos. So if I have any hope, it’s that our commitment to freedom of speech and this technological revolution will allow us to fortify and defend the pillars of Western civilization. Thank you very much.
