Her stint as governor of the State of Washington was a controversial one, as she economized in startling ways, and proved largely unsympathetic to environmentalist politics. Indeed, she later wrote Trashing the Planet, which took on trendy “solutions” to environmental problems, based in no small part on her own experience and perspective as a scientist. She was an early critic of the developing “global warming” pseudo-“consensus.”
Twitter is being banned in Brazil by a “Supreme Court justice” who seems to be the de facto ruler of the country. Who is also threatening Brazilians with massive fines, $8,900 USD daily, if they try to reach Twitter through a VPN.
A VPN or virtual private network hides your IP address and encrypts your web traffic. VPNs protect privacy and let you visit sites otherwise inaccessible. Sites that purvey “disinformation,” i.e., criticism of the government, and other verboten content. VPNs combat censorship and surveillance.
The justice, Alexandre de Moraes, issued an edict to ban Twitter after Twitter owner Elon Musk refused to obey censorship orders.
Twitter had told users that it expected to be shut down by Justice de Moraes “because we would not comply with his illegal orders to censor his political opponents.”
Now Musk declares that an “unelected pseudo-judge in Brazil is destroying [free speech] for political purposes.”
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino adds that according to Brazil’s own constitution, “censorship of a political, ideological and artistic nature is forbidden.… Until there is change in Brazil, X [Twitter] will be shut down.”
Dictatorships often issue “illegal orders” in the sense that these contradict constitutional provisions whose force has faded … or that were never intended to do anything but fool people to begin with. Such political systems are not truly constitutional.
Nor would the situation be any better were the “constitution” more honest, simply announcing that whatever the dictator says goes.
September 2 marks the 1839 birth of American economist and reformer Henry George.
George is most famous for his 1879 treatise, Progress and Poverty, but made other contributions, including advocacy of the secret ballot and his able economic policy polemic Protection or Free Trade (1886).
On Friday, Paul Jacob (“Deep State in a Corner”) alluded to Elon Musk’s verbal and legal battles with Brazilian censorship, suggesting “why Musk is pulling out Twitter personnel” out of the Portuguese-speaking country. And as that commentary was “going to press,” as we used to say in the print biz, the story grew much larger.
“X began to go dark across Brazil on Saturday after the nation’s Supreme Court blocked the social network because its owner, Elon Musk, refused to comply with court orders to suspend certain accounts,” explain Jack Nicas and Kate Conger in The New York Times. “The moment posed one of the biggest tests yet of the billionaire’s efforts to transform the site into a digital town square where just about anything goes.”
Yes. It’s called “free speech.” It’s almost as if Nicas and Conger are trying to dysphemize it.
“Alexandre de Moraes, a Brazilian Supreme Court justice, ordered Brazil’s telecom agency to block access to X across the nation of 200 million because the company lacked a physical presence in Brazil.” But remember: X was pulling out so personnel wouldn’t get arrested for not complying with the maniac judge, Alexandre de Moraes.
Moraes’s antics have been covered extensively by Glenn Greenwald of System Update on Rumble. As noted on Friday, Rumble is also not operating in Brazil, nor allowed to be accessed over the Internet.
A “meme” on the subject, found on X.
But there’s a lot more to the censorship story, and some of it expands upon the points in “Deep State in a Corner”: Mike Benz, whom you may have caught on Tucker Carlson’s show, says he was told by a Brazilian congressman that behind all this is a batch of NGOs funded by the United States: “the Brazilian think tanks who are part of the legislative development of these censorship edicts and who pressuring Brazil’s government not to create a carve‑X out for congressional parliamentarians because it would give a free pass for Brazilian members of Congress to spread misinformation online.”
