Tag: censorship

L.A. School District to Ban Fifth-Grade Plays About U.S. History: ‘Culturally Insensitive’

The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) is banning a celebrated series of fifth-grade musical plays about American history at a local charter school because, the district says, they are “culturally insensitive.”

For nearly three decades, the fifth-graders at Marquez Charter Elementary in Pacific Palisades have performed musicals about crucial periods in the formation of the United States.

These include Miracle in Philadelphia, about the Constitutional Convention; Hello, Louisiana!, about the voyage of Lewis and Clark; and Water and Power, about the Industrial Revolution. (A fourth-grade play, Gold Dust or Bust, focuses on the history of California.)

The musicals, co-written by Jeff Lantos (with music composed by the late jazz pianist Bill Augustine), are so successful in conveying historical details that Marquez students consistently score off the charts in history assessments.

A 2004 academic study of the Marquez plays observed: “Students who attended Marquez Elementary School scored more than twice as many items correctly [on history tests] as did students from other schools.”

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Should Elected Officials Censor Americans? Trump’s Administration Says Yes.

Last week, a gunman in Utah shot and killed conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It was a brutal and tragic event, regardless of one’s politics. And yet the fallout of Kirk’s murder has revealed a disturbing hostility toward free speech on the political right.

Republicans have long cast themselves as defenders of free speech against cancel culture and the censorial impulses of the political left. And there was merit to the argument—Reason has covered many cases of overreach.

But over the last week, MAGA Republicans have scoured social media for government employees posting about Kirk’s murder, contacting employers in an attempt to get them fired. “Kirk’s online defenders have snitch-tagged the employers of government workers over social media posts saying they don’t care about the assassination, that they didn’t like Kirk even as they condemn his assassination, and even criticizing Kirk prior to his assassination,” Reason‘s Christian Britschgi wrote this week. Even for nongovernmental employees, social media detectives apparently compiled a database with tens of thousands of people who criticized Kirk, including their names and employers.

Of course, that’s just people online. It’s not like those with government power are advocating such a thing, right?

“I would think maybe their [broadcast] license should be taken away,” President Donald Trump told reporters this week on Air Force One, about TV networks. “All they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer,” Vice President J.D. Vance said while guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast this week. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”

Vance’s argument bears a striking resemblance to the comments made just a few years ago by his ideological enemies. When certain public and not-so-public figures received backlash for offensive statements, some commentators noted that this was not cancel culture, it was “consequence culture”—people merely experiencing the consequences of their actions.

It’s no surprise that Trump has no principles on free speech—from the beginning of his first term, he called the press the “enemy of the American people.” But Vance’s position marks a notable pivot from just a few months ago.

“Just as the Biden administration seemed desperate to silence people for speaking their minds, so the Trump administration will do precisely the opposite,” Vance said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in February. “Under Donald Trump’s leadership, we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer them in the public square, agree or disagree.”

Now, Vance seems less keen on defending someone’s right to offer views that he personally disagrees with. Unfortunately, he’s not alone.

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The “Charlie Kirk Act”, Free Speech, Propaganda, And A Censorship Nightmare

As of the date of this writing, September 17th, 2025, it is Constitution Day. Despite this, in 2025 America, the Constitution is being eroded more than ever before. Just read any of constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute, John W. Whitehead’s essays on the matter.

The infringements are endless, with masked agents running amok, disappearing people off the streets, extrajudicial executions at sea, military deployed domestically as law enforcement, unconstitutional wars waged, illegal mass surveillance on every American, warrantless search and seizure, debt-based Fiat currency, and so much more.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. The only way for Americans to sit by and allow their freedoms to die at such a magnitude is to keep them perpetually distracted and apathetic. This is why 5th-generation warfare comes in so handy for the ruling class. Keep the entire population besieged from all sides at all times, economically, biologically, informationally, neurologically, so utterly saturated, so deep in the trenches, they don’t even realize they’re in a war.

When the average tax cattle are so exhausted from capitalist exploitation just to meet the bear standards for survival, so psychologically fatigued from the constant influx of doom porn, and the various other ways that the rat race is designed to keep us exhausted and unfulfilled while being simultaneously bombarded with socially engineered algorithms feeding into echo chambers it’s easy to keep the masses focused on manufactured outrage and fake culture wars, or shallow celebrity gossiping and rigged sports-ball entertainment. Blissfully unaware or uncaring of how their rights are being stripped away every day

The most fundamental of these freedoms is guaranteed to us in the 1st amendment — freedom of speech, freedom of expression, among others. That simple principle is the litmus test of a free society: Can you speak your mind freely without reprisal from the state? For believers in America’s founding ideals, the answer should be a resounding yes. And yet politicians and citizens alike oftentimes seem all too keen on allowing their principles to be pulled by puppet strings, ethically ambiguous and logically inconsistent.

Last week’s heinous murder of controversial conservative pundit Charlie Kirk has brought these issues to the forefront of our current discourse. Kirk based his entire brand on exercising the First Amendment, engaging in public debates with individuals whose ideological position opposed his own until he was ultimately gunned down last week.

Already, there are numerous discrepancies in the official story of the assassination, and much in line with the old adage of not letting a good crisis go to waste, the usual suspects have wasted no time in exploiting his death to ramp up the divide and conquer rhetoric. On the heels of attempting to make him a martyr, many on the right who previously grandstanded for free speech are now openly demanding the erasure of the rights that Charlie himself embodied.

But let’s not mince words here and call a spade a spade; none of this being said is to put him on a pedestal. Charlie Kirk was a professional liar, a propagandist of the highest degree who promulgated blatantly false, oftentimes bigoted, authoritarian rhetoric. He built a career off of perpetuating the fake left versus right dichotomy, exploiting the base he cultivated by inflaming the fears, anger, hatred, sadness, and anxieties of conservatives. While this was probably not Kirk’s intention, as he himself was likely just as much a victim of government propaganda that ultimately fomented his views, it was most definitely the result. Yet despite all of this, anyone who claims to actually support free speech should still support his right to express his ideas, no matter how much one may disagree with them.

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State Department finally shuts down ‘framework’ behind ‘censorship nerve center’ Rubio shuttered

The State Department confirmed it formally removed the “framework” underlying both the Global Engagement Center, deemed the government’s “censorship nerve center” by a first-term Trump administration official and defunded by Congress after the 2024 election, and GEC’s surreptitious successor Counter Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Hub, which Secretary Marco Rubio shut down in April.

Acting Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Darren Beattie told The Daily Wire there were “loose ends” to tie up, including GEC’s agreements with other countries to “facilitate and provide a framework for cooperation on mutual objectives, including principally combating so-called ‘disinformation,’” which sometimes turned out to be domestic and often consisted of disfavored narratives.

Beattie said GEC used an “indirect approach to censorship whereby they would fund third-party organizations that would engage in activity from facilitating the demonetization of conservative sites to generally castigating certain narrative perspectives on COVID, on immigration, on foreign policy, as simply malign as a matter of foreign influence when in fact these were entirely legitimate points of view that often came from Americans.”

His office is conducting a “meticulous transparency review” whose “very first tranche” will come out this fall, reflecting “the extensive review of hundreds of thousands of emails that will more specifically and systematically document exactly the kinds of nefarious activities that the GEC was involved in[,] in this unfortunate chapter of America’s history.”

Beattie wouldn’t say if that would be released through a vehicle like the Twitter Files, just that its approach would be “entirely appropriate and very satisfying as well.”

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Environmental Groups Are Suing To Silence Scientists Who Wrote a Report Questioning Climate Change Alarmism

In July, the Energy Department released a report challenging many of the mainstream narratives surrounding climate change. The report, which was authored by the Climate Working Group (CWG)—a team of five climate scientists and economists—was drafted to “encourage a more thoughtful and science-based conversation about climate change and energy,” according to Energy Secretary Chris Wright. 

“To correct course, we need open, respectful, and informed debate. That’s why I’m inviting public comment on this report,” the energy secretary wrote in the report’s foreword. The publication has indeed opened up debate, garnering nearly 60,000 comments in the Federal Register. But it has also introduced a series of legal challenges against the agency and the CWG. 

On Thursday, the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts heard arguments in a lawsuit filed by two environmental groups—the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists—against the Energy Department, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the CWG. 

The lawsuit argues that when forming the CWG, Wright and the Energy Department violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires federal advisory groups to provide meeting notices and meeting notes to the public, create an approved charter of the group’s mission, and “have a balanced membership in terms of ‘the points of view represented and the functions to be performed by the advisory committee,'” according to the the Congressional Research Service. 

Much of the lawsuit focuses on the viewpoint balance of the CWG, with the plaintiffs arguing that “all five authors are well known for holding ‘contrarian views on climate science that are out of step with the mainstream'” and “none of the members represents the consensus view among climate scientists that human activities…have unequivocally caused global warming.” To remedy the lawsuit, the environmental groups are demanding that the working group be disbanded, the report be vacated, and CWG members be prohibited from advising federal agencies until the defendants “comply with all requirements for the group to operate legally as an advisory committee.”

The Energy Department has refuted claims that it violated the FACA, arguing that the CWG is not an advisory group under the law because it was created to “exchange facts or information” with the Energy Department, not to “make recommendations on an identified governmental policy for which specified advice was being sought.” Additionally, the CWG was disbanded on September 3, in a letter sent from Wright to the group’s members, rendering “most of Plaintiffs’ claims…moot due to the CWG’s dissolution.” Even with the CWG officially being shut down, its members will continue to collaborate (outside of the federal government’s scope) and update the report, according to Bloomberg.

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US lawmakers introduce ‘thought police’ bill to strip citizens of passports over Israel criticism

A US congressman is introducing a bill that could potentially be used to deny US citizens the right to travel based solely on their speech, including for criticism of Israel, the Intercept reported on 13 September.

Introduced by Florida Congressman Brian Mast, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, the bill would grant Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke the passports of US citizens in the same way he has revoked the green cards and visas of foreign nationals in the US for criticizing Israel.

In March, Secretary of State Rubio revoked the visa of Turkish doctoral student Rumeysa Ozturk after she wrote an opinion piece critical of Israel in the Tufts University student newspaper in 2024. 

The op-ed did not mention Hamas, but called for boycotting and divesting from Israel.

One section of the bill grants the Secretary of State the ability to deny passports to people determined to have “knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”

The reference to “material support” disturbs civil liberties advocates because it is vague and can be interpreted to include speech and anti-war activism.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which functions as a front for Israeli intelligence in the US, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law suggested in a letter last year that Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) was providing “material support” for Hamas by organizing campus protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza.

The provision regarding material support to terrorism poses a threat specifically to journalists, The Intercept noted.

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The Motive for Nepal’s Revolution

The final straw for the revolution in Nepal was the government’s attempt to stifle free speech by banning social media platforms. These events did not take place because a few kids had their tablets taken away. Extreme government corruption ran rampant for years while the elite lived luxurious lifestyles in spite of the people they ruled over. The Nepalese government attempted to prevent the people from freely voicing their growing discontent, and then, when the people attempted to protest, the government murdered over 20 school-aged children in cold blood.

The media has poorly portrayed the cause of events by calling it the “Gen Z” revolution, sparked by a social media ban, which is entirely misleading, as the culprit was corruption and poverty. One in four citizens lives below the poverty line, with the average Nepali earning $1,400 USD annually. The poorest 20% spend around 67% of their income on food, and, much like most nations, in 2025, the majority is struggling to maintain the cost of living.

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“Art Must Always Tell The Truth”

Popular artist Banksy created a graffiti mural in London depicting the current state of the UK censorship system using the courts to trample the rights of British citizens…

As ‘sundance’ writes at TheConservativeTreeHouse.com, it did not take long for the authorities to cover the mural and eventually attempt to remove it.

I particularly like the fact the govt turned the CCTV camera, so they can monitor who might visit the scene of the criminal dissent.

Apparently, the British government doesn’t quite see the irony.

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Online Safety Act: Ofcom’s super-complaints scheme will be used to censor “emerging online harms”

Introduction

Ofcom is a public corporation accountable to the UK Parliament.  It is the UK’s regulator for communications services.  It regulates the UK’s broadband, home phone and mobile services, TV, radio and video on demand services, oversees the universal postal service and looks after the airwaves used by wireless devices such as cordless phones, walkie-talkies and even some car keys and doorbells.

With the introduction of the Online Safety Act (“the Act”) in 2023, Ofcom became the regulator for online safety.  The aim is that Ofcom will become the online regulator not only in the UK but globally.

The Act gives Ofcom the powers they need to take appropriate action against all companies in scope, no matter where they are based, where services have relevant links with the UK. This means services with a significant number of UK users or where UK users are a target market, as well as other services which have in-scope content that presents a risk of significant harm to people in the UK.Online Safety Act: explainer, Department for Science, Innovation & Technology, UK Government, 24 April 2025

What are Super-Complaints?

A super-complaint is a formal mechanism established under the Online Safety Act that allows designated organisations to raise concerns about systemic issues affecting users of regulated online services.  Unlike individual complaints, super-complaints focus on broad, emerging trends or widespread problems across multiple platforms, rather than isolated incidents. 

Eligible entities, such as consumer protection bodies or organisations representing users, can submit these complaints to trigger a specific regulatory response from Ofcom.  The super-complaints regime is designed to complement Ofcom’s own research and horizon scanning, a forward-looking assessment of emerging risks and trends in digital services.

“The super-complaints regime, in line with the Act and recent Government regulations … will enable eligible entities to raise systemic issues that arise across services or, in exceptional circumstances, on one service, to our attention. We expect to consult on draft guidance for potential super-complainants in September 2025 and publish our final guidance in early 2026,” Ofcom’s roadmap to regulation of “online safety” states.

From November 2023 to 11 January 2024, the Government ran a public consultation on the eligible entity criteria and procedure for super-complaints.  The Government’s response to the consultation was published on 9 June 2025; the Ministerial Foreword by Baroness Maggie Jones stated:

The objective of the super-complaints regime is to ensure that eligible entities can make complaints to Ofcom, as regulator, to make them aware of existing or emerging online harms. This will also support Ofcom’s horizon scanning function, supporting Ofcom in taking an agile approach to regulating online harms.

Once approved by both Houses of Parliament, the super-complaints regime will come into force on 31 December 2025.Ministerial Foreword, Consultation Outcome: Super-complaints eligible entity criteria and procedural requirements: government response, UK Government, 9 June 2025

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No, South Park, You Didn’t Need to Yank the Charlie Kirk Episode

Oh, c’mon, South Park. You didn’t need to do that. This current season featured an episode about Charlie Kirk and his activism, which was pretty funny, and it’s been pulled from rotation. Amy has more: 

According to the New York Post, the episode was quietly pulled and the network did not issue a statement, noting that “industry insiders” said the episode was “temporarily pulled” from rotation on Comedy Central. It is still available on Paramount+ with a subscription. 

The current season has been a bit Trump heavy, but the program has gone after everybody for years, from the hypocrisy surrounding hate crime legislation to steroid use in sports, political correctness, global warming, and other political figures; the program has tormented everyone. Also, Kirk loved the portrayal. He had a sense of humor, and conservatives can take a joke. 

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