Tag: censorship

Networks Were Ordered to Stop Filming Trump—and They Didn’t Protest the Illegal Censorship

“Cameras off the president right now.”

This direct command could be heard this weekend on the live broadcast of the Freedom 250 Grand Prix, an IndyCar street race orchestrated by President Donald Trump’s administration as part of its MAGA-branded commemoration of the nation’s historic anniversary. The entire three-hour debacle was live-broadcast on Fox, alongside footage of Trump and First Lady Melania Trump as they basked in the front-row presidential suite.

At one point, the presidential couple engaged in heated conversation—possibly regarding, some speculated (Mercury News, 8/24/26), the presence of Trump’s personal assistant Natalie Harp, with whom he has an unusually close relationship. As this discussion transpired, a terse command to the camera operator could be heard: “I need the cameras off the president right now. Cameras off the president right now. Turn the cameras.”

A camera operator replied, “We’re the pool with President Trump for the entire network—Fox, CNN, CBS, ABC.”

The response was unyielding: “I understand that. We’ve asked you to turn the cameras off of the presidential suite.”

The command—from a staffer wearing an IndyCar uniform—was an astonishing call for press censorship on behalf of Trump, not to mention a direct violation of the First Amendment freedom of press.

As Brendan Keefe, an award-winning investigative reporter for Atlanta News First, posted on X (8/23/26):

You can tell us where we can be. You cannot tell us what to film. “Cameras off” is an unlawful order from government, especially when recording an elected official…. The First Amendment allows the press to record in any place they’re allowed to be present.

Even more surprising, however, is that none of the major outlets—including the outlets for which the camera person was working—have acknowledged this blatant assault on the freedom of the press. Coverage of the Grand Prix from networks Fox, CBS and ABC operated as usual, highlighting race victories and logistics. CNN correspondent Brian Todd (8/23/26) reported that the race was “a real success.”

Only independent outlets, such as Atlanta Black Star, Raw Story and Crooks & Liars, or overseas-based publications like the British-based Mirror or Spanish sports outlet Diario AS, have published pieces highlighting the infringement. So why have establishment media stayed silent?

One explanation is a realistic fear of government retaliation. After the FCC’s failed efforts last year to cancel ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! for critical comments about Charlie Kirk—a move that was disparaged even by conservatives—the organization mounted a retaliatory campaign, slapping ABC with an unprecedented and mandatory years-early license renewal review. The ordeal has since snowballed into a full-blown lawsuit against the FCC from ABC’s parent company Disney.

But the media have an obligation to act as watchdogs, to report on those in power and keep the public informed on wrongdoing and corruption. Corporate media have billions of dollars at their disposal, and have more resources than any other media format to stand up to the administration. When corporate media are collectively silent about violations of their press freedoms, ordinary people can hardly rely on them to stand up for the rest of us.

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Court Backs DMCA Takedown of Public Meeting Videos

The US copyright system is often used as a tool of censorship, and a recent court ruling shows that there is little to stop this from happening.

The way the system is set up, it provides a powerful tool for anyone to unceremoniously remove content from the internet, with no questions asked. At least not initially.

That tool is the DMCA takedown notice, and the law that underpins it, and the whole system, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). One of its sections, 512(f), is meant to deter abuse of this process, but as the court decision shows, it is toothless.

The case concerns a local news outlet in Massachusetts that had its YouTube channel taken down because of videos it posted about local government meetings.

The city of Waltham had outsourced the recording of its meetings to a contractor, Waltham Community Access Corporation (WCAC), and it was this entity that sent the DMCA notices to YouTube, targeting 15 videos on the Channel 781 News outlet.

This resulted in YouTube temporarily deactivating the channel.

But the court found that WCAC had done nothing wrong, and that its consideration of the fair use doctrine was sufficient, even though it was minimal.

The court’s decision was to grant summary judgment to WCAC and dismiss the claim that the takedowns were a misrepresentation under Section 512(f) of the DMCA.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

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Was My Paper on Flu Vaccine Studies a “Hot Potato” for Editors?

Ithink the answer is “yes,” but here is the story for you to judge.

Each year the CDC publishes estimates of the effectiveness of the flu vaccine in the previous season. Reported by several networks, these estimates are based on a research design that is called a test-negative case-control study.

Over the years, the various authors have shared a similar analytical strategy: Early respiratory events were considered differently from later respiratory events (on the assumption that no effect is expected until immunity is built up). “Early” has typically been within two weeks post-vaccination.

Several months ago, I realized that this special handling of early events is a source of bias called “immortal time.” To expose the bias, I used causal diagrams, formally called “directed acyclic graphs (DAGs).” DAGs were introduced in landmark publications from the 1990s and are widely recognized in epidemiology as a methodological tool.

I wrote a short paper with a scary title: “Immortal time bias in test-negative studies of the flu vaccine.” I illustrated the bias by two simple DAGs that encoded the analytical approaches as described in those CDC-associated studies. The paper may be summarized in three bullet points:

  • Immortal time is an overlooked bias in test-negative, case-control studies of the flu vaccine.
  • The causal structure corresponds to misclassification bias or selection bias, depending on how early events were handled.
  • The bias can be avoided by considering all events and estimating built-up vaccine effectiveness by consecutive post-vaccination days.

I submitted the paper sequentially to three respected epidemiology journals. Surprisingly, the editor-in-chief of each journal rejected the paper within one week using boilerplate text. It was not sent for peer review. Why?

There are three possible reasons:

  1. The message was not sufficiently important.
  2. The paper was poorly written.
  3. Soliciting peer review was not needed. The editor decided that the bias did not exist. 

I can quickly eliminate the first reason. Exposing entrenched bias in studies of the annual flu vaccine is of utmost importance. I didn’t need to compete with any “more important” papers.

Was it poorly written? I have published many scientific papers and two books. I am not a newcomer to epidemiology and even served as an associate editor for one of the three journals. So, that was not the reason.

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Is Amazon Suppressing a Book That Criticizes Islam?

Yes, I wrote the book in question, but that’s beside the point. If they can do it to me, they can do it to anyone who doesn’t hold the views that the leftist establishment finds acceptable. With Amazon being almost the only source for books now, and by far the largest, that’s a dangerous development for any society that values the freedom of speech.

It’s an odd thing. My latest book, The Tragedy of Islam: it has an Amazon page, and that page seems to be in full working order. You can find it here.

If, however, you didn’t click on that link I just provided, but instead went to Amazon and tried to find the book yourself, if your experience is anything like mine just now, you will see that the book is impossible to find. Search for it every which way, and it does not come up. Is Amazon trying to suppress access to this book? It sure looks as if it is.

I asked several other people to replicate this experiment, and they had the same results: They could find the book by clicking on a pre-existing link, but no matter what they searched for at Amazon, including the book’s specific title, subtitle, and author, it doesn’t come up. If you have a minute, please try it yourself and let me know in the comments what results you get.

I found this out because I needed the link to the book’s sale page, and as I was already at Amazon, instead of going to my website and clicking on the link there, I typed the book’s title into the search bar. What came up for “The Tragedy of Islam” was Imam Mohammad Tawhidi’s book from several years ago of the same name and a host of other books with similar names, but my book The Tragedy of Islam was nowhere to be seen. In fact, my book did not appear on the entire page of results for a search of the exact title of the book.

This is not normal. I typed in the names of a few of my other recent books, and they came right up in the searches, either as the first or second result.

So I started to search for The Tragedy of Islam with more information: by the full title, The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses, as well as “The Tragedy of Islam Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam Robert Spencer,” “The Tragedy of Islam by Robert Spencer,” and even “The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses by Robert Spencer, Bombardier Books.” Every search turned up another book I had written, or else Tawhidi’s book. None of the searches, not one, turned up the actual book The Tragedy of Islam: Failure and Excuses anywhere on the first page of search results.

Yet the book is offered at Amazon. Apparently, however, you can only get to it by clicking on a link to it you may find somewhere, not by searching at Amazon. This is a new form of censorship I haven’t encountered before. Amazon can say that they are offering the book for sale and that all is well. They’re just hiding it.

In the past, Amazon has dropped Mohammed’s Koran by Peter McLoughlin and Tommy Robinson, as well as McLoughlin’s Easy Meat about the Muslim rape gang scandals in the UK, and so it’s not at all beyond the realm of possibility that they’re suppressing The Tragedy of Islam, which argues that Islam is a failure, bad for both individuals and societies. They got a lot of heat, however, for dropping the earlier books, and so this time they can say there is no problem at all: The book is in stock and listed, and they’re taking orders for it. Hiding it? Ah, come on, Spencer, you’re just being paranoid!

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Former ABC Reporter Terry Moran Says Fauci Censored ‘Nightline’ Segment on COVID Origins

Former ABC News Correspondent Terry Moran said the network censored his COVID-19 lab-leak story for “Nightline” in 2021, after Dr. Anthony Fauci reviewed it just hours before it was set to air.

In an interview last week on “The Fifth Column” podcast, Moran said it was the only time in his nearly 20-year career at ABC News that he felt the “heavy hand of censorship.”

ABC News fired Moran in June 2025 for violating its news policies after he called President Donald Trump and top White House Aide Stephen Miller “haters” on social media. After he left the network, Moran started the news outlet Real Patriotism.

On the podcast, Moran said that “Nightline” had been planning to air his segment on the origins of COVID-19 and evidence that the virus may have been created in — and leaked from — a lab.

He said he pitched the idea to “Nightline” in early 2021 after people he thought were “smart and serious” argued the virus likely came from a lab.

The segment contained interviews with molecular biologists and former Trump administration officials. It also “broke a little news” based on information from sources in the “three-letter agencies” who said the Chinese military had funded the Wuhan Institute of Virology — the lab that was researching coronaviruses.

“At the end of the day,” Moran said he thought the virus probably had a natural origin. However, he didn’t share that conclusion in the “Nightline” piece.

The segment was ready to air and went for review. When Moran got the edited script back, he said it was “incomprehensible,” adding, “I’d never been angrier.”

Moran said the script was reviewed by “lawyers’ standards, and — I was told — Fauci.”

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Weird timing: Why is the ‘Mary Poppins’ of Disinformation launching a comeback now?

Well, look who’s back…

The Mary Poppins of censorship has danced back into the spotlight.

Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration “disinformation” czar who became famous for singing cringe political “show tunes” online while lecturing the rest of us about what could and couldn’t be said, apparently isn’t ready to give up on the censorship business.

She’s now taking her song and dance show overseas.

Jankowicz almost ran Joe Biden’s floptacular Disinformation Governance Board at the Department of Homeland Security before public outrage helped kill the project almost as quickly as it appeared.

But sadly, that outrage didn’t kill the ideology behind it.

During the Biden years, an entire ecosystem of government agencies, NGOs, academics, “disinformation researchers,” media organizations, fact checkers, and Big Tech platforms worked together to suppress, demonetize, and punish information they considered dangerous.

Of course, it was just a coinky dink that most of the “dangerous disinformation” happened to come from Trump supporters, populists, conservative media, COVID skeptics, or basically anyone making the establishment look stupid.

Revolver knows that world quite well.

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After Cambridge Academic Commits Suicide Over Being Exposed as Fraud, Activists Call for ‘Arday’s Law’ to Limit Free Speech and Honest Reporting

The passing of Jason Arday is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of his own making.

This is true in both a literal sense, in that his death was apparently a suicide, and figuratively, in that the events that drove the former Cambridge sociology professor to suicide were fabulism and fabrication in the service of a career of academic stardom.

He made a Faustian bargain with the truth to achieve academic stardom — one that was so absurd that anyone who bothered to fact-check it would discover it to be a farrago of lies — and could not bring himself to face the consequences of his prevarications when they were brought to light, quite belatedly.

Now that he has killed himself because someone finally reported on his misdoings, some in the United Kingdom want to change the law so that you can’t tell the truth about someone who isn’t telling the truth, or who is doing other things they shouldn’t be doing.

In other words, your free speech should end where a famous person’s feelings might theoretically begin.

A petition on Change.org to enact something called “Arday’s Law” — which would limit the amount of coverage the media could devote to a person over a certain period of time in the United Kingdom — had garnered over 4,300 verified signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

This comes amid a similar petition from the Good Law Project, which calls for an inquiry into Arday’s death, albeit without proposing concrete limits on speech. However, it does call his death “the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” which leads to obvious conclusions about what they might want that inquiry to recommend. That petition had 121,649 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

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Canada is taking censorship lessons from the U.K.

Heritage Minister Marc Miller flew to Scotland in July, officially to attend the Commonwealth Games. According to an access to information memo obtained by Blacklock’s Reporter, however, he also scheduled confidential briefings on a U.K. Labour Party plan to promote what it calls “social cohesion.”

Ezra Levant broke it down on Thursday’s episode of The Ezra Levant Show.

The Labour document, titled Protecting What Matters, calls for “new tools and powers to disrupt organizations that spread extremism, hate, and threaten public safety.” It also proposes to combat what it labels “digital grifters,” “hostile states,” and “politicians of grievance” — a phrase that, Ezra noted, technically describes almost every opposition politician who has ever existed.

“Isn’t every politician sort of supposed to have grievances and then try to solve them?” he asked.

Miller denied discussing censorship during the trip, saying on social media he met with a Scottish cabinet secretary and first minister, discussed nothing of the sort, and that “the most controversial thing I did was drink an Irn-Bru.” Ezra was unconvinced, though.

“It wouldn’t be the first time in history that a politician lied,” he said, adding that the confidential memo listed the briefings on Miller’s official schedule. “I don’t trust Marc Miller when he says he didn’t have discussions about censorship when his own schedule said that’s what they would be talking about.”

Responding to a Canada Proud social media post about the story, Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke responded with one word: “Dystopian.”

Miller replied to Lutke directly, dismissing the story. Ezra noted that Lutke, of German descent, has particular reason to be alert to the language of state censorship — both the Nazi SS and East German Stasi were in that business.

The phrase “social cohesion” is not new in Miller’s vocabulary. In a parliamentary committee exchange obtained by Rebel News, Conservative MP Rachel Thomas asked Miller to define it after he said the CBC’s role was to foster social cohesion.

Miller replied that an age of “disinformation” required a strong state-funded broadcaster and suggested that questioning the CBC contributed to the spread of “falsities.” He also referred to “illegitimate sources” of information — without defining who decides what is legitimate. Thomas noted that the term is used by the People’s Republic of China to mean state control.

Ezra said he first encountered the phrase “social cohesion” in the United Kingdom — and that it has a very specific meaning there. A sitting UK Labour MP named Naz Shah from Bradford West once liked and retweeted a post arguing that the 1,400 young girls raped in Rotherham by gangs of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men should “shut their mouths for the good of social cohesion.”

“That’s what social cohesion means,” Ezra said. “It means shutting down anyone who has a grievance — including, in that case, the rape of 1,400 girls.”

Ezra also noted that he himself was banned from the U.K. earlier this year for being “not conducive to the public good” — which he described as another way of saying he was not part of their social cohesion.

Justin Trudeau introduced four separate censorship bills during his tenure — more than on any other subject. The pattern, Ezra said, is not subtle. The U.K., he said, offers Canadians a view into the future “like a dystopian time machine.”

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French Constitutional Court Blocks Macron’s Social Media Ban for Under 15s To Uphold Freedom of Expression and Protect Privacy

But Macron is not giving up.

As Emmanuel Macron, who is failing, approaches the end of his second and last French presidential term, he is clearly thinking about his legacy.

But, with no less than 7 prime ministers under his rule, the legacy is instability, mass migration, and social chaos.

So, he needs shiny new legislation that’ll look good – he thinks – in the pages of future history books.

Such is the case of his social media ban for under-15s.

While the core idea is not so divisive, the actual plans for implementation bear all the marks of the Globalist ideas he is always advancing.

Yesterday, France’s top court blocked the social media ban bill, saying it infringed upon freedom of ‌expression.

Reuters reported:

“The bill would have barred children younger than 15 from opening a social media account from September 1. Accounts already open would be ​closed within four months by social media platforms, which would also need to use age ​verification approved by the French privacy regulator.

But France’s Constitutional Council found that the ⁠bill, while requiring everyone to give proof of age, failed ‘to specify the conditions and limits’ under ​which it should be provided, as well as infringing on freedoms and privacy.

‘The Council holds that the ​contested provisions, on the one hand, disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication and, on the other, fail to provide the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life’, it said.”

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The New Censorship Isn’t Coming From The Left – It’s Coming From Everyone

One of the great ironies of American politics is that every movement swears it’s against censorship – right up until it has enough power to do some censoring of its own. It’s almost adorable.

For years, conservatives rightly criticized Big Tech, universities, corporate America, and legacy media for suppressing dissenting viewpoints. We argued that free speech wasn’t merely a constitutional protection; it was a moral principle. We insisted that bad ideas should be defeated in the marketplace of ideas rather than buried beneath bureaucratic decrees or algorithmic exile.

I agreed then. I still do. Which is why I’m beginning to ask a question that makes some people on my own side a little uncomfortable.

What happens when conservatives become just as tempted to use institutional power to silence people they don’t like? As a Black conservative, I’ve learned that free speech is one of those principles everybody loves until somebody they can’t stand starts talking. Then suddenly the Constitution comes with an asterisk.

Let’s be honest. Every political tribe has its favorite form of censorship.

The Left often dresses it up in the language of safety, inclusion, misinformation, or protecting vulnerable communities. The Right is increasingly tempted to justify it in the language of patriotism, protecting children, combating ideological indoctrination, or preserving public morality. Different vocabulary. Same temptation.

Power has an uncanny ability to convince us that our restrictions are simply common sense while everyone else’s are authoritarian. History suggests otherwise.

Free speech has never been tested by agreeable people saying agreeable things. It has always been tested by offensive people saying offensive things. Defending speech you already like requires no courage whatsoever. Defending speech you find irritating, misguided, or even insulting is where constitutional principles stop being bumper stickers and become convictions.

That’s why I find myself increasingly skeptical whenever anyone begins a sentence with, “I’m all for free speech, but…” I’ve learned that whatever follows “but” usually involves someone deciding which opinions deserve oxygen and which should be quietly escorted out the back door.

The First Amendment doesn’t ask whether an idea is popular. It doesn’t ask whether it polls well. It certainly doesn’t ask whether it might ruin someone’s afternoon on social media.

It simply assumes that a free people are capable of hearing competing ideas without requiring the government – or increasingly, private institutions acting under political pressure – to function as national hall monitors.

Some readers will immediately object. “But George, some speech really is dangerous.” Of course it can be.

Threats, criminal conspiracies, defamation, and direct incitement have long occupied well-established legal categories. That’s not the debate. The debate is whether we have quietly expanded the definition of “harm” until it now includes disagreement itself.

Somewhere along the way, Americans stopped saying, “I think you’re wrong.” Instead, we started saying, “You shouldn’t be allowed to say that.” Those are radically different civilizations.

One believes truth emerges through debate. The other believes truth must be protected from debate.

As conservatives, we should be especially careful here. For decades, we were the ones demanding viewpoint diversity on college campuses. We objected when bureaucrats decided which speakers were acceptable. We criticized technology companies for selectively enforcing their rules. We warned that concentrated cultural power eventually becomes political power.

Were we making a timeless argument? Or were we merely complaining because we happened to be losing? That’s the question history will eventually answer.

Winning elections should never cause us to abandon the principles that helped us win the argument in the first place.

One of the blessings – and frustrations – of being a Black conservative is that I don’t fit comfortably inside anyone’s political script. I’ve been called a sellout by people who think race should determine ideology. I’ve also occasionally been viewed with suspicion by people who assume conservatism requires intellectual conformity.

Both misunderstand what attracted me to conservatism. It wasn’t tribalism. It was liberty.

Liberty means accepting that people will often say things that offend us. Liberty means resisting the seductive belief that if we could only silence enough bad opinions, society would finally become peaceful. It never works that way.

Every censorship regime begins by promising to target only the truly dangerous voices. Eventually the definition of “dangerous” expands to include inconvenient voices, unpopular voices, and finally independent voices. That’s not a partisan observation. That’s human nature.

Politics changes. Power changes hands. The precedents you create today will almost certainly be used by your opponents tomorrow. Conservatives above all people should understand that.

Social media has only accelerated the problem. Every controversy now comes with an online firing squad. We don’t simply disagree anymore – we organize campaigns, demand apologies, contact employers, and measure victory by whether someone’s life has been sufficiently detonated before dinner.

Apparently we’ve replaced “I disagree” with “unsubscribe from his existence.” That’s not justice. That’s vengeance wearing business casual.

The Founders understood something we often forget. Freedom is messy. A republic is noisy. Open societies produce arguments, uncomfortable conversations, and occasionally spectacularly bad opinions.

The alternative isn’t harmony. It’s permission. Permission for whoever happens to hold power to decide which ideas deserve daylight. That bargain has never ended well.

Conservatives don’t strengthen their case by becoming more efficient censors than progressives. We strengthen it by demonstrating that our commitment to liberty survives even when liberty protects people we profoundly disagree with.

Otherwise, we’re not defending free speech. We’re simply negotiating whose turn it is to do the censoring. And that’s not conservatism. That’s just tribalism with better branding.

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