Tag: censorship

xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Broad “Nudification” Law as a First Amendment Violation

On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool.

From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees.

That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them.

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here. 

Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech.

What HF 1606 does

The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service.

The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool.

“Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person.

The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case.

The definition that swallowed the law

For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.”

That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them.

The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts.

The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction.

The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not.

The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.”

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Flashback: Fauci Funded Technique To Hide Evidence Of Genetic Engineering According To RFK Jr.

Four years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an accusation that got him shadowbanned, “fact-checked,” and dismissed as a crank: that Anthony Fauci’s NIAID had bankrolled the development of a laboratory technique whose primary utility was erasing the fingerprints of human engineering from a manipulated virus – and that the technique was then handed to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

With Fauci’s personal diaries now public, Tulsi Gabbard’s last-day document dump on the record, Ralph Baric stripped of his NIH grants and placed on leave by UNC, and Fauci himself scheduled to appear under subpoena before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee this Wednesday at 8:30 a.m., Kennedy’s remarks are worth revisiting.

Here’s what he said:

“He [Fauci] funded Ralph Baric to develop a technique called seamless ligation. And that is a technique for hiding the engineering project.”

“So, normally, when you do that kind of engineering, you can see it, and you can say, ‘That bug was created in a lab.'”

“He [Baric] developed a way of hiding all traces [of what] was developed. And he taught that to the Chinese scientists – to Shi Zhengli.”

“There is no public health [reason for this]; it is the OPPOSITE of what you would do if you are interested in public health… To teach people how to hide that only has a nefarious purpose.”

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“Why I’m Writing This Anonymously And What That Says About Free Speech In Britain”

Ann Widdecombe’s murder has reopened a question that surfaces from time to time: should politicians with ‘unfashionable’ views get extra protection? The investigation continues, so I won’t comment on that, but the fact that the question is even being asked in response to a 78 year-old woman being killed in her own home tells you something regardless of how the investigation concludes. We have been here before. Jo Cox in 2016. David Amess in 2021. A pattern is forming, whatever the final facts of this particular case turn out to be.

The debate this triggers is usually framed narrowly: what security do MPs need? I want to push it wider: what if politicians are not actually the group most exposed? They have protection officers, party machinery and a public profile that makes an attack on them a national story. I have none of that. Neither does anyone else who simply has an opinion and a job to protect.

I recently listened to Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, who argued that Britain may be entering a period of increasing internal conflict in which political violence becomes more likely.

Whether or not one accepts his analysis, it’s difficult to ignore the growing sense that our public discourse has become more hostile and less forgiving.

If expressing political disagreement increasingly carries the risk of intimidation or worse, the answer cannot simply be to provide more security for an ever-expanding list of public figures.

That treats the symptom rather than the disease.

The view from nowhere and a nobody in particular

I consider myself an ordinary person.

Thirty-plus years ago I would have considered myself slightly Left-leaning. I liked to think of myself as one of the good guys.

But somewhere in the last three decades the Overton window slid sideways, and views I’ve quietly held throughout – that mass immigration, legal and illegal, hasn’t obviously benefited the culture I grew up in, that free speech should mean everyone’s speech, including the people I disagree with – are now filed under ‘Right-wing’.

I don’t think I’m unusual. Look at the Brexit vote, which for many people was as much about sovereignty and control over immigration as it was about Brussels. Look at any poll on migration levels. There is a large, ordinary, non-extreme constituency that holds views broadly like mine. And a good number of them, I suspect, keep quiet for the same reason I’m staying anonymous here: weighing up whether speaking out is worth the risk. Silence can easily be mistaken for consensus, and I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with while writing this: am I a coward? Publishing anonymously, after all, is a way of having the argument without paying for it. But I don’t think cowardice is really what’s on display here. A coward stays silent. What I’m doing is closer to something else entirely: deciding that saying this at all matters more than saying it under my own name, while still not being willing to bet my livelihood on it. If that’s cowardice, then I suspect it’s shared by a very large, very quiet number of people who hold perfectly mainstream opinions and have simply done the same calculations that I have. That, in itself, might be the more troubling finding than anything else in this piece.

Fear arrives before the crackdown

This is the part I think gets missed in the security debate. We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.

That calculation isn’t paranoid. The variables feeding it are laid out in article after article in the Daily Sceptic. Prevent’s own material cites “cultural nationalism”, defined as the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by specific ethnic and cultural groups, as a sub-category of extreme Right-wing ideology. Two-tier policing is underpinned by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Anti-Racism Commitment, which states that policing should not be “colour blind”, a principle many officers and members of the public have read as licence to treat people differently according to race. It is perhaps no coincidence that public trust in these institutions has been falling sharply. Gallup found that Britons’ confidence in the courts dropped 12 points in a single year to 57%, while confidence in local police fell 11 points to 64%, the largest year-on-year declines on record for either measure. When the referee looks like it’s picking sides, people stop trusting the game.

Campaigners have logged tens of thousands of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ a year, the great majority of them originating from something someone posted online. And after events like the Southport riots, an entire category of people were branded ‘far-Right thugs’ as a matter of editorial habit. None of this needs to end in a prosecution for it to work. Its function is to make you flinch before you speak, not after. And it’s working: a YouGov poll found that 57% of Britons admit to sometimes holding back their views for fear of a negative reaction, and research published earlier this year found the same pattern setting in even among teenagers, with around one in five saying they hide their political opinions at school to avoid being ‘cancelled’. Self-censorship of this kind isn’t a fringe habit. It’s now closer to a majority experience.

Nothing dramatic has happened to me. Nobody has knocked on my door. I have not been arrested, cautioned or sacked. I have simply chosen, before any of that could happen, to leave my name off this piece. That is precisely the point. Fear doesn’t need to become reality to change behaviour. The anticipation of it is enough.

That’s the self-censorship no one puts a number on, and I think it’s doing more to shrink public debate than any single policy or piece of legislation. Its success isn’t measured by how many people it punishes, but by how many quietly change their behaviour hoping never to be punished at all.

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“USA Isn’t A PiggyBank For Europe”: Trump Launches Section 301 Probe Into EU Over Big Tech Fines

Trump Says US Begins Section 301 Investigation on Europe 

President Trump wrote on Truth Social that the US will launch a Section 301 investigation into the European Union for “robbing American companies, in turn, the American Taxpayer.” 

Trump said Brussels is using America as a “PIGGYBANK” by fining Big Tech companies billions and billions of dollars.

Trump listed the technology companies that have been fined a combined billions of dollars:

After having fined Apple, for no reason at all, 15 Billion Dollars, Meta, 3 Billion Dollars, Amazon 2.5 Billion Dollars, and many others, we have just been informed that Google, a truly advanced and amazing group, has been fined yet another 1 Billion Dollars, without explanation. This brings the Google total to over 18 Billion Dollars!

Trump continued:

This illegal and highly discriminatory practice started at these high levels during the first year of the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, but it’s not going to continue during the Trump Administration.

He added:

The United States of America is not a “PIGGYBANK” for Europe, nor will we allow it to be!

Please let this TRUTH serve to represent that we will immediately initiate a 301 Investigation into the practice of “ROBBING” American Companies and, in turn, the American Taxpayer.

The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about.

The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substantial TARIFF to be placed on them at the earliest possible moment.

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JAWBONE Act: FCC Democrat Backs Cruz Anti-Censorship Bill

FCC member Anna Gomez has been describing what happens when a federal regulator leans on broadcasters over programming it dislikes.

This month, she endorsed the JAWBONE Act, a Ted Cruz bill that would let the broadcasters and platforms on the receiving end of that pressure haul federal officials into court and collect money from them.

Punchbowl News reported the endorsement on July 14. The bill Gomez is backing, S. 4749, carries the name Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, which nobody will ever say out loud, and it was introduced on June 11 by Cruz and Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden.

It would make it unlawful for any federal agency, or any officer or employee acting “under color or pretense of office or employment,” to coerce or attempt to coerce a broadcaster, an online platform or an AI provider into taking what the text calls a content action, meaning adding, altering or deleting speech.

Coercion is defined broadly as “to take a harmful, hostile, or unfavorable action, to imply the possibility of taking such action, or to threaten such action.”

The prohibition reaches conduct undertaken “for the purpose of, or if a reasonable person would understand the coercion or attempted coercion to be for the purpose of, incentivizing the broadcaster or provider to take a content action.”

The bill then lists eight factors a court should weigh in deciding whether something counts as coercion. Read them against the record built in Missouri v. Biden and the fit is almost exact.

Courts are told to consider the word choice and tone of the communication, whether the official had regulatory or enforcement authority over the recipient, whether the communication referred to adverse consequences, whether it was public or private, whether it carried a disclaimer saying it lacked legal force, and whether it led the recipient to act contrary to its own policies.

Two of the eight cut the government’s way, asking whether the communication carried “a factual statement without legal force that could be useful to the decision-making of the recipient” and whether it “was for the purpose of aiding compliance with existing law.”

The findings concede the point: “not all government communication to a private speech platform is coercive.” The government does not need a license over Facebook to have leverage over it. It has Section 230 and it has the antitrust division.

Consider what that leverage produced in the summer of 2021. Rob Flaherty, the White House director of digital strategy, ran a sustained campaign of emails and meetings aimed at Facebook’s moderation of COVID content.

The Fifth Circuit found he had demanded internal policy details at least twelve times, pressing the company on what content was being demoted, what interventions it was making, and what measurable impact any of it had.

He told the company the White House was “gravely concerned” that Facebook was “one of the top drivers of vaccine hesitancy,” accused it of running a “shell game,” and, when an answer was slow, wrote: “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

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UK’s Ofcom Seeks Wider Powers After American Forum Fine Fails

Ofcom wasted months chasing a website it cannot reach, came up empty, and has decided the fix is more power.

Britain’s speech regulator closed its investigation into an American suicide discussion forum this week, admitted it has hit the outer wall of what the Online Safety Act censorship law allows, and used the same announcement to ask the government for tools that reach further.

The forum, which Ofcom will only call an “online suicide forum,” has allegedly been linked with more than 130 deaths in the UK and named in coroners’ reports.

Ofcom fined it £950,000, roughly $1.3 million, under the Act. The forum is based in the United States, holds no assets in Britain, is protected by the First Amendment, and has not paid. So the regulator is holding a penalty against a company it has no clear way to bill.

Ofcom thinks there’s a chance the money is still coming. It says it has “initiated work regarding the pursuit of this debt, as we have done with all companies that have not paid their fines by their deadlines.”

A separate post, cheerfully titled “What happens when a company doesn’t pay a fine,” lays out the plan. For a company with no UK assets, obtaining a judgment debt “is more complex and challenging,” and Ofcom says “it is often necessary to engage with law enforcement agencies and private specialists in other countries to identify individuals and assets against which Ofcom can take action.”

Whether Ofcom recovers a penny “can also depend on whether a court in that country will recognise a UK court judgment, and whether we can identify individuals on whom we can serve proceedings.”

That means, a British regulator wants American help to collect a British censorship fine from Americans, and even Ofcom concedes an American court might throw it straight out.

Ofcom has tried this before. It floated the same approach while chasing a fine against 4chan, a strategy that Preston Byrne, the US lawyer representing both sites, called “legally illiterate.” Byrne was just telling it like it is about the forum case. “Censorship fines are anathema to our Constitution,” he said, adding that “if Ofcom attempts to enforce the fine in a US court, which we do not expect, American law is on our side. As far as we can tell, however, this enforcement action is functionally over.”

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Everyone Is a Foreign Agent Now

In a corner of the Saarland, a man ran a blog. It carried no advertising and charged nothing to read. It was funded the way a busker is funded, by whoever chose to drop something in the hat – €60,038.65 in voluntary donations over sixteen months. On four occasions in 2023 the blog embedded videos from RT, the Russian state channel the European Union had banned. That is the entire factual basis of a case that climbed to the Court of Justice of the European Union and produced, on 2 July 2026, a judgment that should frighten anyone in Europe who publishes anything.

The blog belonged to a writer who works under the name Traugott Ickeroth. German prosecutors in Saarbrücken charged him and two others under the country’s Foreign Trade Act, which turns a breach of EU sanctions into a criminal offence carrying three months to five years in prison. The regional court, to its credit, hesitated. The law bans “operators” from broadcasting listed Russian content. Was a private individual with a donation button an “operator”? The judges in Saarbrücken were not sure, and referred the question upward.

The Court’s answer removed every doubt, and with it every limit. An “operator,” the Fourth Chamber held, is any natural person who makes the banned content available to the public. Not a company. Not a professional. Not someone turning a profit. The word appears in thirteen language versions of the regulation without the adjective “economic” attached, and the Court seized on that absence to rule that commercial character is irrelevant. So is scale. So is duration. Four videos or one, for money or for nothing – the act of publishing is the crime.

There is a detail here worth pausing on, because it tells you which way the wind is blowing. The European Commission’s own guidance had said the ban applied only to those exercising a “commercial or professional” activity. The Court overruled the Commission – and overruled it against the citizen. The executive branch had read its own prohibition more narrowly than the judges were prepared to. Brussels asked for less reach than Luxembourg delivered. When a court strains to be harsher on the individual than the government that wrote the rule, the machine has acquired a momentum of its own.

The penalty is not theoretical. Under Germany’s Außenwirtschaftsgesetz the sentence runs from three months to five years, and a further amendment has added an aggravated tier reaching up to ten. Poland’s implementing statute prescribes a minimum of three years. And here the trap folds back on itself: the very donations that keep an independent site alive are what a court can treat as a “professional” income stream – which lifts the offender into the aggravated bracket. The reader-funded writer, the one with no corporate backing and no advertiser to please, draws the longer sentence precisely because he is independent. Independence is reclassified as aggravation.

Understand what this ruling plugs into, because the ruling alone is only half the apparatus. The European Union now runs two mechanisms against disfavoured speech, and this judgment welds them together. The first is a list. Under the hybrid-threats sanctions regime the Council of the European Union adds names by administrative decision – no trial, no charge, unanimity reached behind closed doors, with judicial review available only after the asset freeze has already bitten. The second is the criminal prohibition this case just widened, which reaches anyone who relays listed content whether or not they themselves are listed. The Council controls who goes on the list. The Court has now ruled that anyone who touches what the listed outlets produce is a criminal. The net expands every time the list does, and no further judgment is required to make it happen.

The reassuring official story is that all of this is aimed at the Kremlin. It is worth testing that story against the record, because the “Russia” label has already proven to be a wrapper rather than a wall.

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Deep State Media Censorship

Something has fundamentally changed in America, and it should concern everyone regardless of politics. The press was never supposed to decide what the public is allowed to hear. Their job was to report the news. Somewhere along the way, they decided their real job was deciding which information is acceptable and which information should be filtered before it ever reaches the public.

When President Trump delivered his address on the newly released election-related documents, several major television networks chose not to carry it in full. ABC and NBC declined to air the speech on their broadcast networks. CBS began airing it but cut away before it concluded, while other outlets focused immediately on commentary and fact-checking rather than simply letting viewers watch the entire address for themselves. Whether one agrees with the President or not is beside the point. The public should be able to hear a presidential address in full and make up its own mind. The editorial decisions themselves became part of the story.

The press increasingly tells people what to think before they have even been allowed to hear what was said. Every story arrives prepackaged with analysis, approved conclusions, and a warning label. The assumption seems to be that the public cannot be trusted to evaluate information on its own. Yet, as the press is refusing to broadcast an announcement from a sitting president, one can see that the legacy media’s loyalty is to the actors behind the curtain. The deep state is controlling the narrative—you’ve been warned.

ABC is no longer simply a television network. It sits inside one of the largest entertainment conglomerates on the planet. Disney acquired ABC decades ago, transforming what was once a standalone broadcaster into another division of a multinational corporation whose interests extend far beyond journalism. When news becomes one business unit among countless others, people naturally begin asking whether protecting the corporate brand becomes just as important as reporting the story.

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If a SIDS-vaccine study offends, remove it

In 2021 Toxicology Reports published Neil Miller’s results of his examination of VAERS reports of 2,605 SIDS deaths between 1990 and 2019:

The peer-reviewed paper found that 75% of SIDS reports occurred within seven days of vaccination, with the highest number on day two. [snip] The journal removed the paper April 9, 2026, citing “serious methodological flaws” and “potential implications for medical practice.” Miller said the journal never specified what those flaws were, despite repeated requests.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) wrote a letter on June 29 demanding that “Toxicology Reports and its parent company Elsevier release all records related to the decision to remove the paper. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. HHS also wrote to the journal June 11 seeking clarification.”

Neil Miller is careful to say that his paper correlating vaccines with SIDS does not prove causation. But reclassifying ICD codes to remove vaccine-related deaths and purging papers that expose shocking statistics to the contrary smacks of the deliberate suppression of information unfavorable to the vaccine industry.

This is not to damn vaccines: in the first half of the 20th century alone, smallpox is credited with killing 254 million people. Vaccines eliminated that disease. Although tuberculosis can be treated by medicine, the scourge of that devastating disease was largely vanquished by vaccines.

Multi-billion-dollar industries engender powerful — some may say insurmountable — incentives to grow and continue to grow, continuously. The vaccine industry is no exception.

The CDC maintains that children need vaccines starting within 24 hours of birth through age 18, comprising approximately 15-17 vaccines across 26-30 doses. The CDC fails the public when they create the impression of stacking the deck in favor of the industry by “reclassifying” or withholding contradictory information. Absence of absolute proof of harm is no excuse when the degree of safety remains unproven. Parents are entitled to access to all available information regarding the risks as well as the benefits of vaccines.

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Brian Hooker’s paper showing vaccines increase mortality was REMOVED from preprints.org

They censored this paper as a danger to public safety. This means they know the paper is incorrect and can explain the observed data. But they are keeping their analysis a secret. From everyone, including the authors.

So Karl wrote the entire advisory board. Only ONE member bothered to respond with the reasoning. The rest ghosted him.

But the BIG problem is that the “reasoning” does not EXPLAIN what the study observed. At all. We are left clueless. If the vaccines didn’t increase the mortality, then what did? All we have is COMPLETE SILENCE.

In this article I’ll post what the Advisory Board member wrote and what I wrote back.

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