Free Speech

‘Censorship’

The DM 0 Comments

The word ‘censorship’ is used incorrectly regularly, getting invoked routinely in reference to the interactions of private citizens, often when, say, one private party decides to end an association with another, and in so doing removes that now unwelcome party from their space, whether virtual or physical, which necessarily ends the removed party’s ability to ‘speak’ in that setting, the remover then getting deemed a ‘censor’ by the removed.

That’s not censorship, and isn’t about free speech. That’s an exercise of the rights of association and property. The removed party having no ‘right’ to be in the other’s private space, he was there by the owner’s leave, and the curtailment of his speech in that setting as a byproduct of his removal from that setting, a non-public space, is not a free speech issue, and has nothing to do with the reasons for that aspect of the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Censorship is state restriction of citizen speech. That’s all.

This, however, is censorship, or will be, if and when enacted: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/15/danish-justice-minister-we-must-break-perception-of-right-to-private-messaging.html

This will be the state, whatever state that adopts this, and whatever the justifications offered, proscribing how private conversations may be conducted between private parties. If states can proscribe truly private electronic messaging (if that even exists or even could – which I doubt), and demand to be able to proactively eavesdrop on all electronic messaging in real time or be able to review any of it later, then they can demand to do the same to private verbal or written communications, and by this reasoning, could forbid also the how of those exchanges, as well, whether verbal conversations in unsurveilled settings (say a swept and secured Faraday room in a house or office), or the writing and passing of private unreviewed or unreviewable (by the state) physical documents.

Like an inmate at a prison, one could write a letter, but it will be read and discarded if the content is deemed unacceptable by the warden. In curtailing the how, the state is also thus curtailing the what, the content of what would have been conveyed, but possibly no longer will be, the privacy of the communication being eliminated or the communication just being prevented by the state in the first place.

That rationale is the same, and that’s the state restricting – while also violating, in the U.S., property rights and the 4th Amendment – the speech of private citizens aka: censorship.

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Rejecting the Tsunami

The DM 0 Comments

Going through just one Telegram thread this morning, a tsunami of evidence for encroaching and enveloping tyranny across the world, the most basic rights people in western nations thought to be unassailable not very long ago rapidly coming to an end, I am reminded of the overwhelming obviousness that we are way, WAY past the point of needing any new information to act, and reminded also that ‘acting’, almost anything and everything that that would entail, is just too daunting and fearsome for people to contemplate doing, so the amassing and sharing of evidence just goes on and on and on….

We are there, at a major societal crossroads, and have been for years, and this is how it always happens, as almost no one can ever handle this crossroads, knows how to proceed once reaching it, the one involving the complete corruption and abuse of one’s own state. Or, more likely, they know, but just can’t face the prospects, and are hoping for a miracle that doesn’t involve major risk and life disruption. I suppose this is what drives support for Donald Trump.

In any case, it’s way too much info and way too many fronts to fight. Too much and too many by orders of magnitude. Those who see this will finally, if anything is EVER to change for the better, or have any chance to, have to simply reject EVERYTHING they have not actively agreed to engage with, support, associate with. Everything. No different than any other private engagement. Non-association as the default and assumed state of being.

I’m pretty sure life isn’t meant to consist of the endless and pointless tracking of super-bad and ominous news while watching all fundamental rights gradually evaporate. If the system worked, then people should have been in jail and executed now for the endless crimes of the state and the private institutions with which the state is enmeshed and owned by. They aren’t, never will be, and we now overtly see the opposite result, with routine citizen dissent and journalism being rapidly criminalized without any due process, and so it comes back hard to the regular person’s doorstep to remedy, to take some action other than endlessly tracking the tsunami.

The only remedy I see, at least the only one that has not been tried, and the one never widely discussed, and the only likely peaceful possibility, is that of the combination of active non-compliance and disassociation.

We will have to move on from this perpetual tracking of the latest, now hourly, waves of corruption, controversy, drama, and hyper-harm we are relentlessly inundated with and agreeing to engage with. Our lives can’t reasonably be thought to be spent properly or happily this way. I believe those who see the problem will have to start tangibly acting in non-compliance and disassociation. How bad is it going to have to get before that might become common thinking? Would it ever, I wonder?

If there’s another way, I’d love to hear it. I don’t see one.

Graham Phillips Journalist

Hello and welcome!

Here is just one gallon I came across today from the 100 foot wall of water bearing down on us all. He’s just the latest of the writers, webloggers and journalists now being criminalized and persecuted in Europe, a practice rapidly going mainstream, even now in England.

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