Censure / Education / Info / Censorship

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt drew a useful distinction between lies and bu****it. Liars at least know that what they’re saying is false. Truth therefore still plays a central role for the liar, since they have the decency to be defined in opposition to it. Bu****it does away with the concept of truth altogether. It’s simply indifferent to it; it has no use for it. The bu****itter could be telling the truth, they could be saying something false, it doesn’t matter; the reason they’re saying it has nothing to do with its veracity either way. It’s all flotsam and nonsense, signifying nothing.

Much of the social media content that consumes the minds of the bored and angry is worse than false – it’s bu****it. I think that’s part of why many people who spend their days watching it let it go as easily as they got stuck on it. Oh, that conspiracy theory wasn’t true? You didn’t like that post? Ah well, the next one’s coming up. We don’t have this amnesiac restlessness for the non-bu****it we share, like a favourite film or a resonant piece of writing – things that mean something to us.

--The Guardian--

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FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM TIGHTEN CENSORSHIP RULES FOR SAYING “ANTIFA”.
Meta’s new rules let it ban users or suppress comments that include the word “antifa” alongside “content-level threat signals.”

Donald Trump speaks to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, left, during a dinner in the State Dining Room of the White House, on Sept. 4, 2025, in Washington.
FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM parent company Meta changed its speech rules to add new restrictions around posts including the word “antifa,” according to documents reviewed by The Intercept.
This spring, Meta quietly revised its Community Standards policy, an internal company document dictating what its billions of global users can and cannot say online. The latest tweaks can be found in a chapter on “Violence and Incitement,” where a subsection titled “Other Violence” spells out, among other rules, the company’s bans on ads for assassins. It’s in this subsection where Meta last month published a revision to include new limitations for users who mention antifascism.
Policy documents reviewed by The Intercept show Meta now treats any “Content that includes the word ‘antifa’ as a potential rules violation if that word appears along with what Meta deems a “content-level threat signal” — meaning a statement that the company believes implies violence.

--The Intercept--

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Social media giant Reddit has been ordered to appear before a grand jury in Washington, D.C., as part of a federal effort to unmask anonymous online critics of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.

Attorneys for the Reddit user say their client’s posts and their anonymity are squarely protected under the First Amendment and that ICE’s use of a grand jury marks a disturbing escalation for the agency after seeing its previous efforts to investigate political speech quashed in court. The subpoena was issued by federal prosecutors in the capital after ICE’s effort to identify the same user failed in a Northern California federal court. (The U.S. attorney’s office in Washington declined to comment on the case.)

“We should be very, very, very concerned that they’ve now taken one of these to a grand jury.”

Une députée européenne empêchée d’entrer au Canada
Elle devait participer à deux conférences à Montréal aux côtés du NPD et de QS.

La députée européenne Rima Hassan prononce un discours lors d’une manifestation en faveur de la Palestine organisée par plusieurs syndicats à Paris, en France, le samedi 14 juin 2025.
Photo: urélie Morissard Associated Press La députée européenne Rima Hassan prononce un discours lors d’une manifestation en faveur de la Palestine organisée par plusieurs syndicats à Paris, en France, le samedi 14 juin 2025.

La députée européenne franco-palestinienne Rima Hassan s’est vue refuser l’entrée sur le territoire canadien, quelques jours avant la tenue de conférences auxquelles elle devait participer à Montréal, aux côtés du Nouveau Parti démocratique (NPD) et de Québec Solidaire (QS). Elle dénonce une « entrave préoccupante à l’action parlementaire et à la liberté d’expression ».

« J’ai été empêchée de me rendre au Canada, a écrit samedi soir Mme Hassan, sur son compte X. J’assurerai malgré tout mes deux conférences à distance lundi et mardi soir, ce qui sera pour moi l’occasion de m’exprimer sur cette tentative de censure. »

Selon un communiqué du parti français d’extrême gauche La France Insoumise, la demande d’autorisation de voyage électronique (AVE) de Rima Hassan avait été pourtant acceptée dans un premier temps par les autorités canadiennes, avant d’être révoquée vendredi, soit la veille de son départ pour Montréal.

Le communiqué explique que, selon les autorités canadiennes, elle aurait omis de mentionner un refus de visa ou d’entrée sur le territoire d’un pays et de mentionner une prétendue infraction pénale, arrestation, mise en examen, ou condamnation, ce qui aurait provoqué l’ouverture d’un examen de sa demande.

Pour La France Insoumise, il ne fait aucun doute que les deux éléments évoqués par les autorités canadiennes font référence à l’interdiction d’entrée sur le territoire israélien, qu’elle a reçue à son arrivée à Tel-Aviv en février 2025, ainsi qu’à des plaintes déposées contre elle qui n’auraient donné lieu à aucune condamnation, précise le communiqué.
--La Presse--

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This is Ben Muessig, editor-in-chief at The Intercept.
I need you to understand what happened Sunday — and what it means.
Donald Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, issued a public threat to news broadcasters: Report the Iran war the way the administration wants, or lose your license to operate.
Take a moment to process that. The U.S. government threatened to silence news organizations for covering a war in ways that the president doesn’t like.
The Intercept has covered enough authoritarian governments to know what censorship looks like. This is it. And it’s happening here.
What makes it so insidious is that the threat doesn’t even have to be carried out to be effective. In the last 15 months, we’ve watched corporate news outlets preemptively fold one after the next — pulling coverage, softening headlines, spiking investigations — not because they were ordered to, but because they’re afraid.
The chilling effect is the point.

Lisa Nandy vows to give BBC permanent charter to prevent political interference
Minister says the change is needed to protect the corporation from repeated ‘culture war’ attacks

The government is to put the BBC’s charter on a permanent footing for the first time, after the corporation said the change was needed to protect it from political interference.

In a significant change to the governance of the BBC, the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, said she wanted to grant the corporation’s demand for a permanent charter. She said she wanted to protect it from repeated “culture war” attacks.

BBC executives had argued that the current system in which the broadcaster’s charter had to be renewed every 10 years created a rolling existential threat. That threat has become more acute with the rise of Reform UK, an arch critic of the BBC that has vowed to end the licence fee.

Speaking at the Society of Editors conference in London, Nandy said the BBC was “one of the two most important institutions in our country”, alongside the NHS.

“While the terms, the structures and the funding for the BBC will continue to be negotiated every several years, we should seek to end the bizarre situation where if the charter isn’t agreed in time, the BBC ceases to exist,” Nandy said. “The truth is we would not accept this for the NHS and we should not accept it for the BBC. This is about protecting the BBC – and everything that it represents – for the long term for all of us.

Google’s former Europe boss close to becoming next head of BBC.

Appointment of Matt Brittin as director general would be latest sign of big tech’s power in media world.
Google’s former Europe boss is closing in on becoming the BBC’s next director general, the Guardian has been told.
Sources said that Matt Brittin, 57, was very advanced in the appointment process. Some insiders believe that, barring a last-minute development, he will succeed Tim Davie as the broadcaster’s next director general.
Brittin, a member of the British Olympic rowing team in 1988, led Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa for a decade until stepping down last year to take what he described as a “mini gap year”.
His appointment would be the latest sign of big tech’s power in the media world, with the rise of online platforms and streaming.
--The Guardian--
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Why independent bookshops strike fear in the heart of Germany’s culture tsar.
Every year, the German Bookshop prize, awarded on behalf of the federal government’s commissioner for culture and the media, serves as a financial injection for more than 100 independent, owner-managed bookshops all over Germany. An independent jury selects the winners, based on criteria such as carefully curated literary selection and cultural events.
Usually, the public doesn’t take much notice of the prize; its weight on the public purse is barely significant. But for small bookshops operating on narrow margins, the prize money of between €7,000 and €25,000 makes a tangible difference.
This year, for the first time, three bookshops disappeared from the jury’s list, according to an investigation by the newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The ministry of culture deleted them, due to “information of relevance to the domestic intelligence agency”, it states. What kind of information? Nobody knows, not even Germany’s commissioner for culture himself, since the domestic intelligence agency (Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) is not allowed to divulge it. A quick look at the three bookshops is telling: they are antifascist, they are proud of it and they are institutions in their communities.
Germany’s literary scene is outraged, and with good reason. Because what sounds like a minor issue is actually another highly alarming intervention into Germany’s cultural scene by Weimer. Last month, he dominated headlines when it was revealed that he was considering dismissing the Berlin international film festival’s director, Tricia Tuttle, because a film-maker had made a pro-Palestinian speech during the festival’s closing gala. After an open letter of protest, signed by nearly 700 international film-makers, Weimer dropped the plan to sack Tuttle and instead imposed a “code of conduct”on the Berlinale and appointed an advisory board to oversee its director in the future. To many observers, this looks like the plain repression of dissenting artists.
--The Guardian--
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Wilhelm Reich: Twice Burned

A psychoanalyst and physician, Reich fled the N***s only to be detained by the US as an “enemy alien” during World War II. And then came the sexual revolution.

Wilhelm Reich has a curious distinction: his books were burned by the N***s in the 1930s and then by Americans in the 1950s.

Born in 1897 in Austria-Hungary, Reich was a physician and a psychoanalyst of the second generation after Freud, who initially thought the youngster a wunderkind. Reich went on to author influential books such as The Function of the Or**sm (1927) and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), which argued that fascism emerged out of sexual repression. As sex-radical psychoanalyst, anti-fascist, communist, and someone of Jewish parentage (he didn’t identify as Jewish), he would have been on multiple N**i enemies-lists. The N***s burnt his books, but he escaped to Norway in 1934.

Reich was one of some 40,000 Germans stripped of their citizenship by the N***s for emigrating. (Reich was considered a German after the German takeover of Austria in 1938.) Scholars Philip W. Bennett and Andreas Peglau use Reich as a case study of the N**i denaturalization process, which they call both “ideological and economic”; ex-Germans could have property legally seized. Reich’s German citizenship was revoked at the end of 1939, making him stateless until 1946, when he became a naturalized US citizen.

The FBI opened a file on Reich as soon after he arrived in the US in August 1939. Bennett and Peglau write that the FBI’s investigation of Reich “bears remarkable similarities to the N**i’s case against him.” In both investigations, “rumors spread by anonymous sources played a key role, and both were motivated by anticommunism.” As a result, when the US entered the war against Germany, the famously anti-N**i Reich was rounded up as a “German enemy alien” among 16,000 others so deemed.
Reich’s subsequent career was, to use the parlance of the Sixties he influenced so much, “far out.”

Bennett and Peglau argue that the “Gestapo’s decision to denaturalize Reich made the FBI’s actions illegal. Wilhelm Reich could not be detailed as an enemy alien, since he was not a German when the United States declared war on Germany.”

“The irrationality of my arrest makes me feel bitter and helpless,” wrote Reich a week into his confinement on Ellis Island. His detention there lasted nearly a month. As one of the most forceful opponents of N***sm, he feared for his life among the actual N***s also detained on the island. Though he was released—authorities claimed they mistook him for another Wilhelm Reich—he remained on the priority list of the Enemy Alien Control Unit.
Reich’s subsequent career was, to use the parlance of the Sixties he influenced so much, “far out.” Reich believed there was a cosmic life-force he called orgone energy. The name came from “orgasm” and “organism”: it was the power of universal libido.

He built versions of Faraday cages, which block some electromagnetic waves, first for mice and then for people, and called them “orgone accumulators.” Claiming all sorts of health benefits for these accumulators, Reich marketed them.
In 1947, following media exposes, the FDA obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of Reich’s accumulators. The injunction also included literature associated with the devices. In 1956, Reich was charged with contempt for violating the injunction and sentenced to two years in prison. The court also ordered that Reich’s orgone-related publications be suppressed. Some six tons of his writings were burned by the US government as a result.

Since he’d written about orgone in his new introduction to his classic works, like The Mass Psychology of Fascism, copies of these were included in the burning as well.

This seems to have been the only federal government-sanctioned book burning in US history. Publisher Roger Straus called it “one of the most heinous acts of censorship in US history,” and in response, his firm, now Farrar, Straus and Giroux, brought all of Reich’s published work back into print starting in 1960. Reich himself didn’t live to see this; he died of a heart failure in his prison bed in 1957 at the age of sixty. But as the man who coined the phrase “sexual revolution,” Reich became a posthumous liberating spirit of the Sixties. Reich’s critique of sexual repression was a mainstay of the counterculture, orgone boxes were a fad, and “Reichian” an adjective.
While Reich’s “orgonomy” and the “cloudbusters” he wielded in “Cosmic Orgone Engineering” and battling UFOs were off-the-charts pseudoscience, his early notions of sexual repression, especially its costs for women (his mother killed herself to escape her abusive husband), remain relevant today, as do the disturbingly parallel efforts to suppress his works.

August 3rd, 1956. At the 25th St. Gansevoort Incinerator in New York City
Dr. Willhelm Reich’s Friends and colleagues stand speechless as over 6 tons of the scientist’s books, journals and papers are set to fire before their very eyes.
Today, this event is frequently cited as one of the worst instances of censorship in U.S. History yet at the time, the monstrous act of government suppression didn’t even make the paper.
================================================
Were they the lunatic ramblings of a scientist gone “mad?”
Or did they hold the holy grail of science?

The first thing to know is that Willhelm Reich (1897 -1957) always did things a little bit “different”, and perhaps that’s because he grew up in a place in time where the “laws” of science were being rewritten on an almost daily basis.
In 1903 when Willhelm Reich was 6 years old, the Wright brothers became the first humans ever to fly Accomplishing in just a few minutes what others had called “impossible” for more than 2,000 years.
In 1905, Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity shocked the world by showing that atomic energy could be easily created by humans.
In 1907, Nernst’s third law of thermodynamics suddenly changed our
understanding of particles in motion.

In 1911 Onne’s discovered superconductivity, making it possible to rapidly transfer energy with little to no resistance.
And in 1913, Bohr came out with his first model of the atom.So Willhelm Reich lived in an age where the “impossible” was constantly being shown to be possible, and this was especially true when it came to the “laws” of energy.
Now you should also understand that Dr. Reich was a man of extraordinary intellect.
When he was still an undergraduate in college he was hired by the famous psychoanalyst and neurologist Dr. Sigmund Freud to start treating patients.
When he was just 25 years old he was put in charge of one of the most prestigious medical clinics in all of Europe. In his 30’s he started studying how plants could be used to generate power.
And in his 40’s Reich did experiments with Albert Einstein, shocking the world’s most famous scientist with a revolutionary device that could generate 100% free energy, run for thousands of hours, and harness the incredible natural forces already present on earth, to power homes and cities for the rest of human history.

REICH CALLED HIS DEVICE AN "ORGONE ENERGY MOTOR"

And experimented tirelessly in his laboratory, tweaking, tinkering, and perfecting the machine.
This motor was based off one revolutionary observation:
That there’s an energy force running through the earth, and all living things, and while at first, that may sound like something out of a “new age,” textbook, what he was observing was the behavior of electromagnetic fields.

But because he always approached science a little bit differently, he was able to accidentally discover a strange “exception” to the laws of electromagnetism,allowing for massive amounts of magnetic energy to be created, without the need for a massive power source, using materials that are so basic, you could drive into town right now and pick them up for less than $100 and build your powerful machine in less than 24 hours– even if you’re unsure how to use a hammer and a nail.
Here’s a basic outline of the motor…
Essentially, it works by using magnetic forces to create a permanent state of imbalance between a “rotor” and a “stator”, continuously concentrating a flow of energy in the same direction as the motor rotates – allowing for sustained, “almost” perpetual motion.

We put “almost” in parentheses, because the laws of thermodynamics say that true perpetual motion is impossible. In fact, that’s why you always hear critics of free energy saying “it won’t work, it violates the laws of physics.”

But these critics make a huge mistake because they assume that if a motion can’t be perpetual, then it must be short-lasting. To see why they’re wrong, simply look at planets.
It was a way to get FREE ENERGY
They’re in “almost” perpetual motion, orbiting the sun (which is highly magnetic) for billions and billions of years. One day they’ll stop, but we’ll be long gone when that happens.

So even if a motion created is not “perpetual,” it can still be self-generated, without an energy source, for near eternity.

You see, it’s all about thinking "differently".

And by doing this, Reich realized that even if energy generation doesn’t last “forever”, it could still be made to last for a couple of thousand years. Dr. Reich first shared his device with Einstein in 1940, and worked tirelessly to improve both its efficiency and output over the next several years.

In 1947, he presented his device to a select group of colleagues; who was astounded to watch as he powered an electrical motor “as if by magic.”

Now by this point Dr. Reich was already a very famous scientist, constantly referenced in the day’s leading academic journals, and prominently listed as one of America’s top “Men Of Science”, but when his Orgone Energy Motor was finally revealed to a select group of leading scholars, providing an incredibly simple way for every person in America, and the world, to create their free energy, for the rest of their lives, with virtually zero maintenance, and freeing them from the tyrannical clutches of the world’s largest monopolies, it appeared as though Dr. Willhelm Reich was about to take his place as one of the most prominent inventors in history.
Unfortunately, the titans of the energy
monopolies had different ideas and a few years later,
Dr. Willhelm Reich turned up DEAD.

The product of systematic and targeted persecution planned by the world’s most powerful elite and carried out by the very government that was supposed to protect him.

It was an act of suppression reeking of arrogance; they publically burned the evidence in the streets of New York as if to warn us that “this” is what happens when we try to change the status quo.
They Burned The E
That “this” is what happens when you try to threaten our bottom line, because while we all know that building our perpetual energy generator would save us tens of thousands of dollars throughout our lives and drastically reduce damage to the environment, while ridding the air of many pollutants that may well be causing the increase in cancer we’re experiencing, there’s little profit in it for the corporations.

And losing money is not something they’re going to readily accept.

Not when companies like General Electric bring in $147 billion in revenue each year, or Exxon Mobile, who has $453 billion in annual revenue.

And so you can understand why they may have some “small” interest in keeping all that blasphemous talk about “free energy” under wraps.

Here’s The Play-By-Play Breakdown Of How They Destroyed Dr. Willhelm Reich:
Step 1. Begin Smear Campaign
Reich had long enjoyed a solid reputation as a leading American scientist. Then suddenly, in 1947 (the same year he shares his energy generator) a series of articles appear in Harpers and The New Republic attacking his credibility they are written by an obscure and virtually unpublished journalist named Mildred Edie Brady. At the end of the articles she says that Reich “must be dealt with.”
It’s unclear how someone with almost no writing credentials could suddenly get identical articles published in two of the nation’s largest magazines. Shortly after Brady’s articles are published, a director of the Federal Trade Commission writes to the FDA, requesting they investigate Reich.

They cite, as the reason for the investigation, that Reich’s energy experiments could affect consumer health and assign agents to start monitoring Reich’s activities at all times.
Which begs two questions:

--Why would a commission on trade start investigating a man focused on free energy?

--Did the FTC use the FDA to keep the public from tracing the investigation back to powerful economic interests?

In 1948, a recently hired assistant of Dr. Willhelm Reich suddenly disappears, taking the Orgone Energy Motor prototype, and a large portion of Reich’s research funds with him Reich is frantic. He investigates and discovers that none of the assistant's claims about his past, including employment, are verifiable--the man is never heard from again.
The FDA persuades the U.S. District Attorney Of Maine to put an injunction on Reich, stopping him from continuing his work and research Reich continues working despite the potential legal threats, but in 1954 the courts demand that all of his energy generators, their parts, their instruction manuals, and all books mentioning “Orgone” be confiscated.

On May 7th, 1956, Reich is found guilty of trying to send a piece of his energy generator out of state. On June 5th, 1956, two FDA officials travel to Dr. Reich’s research facility and supervise the destruction of all energy machines as a man’s entire life’s work lays in ruins, his son Peter walks over and quietly places an American flag on the shattered generators.

Two months later, the burning in New York happens. All of Reich’s works – everything, journals, diaries, notebooks, literature, etc are incinerated before the public’s eyes.

Step 7. Tie Up The Loose Ends
November 3rd, 1957…
Just 7 days before a parole hearing in which it is widely speculated Reich will be released Willhelm Reich is found dead in his prison cell. He is fully clothed, except for his shoes. The prison doctor says it was “sudden heart failure.”

There is no autopsy given. Time Magazine runs an obituary on Dr. Reich, but the rest of the press stays silent – probably out of fear.

And this should be the terrifying, tragic end to the story with the dream of true, free, self-generated energy being lost forever with us enslaved to the corporations for all time.

We’re told that “demand is up,” so the “price has gone up too” and watch helplessly as the air around us fills with smoke, and cancer rates increase by 75% in the next two decades – as the Center For Disease Control has estimated they will.
It should have been the end But it’s not.

Two years ago, in Topeka, Kansas the first, and perhaps only, surviving blueprints for the Orgone Energy Motor were discovered in the attic of a man who, on his deathbed, claimed that he was Willhelm Reich’s “mystery” assistant the one who had disappeared in the winter of ’48 and after a protracted negotiation with this man’s estate and payment to the family, we were able to finally get our hands on Reich’s Blueprints and build the legendary motor that the ruling elite thought they had forever destroyed.

First: It works. Beautifully. The computer we’re using to write this presentation is being powered by the motor this very moment So it is our office and the homes of our staff.

Second: It’s easy to put together. Shockingly so. All it takes are a few copper wires, a few pieces of wood, and a few other pieces that can be found at your local hardware store. Even if you struggle to screw in a lightbulb, you’ll be able to make the device.

Third: It’s cheap. You can be generating your energy, “almost” perpetually, for less than $100.

Fourth: It’s scalable. Once you have the blueprints, you can quickly and easily create larger, and more powerful ones.

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CANADA'S BIGGEST GOLD COMPANY SCANDAL AND THE REPRESSIVE CAMPAIGN THAT LED TO SUPPRESSION OF THE ENGLISH VERSION OF THE BOOK, THOUGH THE FRENCH ORIGINAL REMAINS INTACT.
VIEW THE FILM HERE:

Silence Is Gold This feature documentary takes us through the twists and turns of judicial proceedings pitting Canadian mining companies Barrick Gold and Banro against author Alain Deneault, his co-writers and …