Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger rebuked the Democratic reliance on censorship to maintain power during a Saturday interview.

During a conversation with The Daily Wire’s Georgia Mae Howe on the Morning Wire podcast, Shellenberger shed light on the global and national movement to censor speech, ideas and social media platforms. Shellenberger recounted recent cases of censorship requests involving high-profile Democrats like billionaire Bill Gates and former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry.

“They view censorship of social media as a must-have, not a nice-to-have, and I think that’s the thing that it’s so terrifying about this moment,” Shellenberger said, reflecting on the censorship trend.“They seemed to view this as one of their highest priorities.  This is a very different Democratic party than the one I certainly grew up with.” 

He further described censorship as “essential to how they want to govern,” comparing today’s media landscape—with the introduction of the internet—to the past when “there was a significant amount of control over the media and the discourse.” 

Shellenberger also warned of the implications of rising censorship, particularly in Europe and Brazil: “The censorship industrial complex, which are these NGOs and academics and politicians and news media companies, we think they want to see more censorship abroad so they can then get censorship here.” 

Shellenberger went on to share his research on censorship in the United States, remarking, “We uncovered a censorship operation project in the United States called the ‘Cyberthreat Intelligence League’ that was directly involved with the Department of Homeland Security. … We also uncovered an effort by so-called former CIA people to try to take control of content moderation at then-Twitter.”

Shellenberger warned that the Democratic Party has shifted toward authoritarianism in recent years. “From 2018 to 2023, we saw the percentage of Democrats who support government censorship of so-called misinformation on social media platforms rise from 40% to 70%,” he said. 

Shellenberger then made an unsettling connection to George Soros, the leftist billionaire. “The Soros funding of these NGOs that used to be advocates of free speech they’ve now become pro-censorship,” he said, directly referring to organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union and Amnesty International.

These organizations have a notorious background of receiving funding from Soros and calling for censorship. ACLU alone received $15 million from Soros in 2022, while Amnesty International has taken in $$5,605,943 since 2020. 

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