A little over a year ago, I participated in a public event in London with Russell Brand and Matt Taibbi. While there, I expressed my bewilderment at the censorship we had uncovered. It wasn’t the first time. When Matt and I testified before Congress in February, I also described being disoriented. After all, growing up progressive in the 1980s and 1990s, free speech was a foundational value, both for radical Leftists like myself at the time and for more moderate liberals. To watch liberal and Leftist Democrats demand censorship right in front of me was jarring, to say the least. I wondered aloud, “What is going on?” And I kept wondering until I found some answers.
I believe that my colleagues and I are now much closer to having a unified field theory of contemporary totalitarianism. We have published hundreds of articles so far on the censorship and other totalitarian tactics, including the weaponization of the FBI and CIA and the lawfare aimed at incarcerating Donald Trump, that we’ve been documenting. If I had to sum it up, I would say that there are at least four core drivers, all of which I described in a conversation I had yesterday with Russell.
