The Threat Within, Part 1: Institutional Forces Compose a Massive Censorship Complex

Past as Prologue

Last week was a hearty one for free speech—and a pretty bad one for government censorship—as the Trump administration and congressional Republicans put into overdrive their efforts to dismantle what has become a massive global censorship regime stretching from the enclaves of elite Europeans to the bowels of the U.S. deep state to a state government near you—hey Wisconsin, I’m looking at you.

On the administration side of things, Vice President JD Vance gave a historic speech to European leaders at the Munich Security Conference—a shocking and courageous speech no one could have imagined he (or any other president or vice president) would deliver—excoriating Europeans for their authoritarian constructs and warning that their most dangerous enemy wasn’t Russia or China but themselves.

Vance was deeply unsettled not only by the continent’s widespread new censorship and hate speech laws but by European leaders’ support for the Romanian government’s cancellation last year of its presidential election—because of purported disinformation—and he was even more unsettled by Germany’s threat to do the same.

“I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people,” Vance told the gathered leaders. “Europe faces many challenges. But the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you.”

He added, “If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

Back home, and over in Congress, the House Judiciary Committee convened a hearing on the “Censorship-Industrial Complex,” a look into both the Biden-Harris administration’s censorship campaigns and upcoming potential threats to free speech from artificial intelligence (AI) and foreign governments.

If anything, this hearing was even more important than Vance’s speech because, as Vance was warning Europe, GOP lawmakers on the committee, along with three witnesses, were making much the same point in a grim warning to American citizens, namely, there is an enemy within that poses a grave threat to free speech and thus to our constitutional republic.

Even worse, that threat has become institutionalized, and it further involves using against the American people the same kind of subversive warfare the CIA weaponized for decades against foreign governments.

Not to brag for Wisconsin, but the most salient questioning came from our own Wisconsin U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisconsin-7), who with his focus on the infrastructure of censorship got two of the witnesses, independent journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, to open up about those very grave threats.

Every American, every Wisconsinite, needs to heed the warnings that came out of Vance’s speech across the pond and out of the hearing in the Washington Swamp. Failure to recognize the unprecedented abuse of civil liberties they describe, and how deep the insidious augers of the deep state go, will be fatal to free speech.

A final word before I delve into the hearing itself—consider it a prelude to a piece about the censorship-industrial complex here in Wisconsin. That same infrastructure is also wide, woke, and deep. And active. Last week, I underscored the importance of the 2026 gubernatorial race in dismantling the tentacles of state government bureaucracies, as they will no doubt serve otherwise as progressive substitutes for a defenestrated federal government, at least until their allied reinforcements can arrive, and that goes for free speech, too.

While most of the efforts to dismantle the censorship regime take place federally, there’s crucial work to do in Wisconsin and in every other state as well. Let’s take a look.

Orwellian Europe Prosecutes “impolitic thought”

Right at the outset of the judiciary committee hearing, committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) tied together the hearing in Washington and the Vance speech in Munich by reminding everyone of the words of another of the witnesses, Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya, in testimony she gave two years earlier.

“She warned us about what was coming in Europe and around the world with the censorship efforts we’re seeing in other western nations,” Jordan said. “One of the things she said when she testified almost two years ago, she said, ‘what is under threat is a core value of western civilization.’ Never forget that powerful statement. That’s what is at stake here.”

Subramanya picked up on the theme at the hearing last week.

“What if I were to ask you, what are the most repressive governments around the world when it comes to freedom?” Subramanya asked the committee.

As Vance was doing in Munich, Subramanya proceeded to give the committee examples.

“In Scotland, hate crime legislation adopted last year criminalizes anything that stirs up hatred against an array of protected groups, including the disabled, the old, the LGBTQ community and others,” she testified. “In Germany, the government started enacting hate crime laws that imposed jail sentences on those who displayed hateful symbols like swastikas. Authorities have ramped up their policing of online hate speech by arresting people who make offensive posts and seizing their laptops and other devices.”

Last year, Subramanya said, the German government banned a far-right magazine for anti-human hate speech and agitation and shut down a protest because the protestors were Irish and speaking Gaelic rather than English or German.

“In the United Kingdom, the police have taken to arresting people who post videos and social media accounts deemed offensive,” she testified.

In addition, Subramanya testified, Europe’s Digital Services Act bars the dissemination of any content deemed harmful or illegal, while, in Canada, one neoliberal proposal would fine people for saying good things about fossil fuels, while another would allow the arrest of people for hate crimes that have yet to be committed.

The left in America long adhered to a different standard, Subramanya said, and traditionally it was the progressive left that felt most passionately about defending free speech rights.

That is no longer the case, the journalist said.

“I am worried because we live in an illiberal moment,” she testified. “This moment has been building for many years and there’s many forces behind it, social, political, and economic. For one thing, the left has lost its passion for the First Amendment.”

Subramanya acknowledged that there are plenty of conservatives who would prefer that school libraries not include books about gender fluidity or critical race theory and some who have wanted to ban authors like Tony Morrison or Margaret Atwood.

“All that is wrong, but I’m less concerned about this trend than I am about the censorship that has happened under Joe Biden in partnership with Washington, much of corporate America, including banks and social media companies,” she testified. “This partnership affects far more people than a relatively small number of school boards.”

When Meta or the Bank of America decide that one of their users or account holders has voiced the wrong opinion, they can take action that the vast majority of people will never know about, Subramanya said.

“They can suppress an algorithm, remove a book from the digital shelf, suspend a checking account, which raises a very frightening prospect,” she said.

The Censorship-Industrial Complex

For his part, Shellenberger recounted, as he has in testimony before, an intricate censorship enterprise has metastasized throughout the government, an enterprise Shellenberger calls the censorship-industrial complex, a network of government agencies he says includes the Department of Homeland Security and government contractors, including the Stanford Internet Observatory and big tech social media platforms that conspired to censor average Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.

And there’s way more than those, Shellenberger testified:

The problem is, Shellenberger testified, it’s not just censorship they want but total control.

“The problem is that deep state agencies within the U.S. government have for two decades sought to gain control over the production of news and other information around the world as part of ongoing covert and overt influence operations, and that after 2016 multiple actors and several deep state U.S. government agencies turned the tools of counterterrorism, counterinsurgency and counter populism against the American people,” he testified.

In closing, Shellenberger urged Congress to defund the censorship-industrial complex and to seek a proper accounting of the various efforts to fund it, including secretly through pass-through organizations and shell organizations like USAID.

“I further urge Congress to seek other ways to reduce the exposure of American social media users and companies to the threat of censorship from Europe, Britain, Brazil, and other nations,” he said. “We should respect national sovereignty, but Vice President Vance makes a good point when he asks why Americans should be spending our wealth and putting our lives on the line for Western European NATO members who are actively demanding censorship by American companies of our speech.”

In his testimony, Taibbi underscored the special danger the Democratic Party poses to free speech.

“Now, I defended John Kerry when people said he looks French, but Marie Antoinette would’ve been embarrassed by [his speech last year at the World Economic Forum],” Taibbi testified. “He was essentially complaining that the peasants were self-selecting their own sources of media. What’s next? Letting them make up their own minds?”

Building consensus may be a politician’s job, Taibbi stressed, but it’s not his job as a citizen or as a journalist.

“In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job,” he said. “The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem. This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment.”

Indeed, Taibbi said, the censorship network that Shellenberger described is a giant closed messaging loop whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine.

“There is no way to remove this rot surgically,” he testified.

Tiffany Hits the Target

Much of the questioning was predictable on both sides of the aisle, but at one point Tiffany, in his questions to the panelists, got to the heart of the hearing’s importance—the character of the censorship, on the one hand, and the tactics of the censors, on the other.

That is to say, the character is institutional and embedded. It is not some clique or collective of people that has hijacked our institutions and can be dispatched; it is the institutions themselves that have evolved over time into a bureaucratic force for oppression.

In such a situation, the goals cannot be simply to oust the hijackers; it must be to tear down, rebuild, and rededicate those institutions for the constitutional good. Many of them must go away for good, lest they ruthlessly use the same censorship tactics against American citizens that they have employed as an American signature of foreign policy, the subversion of unfriendly regimes.

In other words, for the federal bureaucracy, the American constitutional republic has become an unfriendly regime.

It was Tiffany in his questioning who got to the heart of the matter. He called the potential use of such corrupt weapons––psyop tactics against the American people—scary stuff that Americans need to know about.

Shellenberger said it was essentially about regime change, both here and abroad.

“We now know what happened, which is that basically after the war on terror, the United States used counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, counter populism tactics, first in the Middle East as part of the Arab spring uprisings, then in Eastern Europe as part of the Colour revolutions, using social media to foment revolutions against places that we wanted regime change and then using censorship in places to repress conflicting opinion in places that we were trying to stabilize,” he said.

Those tactics were then turned against the American people after the populist revolution of 2016, Shellenberger added.

“First you saw Russiagate, this wild conspiracy theory that President Trump was somehow controlled through a sex blackmail operation by the Russians, but then we also saw a very elaborate effort to do exactly what they had done abroad, creating small committees of experts to decide what the truth was and demand censorship on the basis of it,” he testified.

What’s more, Shellenberger said, there were also proactive influence operations, the most dramatic of which was the Hunter Biden laptop, which Shellenberger called severely illegal, and a take-over of independent journalism by government agencies.

Controlling the flow of information, aggressive influencing operations, disinformation campaigns designed to destroy credibility, outright propaganda and censorship—all those trademarks of foreign intelligence operations have been turned inward, Shellenberger said.

And who can argue with him? When USAID establishes a fake social media network in Cuba to disrupt that regime, as it most certainly did, and does the same in Brazil, it is not so much different from the tactics used by domestic federal agencies since 2020 in the U.S.

“My colleagues and I are over two years into our research characterizing the censorship industrial complex and we continue to discover whole new institutions involved in censorship,” Shellenberger said at the hearing.

It was the institutional aspect that upset Taibbi the most.

“Many of the programs that Michael and I reported on in the Twitter files, these are taxpayer funded programs that are being spent to remove the speech of the taxpayers themselves or to encourage platforms to take down content of the taxpayers and I think most people would disagree with that allocation of resources,” Taibbi testified.

And that’s a huge problem. As Taibbi testified, the censorship is institutional. It builds fortress walls with an internal coherency only its members can understand. It uses the courts, it uses Congress, it uses its regulations and internal codes as impenetrable shields against the outside world. Few opportunities arise in a lifetime to tear it down.

We have one of those opportunities now with the Trump administration, and that opportunity should be used to tear it all down, and decisively so. As Taibbi said, these institutions make up the consensus machine and there “is no way to remove this rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.”

And that means the part of it that continues to hold sway in Wisconsin has to go, too. That consensus machine and its censorship enterprise will be examined in the next piece.