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Censorship Industrial Complex

Lockdowns Codified a World of Violence

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12 minute read

From the Brownstone Institute

During the misnamed and mostly preposterous debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, a moderator fact-checked Trump’s claim that crime is up. In contrast to his claim, he said that the FBI reports that crime is down, a claim that likely struck every viewer as obviously wrong.

Shoplifting was not a way of life before lockdowns. Most cities were not demographic minefields of danger around every corner. There was no such thing as a drug store with nearly all products behind locked Plexiglas. We weren’t warned of spots in cities, even medium-sized ones, where carjacking was a real risk.

It is wildly obvious that high crime in the US is endemic, with ever less respect for person and property. As for the FBI’s statistics, they are worth about as much as most data coming from federal agencies these days. They are there for purposes of propaganda, manipulated to present the most favorable picture possible to help the regime.

This is certainly true of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Commerce Department, which have been shoveling out obvious nonsense for years. Professionals in the field know it but go along for reasons of professional survival. In truth, we’ve never had a real economic recovery since lockdowns.

Crime is up. Literacy is down. Trust has collapsed. Societies were shattered and remain so.

Only a few weeks following the officious fact check at the debate, we now have new data from the National Crime Victimization Survey. The Wall Street Journal reports: “The urban violent-crime rate increased 40% from 2019 to 2023. Excluding simple assault, the urban violent-crime rate rose 54% over that span. From 2022 to 2023, the urban violent-crime rate didn’t change to a statistically significant degree, so these higher crime rates appear to be the new norm in America’s cities.”

The report isolates the “post-George Floyd protests” because no media source wants to mention the lockdowns. It is still a taboo subject. We somehow cannot say, even now, that the worst abuses of rights in US history in terms of scale and depth were a disaster, simply because saying so implicates the whole of the media, both parties, all government agencies, academia, and all the upper reaches of the social and political order.

The problem of political division is getting alarmingly serious. It’s no longer just about competing yard signs and loud rallies. We now have regular assassination attempts, plus even an extremely strange appearance of a bounty put on a candidate’s head by an official agency.

Surveys have shown that 26 million people in the US believe that violence is fine to keep Trump from regaining the presidency. Where might people have gotten that idea? Probably from many Hollywood movies that fantasize about having killed Hitler before he accomplished his evil plus the nonstop likening of Trump to Hitler, and hence one follows from another.

Liken Trump to Hitler and that is the result you produce. Just as the lockdowns and pandemic response acted out the Hollywood production of the movie Contagion – a perfect example of life imitating art – many activists today want to play a role in a real-life version of Valkyrie.

What’s next, the real-life version of “Civil War?”

There is private violence, public violence, and many forms in between including vigilante violence. Rights violations against person and property are the desiderata of our times. This springs from the culture of our times which has been heavily informed and even defined by the deployment of state violence in service of policy goals, at a scale, scope, and depth never before seen.

There were moments following March 12, 2020, and for the next two years, when there was no way to know for sure what was allowed and what was not, who was enforcing the orders (much less why), and what would be the consequences of noncompliance. We seem to have been subject to a range of coercive edicts but no one was sure of their source or the penalties for noncompliance. We were all introduced into the real-world workings of martial-law totalitarianism, which took forms we somehow did not expect. 

There is probably not a living soul without some bizarre story. I was thrown out of several stores for issues of mask compliance even though it was unclear whether there were mandates. It all depended on the day. There was one store where the proprietor was laughing about masks one day and enforcing them the next, following a threat from an angry customer that he would call the police.

Businesses that tried to reopen were closed by force. Violence was threatened against beachgoers. Churches gathered in secret. House parties were extremely risky. Later, refusing the shot meant being barred from the office, though once more it was not clear who precisely was enforcing the order and what the consequences would be for noncompliance.

When CISA – about which no one knew anything because it had been created only in 2018 – sent out its sheet about which industries were essential and which were nonessential, it was not clear precisely who would make the determination or what would happen if the judgment was wrong. Where was the enforcement arm? Sometimes it would appear – threatening visits from inspectors or checks by police – and other times not so much.

On that day, I was riding back from New York City on the Amtrak and suddenly found myself overwhelmed with the possibility that the train could be stopped and all passengers thrown into a quarantine camp. I sheepishly asked an employee about the possibility. He said “It’s possible but, in my view, unlikely.”

That’s what it was like for years ongoing. Even now the rules are unclear, and this is especially true when it comes to speech. We are merely feeling our way around a dark room. We are shocked when a vaccine-critical post stays up on Facebook. A video on YouTube that mentions censorship might stay up or be taken down. Most dissidents today have been demonetized from YouTube, which is nothing but an effort to financially ruin our best creators.

Censorship is the deployment of force in service of state power, and other institutions connected to state power, for purposes of culture planning. It is exercised by the shallow state, in response to the middle state, and on behalf of the deep state. It is a form of violence that interrupts the free flow of information: the ability to speak, and the ability to learn.

Censorship trains the population to be quiet, afraid, and constantly stressed, and it sorts people by the compliant vs the dissidents. Censorship is designed to shape the public mind toward the end of shoring up regime stability. Once it starts, there is no limit to it.

I’ve mentioned to people that Substack, Rumble, and X could be banned by the spring of next year, and people respond with incredulity. Why? Four years ago, we were locked in our homes and locked out of churches, and the schools for which people pay all year were shut down by government force. If they can do that, they can do anything.

Censorship has been so effective that it has changed the way we engage with each other even in private. Brownstone Institute just held a private retreat for scholars, fellows, and special guests. One very special guest wrote me that she was completely shocked at the freedom of thought and speech that was present in the room. As a mover in the highest circles, she had forgotten what that was like.

This censorship coincides with a strange valorization of violence that we are presented with from all over the world: Ukraine, the Middle East, London, Paris, and many American cities. Never have so many held video cameras in their pockets and never have there been so many platforms on which to post the results. One does wonder how all these relentless presentations of destruction and killing affect public culture.

What purpose are all these soft, hard, public, and private exercises of violence serving? The standard of living is suffering, lives are shortening, despair and ill-health are main features of the population, and illiteracy has swept through an entire generation. The decision to deploy violence to master the microbial kingdom did not turn out well. Worse, it unleashed violence as a way of life.

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society,” wrote Frédéric Bastiat, “over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

That is precisely where we are. It’s time we talk about it and name the culprit. Liberty, privacy, and property were already unsafe before 2020 but it was the lockdowns that unleashed Pandora’s box of evils. We cannot live this way. The only arguments worth having are those that name the reason for the suffering and offer a viable path back to civilized living.

Author

Jeffrey A. Tucker

Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

France condemned for barring populist leader Marine Le Pen from 2027 election

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From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. The globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

Marine Le Pen, the former leader of the populist French opposition party, has been sentenced to prison and barred from standing for election as president in 2027, following a court ruling against her for alleged financial crimes.

Le Pen is currently leading polls to win the presidential election, being 11 to 17 points ahead of the party of the globalist President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling Monday on charges of “misuse of EU funds” sees Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) party, facing two years’ imprisonment and a five-year ban on running for elected office. Her lawyer stated she would appeal the ruling.

 

Speaking a day before the verdict, Le Pen said, “There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election.”

She is to address the French nation in a televised statement Monday night.

Party leader Jordan Bardella responded on X, saying, “Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is unjustly condemned: it is French democracy that is being executed.”

Bardella has called for “peaceful mobilization” in support of Marine Le Pen, with a petition launched in protest at the “democratic scandal” of her effective cancellation as a candidate.

The RN won 33 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2024 French parliamentary elections, being the single largest party overall. It is prevented from entering government by a “cordon sanitaire” – an agreement between liberal-global and left-wing parties to “firewall” national-populists from power regardless of how many people vote for them.

Le Pen’s appeal would suspend the jail sentence and the fine of 100,000 euros – but would not be heard until 2026, effectively sabotaging her preparations for the 2027 election should she win. The ban takes effect when the appeal process is exhausted, meaning Le Pen is free to campaign until her appeal is heard in a year’s time.

The court ruled that Le Pen, whose RN was the single largest party in the recent French parliamentary elections, had misused 3 million euros in EU funds by paying party officials based in France.

She had told France’s La Tribune Dimanche on Saturday that “the judges have the power of life or death over our movement.”

The judges appear to have given her party a death sentence. Eight further RN members and twelve assistants were also found guilty in the same trial.

Elon Musk has warned the move will “backfire,” with globalist house magazine The Economist in agreement that “her sentence for corrupt use of EU funds could strengthen the hard right.” Its report stated, “Barring Marine Le Pen is a political earthquake for France.”

The shockwaves have reached across Europe, and around the world. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels,” joining Dutch and Hungarian national-populist leaders Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban in condemnation of the move.

 

According to commentators, the legal ruling shows that the liberal-global regime is now canceling democracy. Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said on X of worldwide globalist moves to criminalize its opponents: “This is a five alarm fire.”

 

Citing the lawfare undertaken against then-candidate Donald Trump, former State Department official Mike Benz described the many examples of the rule of lawfare were “a dagger in the heart of democracy”:

 

Donald Trump Jr. asked whether the French judiciary are “just trying to prove JD Vance was right” – referring to the vice president’s “blistering attack on European leaders” over their rising censorship and anti-democratic moves. Vance told EU and UK leaders in Munich, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

U.S. political strategist Steve Bannon also referenced populist figures facing legal persecution in his “War Room” rundown of the Le Pen affair today:

 

The move to legally “firewall” Le Pen has left even her political opponents disturbed, with the ruling Prime Minister Francois Bayrou reportedly “disquieted” by the verdict. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the left-liberal LFI and a determined political enemy of Le Pen, has said, “The decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people” – not the courts.

Right-populist leader Eric Zemmour, who coined the term “remigration,” warned of a “coup d’etat” of activist judges in 1997 – and said today that “everything has to change” as “it is not for judges to decide for whom the people must vote.”

Laurent Wauquiez of the conservative Les Republicains – who have also refused to work with the RN in coalition – said, “The decision to condemn Marine Le Pen is heavy and exceptional. In a democracy, it is unhealthy that an elected official be forbidden to stand for election.”

It seems this latest example of liberal-global lawfare may even see Le Pen’s party rise in the polls, with a survey today showing two-thirds of all French voters saying her ineligibility would not stop them voting for her RN party.

Nearly half of voters believe she was treated harshly “for political reasons,” with a quarter believing the move to bar her will be a “trump card” for the party overall.

Whether the move “backfires” or not, the message to Western electorates is becoming clear. You can vote for liberals of the left, right, or center – because anyone offering a real alternative will be locked out of power, or locked up in jail.

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. After canceled elections, speech crackdowns, and criminalizing their opponents, the globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

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Censorship Industrial Complex

Welcome to Britain, Where Critical WhatsApp Messages Are a Police Matter

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“It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,”

“We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”

You’d think that in Britain, the worst thing that could happen to you after sending a few critical WhatsApp messages would be a passive-aggressive reply or, at most, a snooty whisper campaign. What you probably wouldn’t expect is to have six police officers show up on your doorstep like they’re hunting down a cartel. But that’s precisely what happened to Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine — two parents whose great offense was asking some mildly inconvenient questions about how their daughter’s school planned to replace its retiring principal.
This is not an episode of Black Mirror. This is Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, 2025. And the parents in question—Maxie Allen, a Times Radio producer, and Rosalind Levine, 46, a mother of two—had the gall to inquire, via WhatsApp no less, whether Cowley Hill Primary School was being entirely above board in appointing a new principal.
What happened next should make everyone in Britain pause and consider just how overreaching their government has become. Because in the time it takes to send a meme about the school’s bake sale, you too could be staring down the barrel of a “malicious communications” charge.
The trouble started in May, shortly after the school’s principal retired. Instead of the usual round of polite emails, clumsy PowerPoints, and dreary Q&A sessions, there was… silence. Maxie Allen, who had once served as a school governor—so presumably knows his way around a budget meeting—asked the unthinkable: when was the recruitment process going to be opened up?
A fair question, right? Not in Borehamwood, apparently. The school responded not with answers, but with a sort of preemptive nuclear strike.
Jackie Spriggs, the chair of governors, issued a public warning about “inflammatory and defamatory” social media posts and hinted at disciplinary action for those who dared to cause “disharmony.” One imagines this word being uttered in the tone of a Bond villain stroking a white cat.
Parents Allen and Levine were questioned by police over their WhatsApp messages.
For the crime of “casting aspersions,” Allen and Levine were promptly banned from the school premises. That meant no parents’ evening, no Christmas concert, no chance to speak face-to-face about the specific needs of their daughter Sascha, who—just to add to the bleakness of it all—has epilepsy and is registered disabled.
So what do you do when the school shuts its doors in your face? You send emails. Lots of them. You try to get answers. And if that fails, you might—just might—vent a little on WhatsApp.
But apparently, that was enough to earn the label of harassers. Not in the figurative, overly sensitive, “Karen’s upset again” sense. No, this was the actual, legal, possibly-prison kind of harassment.
Then came January 29. Rosalind was at home sorting toys for charity—presumably a heinous act in today’s climate—when she opened the door to what can only be described as a low-budget reboot of Line of Duty. Six officers. Two cars. A van. All to arrest two middle-aged parents whose biggest vice appears to be stubborn curiosity.
“I saw six police officers standing there,” she said. “My first thought was that Sascha was dead.”
Instead, it was the prelude to an 11-hour ordeal in a police cell. Eleven hours. That’s enough time to commit actual crimes, be tried, be sentenced, and still get home in time for MasterChef.
Allen called the experience “dystopian,” and, for once, the word isn’t hyperbole. “It was just unfathomable to me that things had escalated to this degree,” he said. “We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private.”
Worse still, they were never even told which communications were being investigated. It’s like being detained by police for “vibes.”
One of the many delightful ironies here is that the school accused them of causing a “nuisance on school property,” despite the fact that neither of them had set foot on said property in six months.
Now, in the school’s defense—such as it is—they claim they went to the police because the sheer volume of correspondence and social media posts had become “upsetting.” Which raises an important question: when did being “upsetting” become a police matter?
What we’re witnessing is not a breakdown in communication, but a full-blown bureaucratic tantrum. Instead of engaging with concerned parents, Cowley Hill’s leadership took the nuclear option: drag them out in cuffs and let the police deal with it.
Hertfordshire Constabulary, apparently mistaking Borehamwood for Basra, decided this was a perfectly normal use of resources. “The number of officers was necessary,” said a spokesman, “to secure electronic devices and care for children at the address.”
Right. Nothing says “childcare” like watching your mom get led away in handcuffs while your toddler hides in the corner, traumatized.
After five weeks—five weeks of real police time, in a country where burglaries are basically a form of inheritance transfer—the whole thing was quietly dropped. Insufficient evidence. No charges. Not even a slap on the wrist.
So here we are. A story about a couple who dared to question how a public school was run, and ended up locked in a cell, banned from the school play, and smeared with criminal accusations for trying to advocate for their disabled child.
This is Britain in 2025. A place where public institutions behave like paranoid cults and the police are deployed like private security firms for anyone with a bruised ego. All while the rest of the population is left wondering how many other WhatsApp groups are one message away from a dawn raid.
Because if this is what happens when you ask a few inconvenient questions, what’s next? Fingerprinting people for liking the wrong Facebook post? Tactical units sent in for sarcastic TripAdvisor reviews?
It’s a warning. Ask the wrong question, speak out of turn, and you too may get a visit from half the local police force.
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