New Article on Major Free Speech Threat
Many nations seem poised to abandon the core lesson of the Enlightenment: no human institution can or should be trusted to decree Absolute Truth and punish dissent from it
Two weeks ago, I wrote to you to inform you of several changes we had adopted with the primary purpose of creating more time for me to publish more written journalism and analysis, of the kind you have come to expect from my work at the Intercept and then at Substack. Launching our live nightly SYSTEM UPDATE program on Rumble has been very gratifying and a great success in terms of our ability to quickly build a large audience, but it left me with little time to work on the written journalism that I have always considered, and still do consider, to be the anchor of my work.
Those changes have indeed resulted in my having more time to write. We are happy to notify today of a new article we just published on a news story I regard as extremely important. Brazil, under its new government led President Lula da Silva, is poised to become the first nation in the democratic world to implement a law empowering the government to ban "fake news and disinformation," and to punish those it claims are guilty of authoring and disseminating such "false" ideas.
As we report, the implications for this law are serious and extend far beyond Brazil. Brazil is being used as a test case by both the EU and various sectors in the U.S. to see how far states can go in seizing new powers to censors the internet in the name of stopping what the state decrees is "fake news and disinformation."
The article is published here on our Locals platform. As was true for almost every article I wrote at Substack, it is free and publicly available to subscribers and non–subscribers alike. Your subscriptions is what enables us to make our journalism available to the widest possible audience, without having to hide it behind a paywall. There are exclusive benefits for Locals subscribers – including access to our twice-a-week interactive after-show, transcripts of each episode of our program in article form, and other community-based content – but we intend for my news articles and analysis to continue to be freely available to ensure the widest possible distribution and impact.
You can read the new article at this link.
Remember: Those who are paid Substack subscribers are entitled to free Locals membership. You simply go to our Locals page (here), enter the same email you used for your Substack membership, click "forgot password," and Locals will then email you a password for full access.
For now, we hope you enjoy our new article, and we look forward to returning more or less to what had been our regular schedule of publishing new written reporting.