Andy Wells

You know, take the week. Or the month. Scratch that. How about never going on social media again? While you’re at it you could stop trying to censor it. Doing both might help your mental health. I genuinely mean that

Wow, wow, wow. I just left the National Press Club where Minister of Communications @AnikaWells spoke. She repeatedly and brazenly lied about the fake accounts, claiming they were only for enforcement, even though the legislation says in black and white that the eSafety Commissioner can use them in unlimited ways for "educational" and "promotional" purposes. One big moment came when a Politico reporter got up and said something about how mean people like @PaulineHansonOz were to eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant. Seriously. A supposed reporter was white-knighting for a government official during the official Q&A. The same reporter had come up to me before Wells' speech and asked if I had criticized Inman-Grant. Who needs government censors when you have Politico? After he asked his question, Wells showed the most emotion, describing online criticism of Inman-Grant as "abuse." She also talked about her own staff's supposed suffering. I kid you not. The mask dropped, and you could see what really upset her: people — including a sitting Senator — criticizing government officials. After gaslighting the audience about fake accounts, Wells repeatedly insisted the government wasn't trying to censor content. She said this after filling her speech with examples of content she claimed harmed people. You couldn't make it up. This legislation is the culmination of decades of progressives equating words with physical violence. Wells cynically compared her legislation to prevent psychological "harm" to various laws that protect people from physical harm, like seat belt laws. BTW, Wells never said what content it was that she thought caused eating disorders. Pictures of skinny women? Dietary advice? Who knows. Nobody asked. Another important moment came when Wells explicitly said Australia would be pursuing censorship alongside other nations, including the UK, France, and Spain—all countries where governments risk losing power to populists. I spoke with Julie Inman-Grant before the speech began and asked about the fake accounts. She insisted they were there just for enforcement, and when I asked why the law allowed them to be used for government propaganda, she said she might write an "enforcement memo," which, of course, would have no impact on the legislation. After her speech, I went up to Wells and asked if she was seriously saying the legislation didn't allow the government to use fake accounts for government propaganda. She refused to answer. A man who said he was from the National Press Club stepped in front of me and said I could interview her afterward. But that wasn't possible because they rushed her out the back to avoid any difficult questions. So there you have it. The pettiest people in Australia are seeking to silence citizens and their political opponents in the name of protecting children. These deeply intolerant and cynical people want to control what you can see and say online. And they're doing it with most of the media's support. Australia has reached a new low in its rapid descent into dogmatism, intolerance, and censorship.

A Federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minnesota shot a second person dead yesterday. Most of the debate since then has focused, understandably, on whether the ICE agent acted in what he perceived to be self-defense. Whatever the case, it’s clear that, by encouraging people to interfere in law enforcement operations, the Left is getting people killed. Videos show both victims, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, impeding law enforcement operations, which progressive nonprofits, Democrats, and liberal influencers have been encouraging for months. Good drove her vehicle perpendicular to block traffic while her partner taunted ICE officers. Pretti intervened at least twice, first by waving traffic through on the street and again as an ICE officer sought to subdue another person interfering in the operation, triggering the agent to use pepper spray against him. In saying this, I am not defending the decisions and behaviors of the ICE officers or anyone else. The killings are a tragedy. And there is a worthwhile debate underway over ICE tactics, separate from the specific behaviors of Good and Pretti. We don’t know what was in the minds of Good and Pretti specifically, but Democrats, progressives, and anti-ICE activists have for years called ICE and the Trump administration fascist and compared them to the Nazis. On January 19, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz called ICE “Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo.” Last year, in California, Governor Gavin Newsom signed legislation to block ICE from hiding its identities. The Los Angeles mayor called them a “reign of terror.” And a few days ago, the Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota urged citizens to “put your body on the line” to block ICE protests. Walz and other Democrats have blocked state and local law enforcement from working with ICE, which has contributed to increasingly risky behavior by anti-ICE activists like Good and Pretti, and thus growing danger to everyone involved. There were no Minneapolis police visible in the videos of the Good and Pretti deaths. And many of America’s largest progressive cities and states are all openly defiant of federal law, declaring themselves “sanctuaries” that protect illegal migrants from the federal government. California, New York, Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and others are “sanctuary states”. At the same time, New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Oakland, San Diego, Sacramento, Seattle, Portland, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Madison, Milwaukee, Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Newark, Jersey City, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Chapel Hill, Durham, Asheville, Tucson, Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Reno, are “sanctuary cities.” The underlying problem is that for decades, schools, Hollywood, and the media have made clear that we should risk and even sacrifice our own lives to stop fascism and Nazism. And yet neither ICE raids nor Trump are fascist, and it is offensive to compare them to the Nazis. The Nazis rounded up Jewish citizens and shipped them to death camps. ICE, by contrast, is detaining foreigners who the government believes committed criminal offenses beyond coming to the US illegally. No nation in the world has allowed more people to enter illegally. Nor has any treated them with greater due process than the US is doing. The American people elected Trump president, like it or not, and the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause in Article VI establishes that federal law prevails over conflicting state or local laws. It ensures the Constitution, federal statutes, and treaties are the “supreme Law of the Land,” binding state courts and governments. The ICE raids may be bad politics, but there is no question that they are constitutional. While some Democrats and progressives know their language is hyperbolic, half of the individuals surveyed told pollsters last year that Trump is a fascist. Such radical beliefs appear to have partly motivated two assassination attempts against Trump and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. While the radical Left has for decades called its political opponents fascists, these views were until recently marginal views, even within the Democratic Party. Moreover, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton all spoke out against illegal migration until 2016. So what changed? Why did so many Americans come to view a democratically elected president and law enforcement operations as equivalent to fascism? What radicalized the Left? Part of the answer is bad information. Many progressives believe ICE is simply sweeping up hard-working and law-abiding immigrants, and do not know that 64 percent of immigrants detained since Trump took office in January 2025 had criminal convictions or pending charges, in addition to having broken the law by entering and working in the country without a visa. For some, labeling Trump as a fascist was simply a political tactic and not something they believed. But many others believe it, as the polling data shows. Many people, both liberals and conservatives, believe progressives like Good and Pretti are acting out of empathy and sympathy for migrants. But if they are, it is purely ideologically driven, not from any real-world understanding of migrant communities. Few of the white progressives protesting ICE have ever spoken more than a few words to much less gotten to know illegal immigrants, even those who work for them as cleaners, cooks, and gardeners, much less come to understand their lives... teapawt.net/shellenberger/status/2… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning investigative journalism, watch the full video, and read the whole article! teapawt.net/shellenberger/status/2…

And after the government combines your personal, banking, and voting data under a single digital ID, it will add social media and vaccine information. Same with Real ID in the US. The Censorship Industrial Complex was dress rehearsal for digital ID.