Commentary: The Hidden Agenda Behind Your Town’s Local Planning Policies

Hartville

In nearly every community of the nation the policy called Sustainable is the catch-all term for local planning programs, from water and energy controls to building codes and traffic planning. The term “sustainable” was first used in the 1987 report called “Our Common Future,’ issued by the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development (UNCED).  The term appeared in full force in 1992 in a United Nations initiative called Agenda 21.

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The Advertising Industry’s Deepening Role in Online Censorship

X User

In the arsenal of the censorship-industrial complex, few weapons have been more effective than advertiser boycotts. Long before online censorship reached its peak in 2020 and 2021, advocates of online censorship had identified online advertisers as the most important source of pressure on social media companies to restrict free speech. When direct appeals to social media platforms fail, pro-censorship campaigners use the threat of advertiser boycotts to produce the desired result.

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Commentary: Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Rise of the Censorship Industrial Complex

This summer the Supreme Court will rule on a case involving what a district court called perhaps “the most massive attack against free speech” ever inflicted on the American people. In Murthy v. Missouri, plaintiffs ranging from the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to epidemiologists from Harvard and Stanford allege that the federal government violated the First Amendment by working with outside groups and social media platforms to surveil, flag, and quash dissenting speech – characterizing it as mis-, dis- and mal-information – on issues ranging from COVID-19 to election integrity.

The case has helped shine a light on a sprawling network of government agencies and connected NGOs that critics describe as a censorship industrial complex. That the U.S. government might aggressively clamp down on protected speech, and, certainly at the scale of millions of social media posts, may constitute a recent development. Reporting by RCI and other outlets – including Racket News’ new “Censorship Files” series, and continuing installments of the “Twitter Files” series to which it, Public, and others have contributed – and congressional probes continue to reveal the substantial breadth and depth of contemporary efforts to quell speech that authorities deem dangerous. But the roots of what some have dubbed the censorship industrial complex stretch back decades, born of an alliance between government, business, and academia that Democrat Sen. William Fulbright termed the “military-industrial-academic-complex” – building on President Eisenhower’s formulation – in a 1967 speech.

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‘Incarcerate the Criminals’: El Salvador’s President Tells America How to Reduce Crime

President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador told the Daily Caller News Foundation on Thursday that the United States needs to incarcerate criminals to stop the rise in violent crime, akin to his policies.

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