You may not care about the censorship and banning of X in Brazil. You don't have to. That's because what's happening there isn't really about Brazil. It's about the country being used as a laboratory to roll out totalitarianism worldwide. We ignore it at our peril.

The world took a giant leap forward into totalitarianism yesterday as the Brazilian government blocked X, formerly Twitter, and threatened to fine its citizens $8,900 per day if they use it. Brazil, the world's sixth largest nation by population, now joins North Korea, China, and Iran in the list of countries that have banned X. It is the 12th largest economy in the world and the superpower of the global South. It doesn’t matter whether or not you care about Brazil. Its totalitarianism is at risk of spreading around the world. Yet neither President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, nor anyone else in the US government has formally denounced the censorship. That’s probably because Biden, Harris, and Democrats not only support the censorship but have also been directly funding it. Of course, there is authentic demand for censorship from within Brazil, and it is ultimately up to the Brazilian people to reverse the nation’s descent into totalitarianism. Brazil’s powerful government-funded news media corporations have been urging censorship, which benefits President Lula’s ruling Workers’ Party. It’s up to Senate President Rodrigo Pacheco to impeach the Supreme Court Justice turned dictator, Alexandre de Moraes. At the same time, the Biden administration and Democrats have played an influential role in instigating censorship in Brazil. The FBI went to Brazil and gave its Supreme Court justices advice on how to censor its population. The US government has been funding many of the NGOs in Brazil that have demanded censorship since the election of a populist president there in 2018. And when I testified before Congress in May of this year, the Democrats on the committee and their witness defended Brazil’s censorship. And Pacheco yesterday affirmed his support for Moraes. After the election of populist president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, the US government funded pro-censorship organizations that demanded censorship. Moraes yesterday openly defended censorship to prevent “extremist populist groups” from coming to power. As United States Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr noted yesterday, that’s a direct violation of the Brazilian constitution, which explicitly protects political speech. As such, the totalitarian takeover of Brazil is a model for what the Democrats and the legacy news media want for the whole world. Pro-censorship scholars at Stanford and Harvard, Democrats in Congress, and the US news media have long recognized that the First Amendment is an obstacle to their plans. And so they have supported censorship efforts by nations with weaker free speech protections, like Brazil, Britain, Australia, and the European Union, to censor and even block X. It’s important that we fight back. We need to show our support for free speech. I urge my Brazilian friends to stay on the platform. Everyone knows that it would be extremely difficult for Moraes to enforce his insane decree, much less fairly and equally. Proof of this comes from the fact that the Brazilian government and the ruling Workers’ Party are still using X, which means they are also using VPNs to evade their own ban. Brazil is thus not just a dictatorship but a lawless one. Its leaders are behaving like the hypocritical pig leaders in George Orwell’s Animal Farm. And independent Brazilian politicians including Senator Eduardo Girão, Congressman Marcel Van Hattam, and Vice Governor of Minas Gerais, Mateus Simões are all resisting the ban and posting on X. “I never imagined myself practicing and propagating civil disobedience,” said Simões, “but censorship cannot be tolerated, ever.” If you’re not already a premium subscriber to X, please consider becoming one. If you can do more, please consider subscribing to Public. And if you can do even more than that, please make a tax-deductible donation to the free speech movement here: https://www.civilizationworks.org/donate Biden and Harris and other political leaders must denounce what is happening. It’s incredible that the only US government official to criticize Brazil’s dictators is the FCC’s Brendan Carr. Congress must hold hearings. People around the world should recognize Brazil’s banning of X as an attack on free speech everywhere. Everyone is at greater risk of totalitarianism when major countries like Brazil succumb to it. The good news is that the whole world is watching and many in the legacy news media in Brazil are denouncing the government’s ban on X. It’s not too late to turn things around. The world took a giant leap toward dystopia yesterday. But a worldwide free speech movement can pull Brazil back. It’s time to make 1984 and Animal Farm fiction again.