We can be certain that they want to censor us because they always want to censor us, regardless of who is in power, because censorship gives them control over us. They won’t admit that they are trying to “censor” us. No censor admits that he or she is engaging in censorship, but that is exactly what they are aiming to do. Sayer Ji connects the dots for us:

Si’s post is actually a long thread of posts (and this article). Here are his first four posts:

The world is being flooded with warnings that AI could destroy humanity.

But the panic itself is creating something just as consequential:

A justification for controlling the systems that will increasingly shape what billions of people can know, say, and even think.

The first censorship regime was easy to recognize.

Your post disappeared.
Your account was shadowbanned.
Your video was labeled.
Your reach was throttled.

The next one may be almost invisible.
Because it won’t necessarily suppress what you say.
It may help compose what you say before you say it.
Think about what has changed.
Search once gave you competing links.
Now AI gives you one synthesized answer.
Autocomplete once finished a word.

Now AI drafts your email, summarizes your meeting, answers your child’s questions,

Sometimes we utter streams of words to report what we actually perceive or believe. Other times we utter streams of less-than-true words to signal loyalty to a tribe. Could someone please invent a hi-tech phone app help us? The app would have two lights:
Green: the person is sincerely trying to describe the world as it is.
Red: The statement is uttered regardless of truth value primarily to stay in good standing with a tribe.

As Jonathon Haidt wrote:

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

We’re never going to get rid of the human tendency to say false things in order to please their tribe. This goes way way back, including a thing that I’ve learned in Catholic school: a virgin can give birth. People look at you with confusion and glazed eyes when you ask them (as I really did in Catholic school): “I’m having trouble believing that. That seems like nonsense.” But then they utter it again and again every Sunday. But even if we can’t get rid of tribal statements that parade as truth statements, can someone please (I’m uttering this tongue in cheek) invent a device so we can clearly in immediately get some guidance when the tribal statement looks like a …

What are the facts? We’re these “modern day lynchings,” as claimed in the Pressley letter? The facts don’t matter for AOC, Pressley and many of their peers. As of this post, Nearly 60 House Democrats have co-signed. Pressley’s office says she led 59 colleagues on the letter to AG Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel. That is Pressley plus those co-signers — about 60 members total. Every named signer is a Democrat (including Delegates Eleanor Holmes Norton and Stacey Plaskett).

A few dats ago, Elon Musk asked Grok to do a fact check:

Today I asked Grok to fact-check AOC’s claim again:

What does not check out
Lynching is murder by hanging (or other violence) as racial terror, typically by a mob or with racial motive. Official investigations have not found that pattern in these cases.

Across the high-profile 2025–26 list:

Most were ruled suicides by police and medical examiners, with no evidence of another person involved. That includes Kyle Bassinga (Cobb County, GA: no indicators anyone else was present), Juliana Nzita (Charlotte: no defensive wounds, no assault, case closed as suicide), To’Nea Miller (Miami-Dade: apparent suicide), Jerard Jackson (Michigan State Police: suicide, no foul play), Justice James (Albany, GA: foul play ruled out / suicide), Trey Reed at Delta State (MS state medical examiner: hanging, suicide; 2025 but constantly bundled in), Tory Medley (Brookfield, WI: preliminary

This action by the Arkansas governor is not surprising given that Arkansas has a wide-ranging anti-BDS statute that prohibits state entities from contracting with private companies unless the company certifies that it “is not currently engaged in, and agrees for the duration of the contract not to engage in, a boycott of Israel. In 2022, nine judges of the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals sitting en banc upheld that statute. I almost fell out of my chair reading it. The majority concluded no free speech problem here! If you are having a hard time wrapping your head around this decision, read the dissent by Judge Jane Kelly, which IMO should have been the unanimous majority opinion.

What else are states up to? Greenwald also reports on Florida:

Hayek employed economics to investigate the mind of man, using the knowledge he had gained to unveil the totalitarian nature of socialism and to explain how it inevitably leads to ‘serfdom’. His greatest contribution lay in the discovery of a simple yet profound truth: man does not and cannot know everything, and when he acts as if he does, disaster follows. He recognised that socialism, the collectivist state, and planned economies represent the ultimate form of hubris, for those who plan them attempt – with insufficient knowledge – to redesign the nature of man. In so doing, would-be planners arrogantly ignore traditions that embody the wisdom of generations; impetuously disregard customs whose purpose they do not understand; and blithely confuse the law written on the hearts of men – which they cannot change – with administrative rules that they can alter at whim. For Hayek, such presumption was not only a ‘fatal conceit’, but also ‘the road to serfdom’.

From Edwin Feulner, Jr.’s Forward to Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom.”…