Michael Shellenberger describes how political figures and media outlets in the USA use labels like “far right” and “fascist” to dehumanise opponents and justify censorship.
A similar “playbook” is currently being tested in Europe, where governments have used legal actions, home raids and ballot exclusions to suppress political dissent and speech.
Shellenberger warns that these European trends, including pressure on social media platforms to moderate content, represent a growing threat to free speech that is intended to be imported to the United States.
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First They Dehumanise You, and Then They Silence You
By Michael Shellenberger, via email on 8 September 2026
Hillary Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Joe Biden said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” – while his own Justice Department was trying to incarcerate Trump. Anderson Cooper asked Kamala Harris whether Trump was a fascist, and she answered, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”
The label was never just a label. Twitter banned Trump in January 2021 even though, as I discovered reporting on the Twitter Files, the company had concluded he did not violate its rules. Prosecutors then indicted him. A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts.
Meanwhile, AP [Associated Press] calls the socialist mayor of New York not “far left” but rather “the democratic socialist leader of America’s largest city.”
In the five months after Trump’s inauguration last year, the networks used “far right” and similar labels 1,222 times. They used “far left” 86 times. Another analysis of more than 30 million articles found that American and British media use right-wing extremism labels more than three times as often as left-wing ones.
If you think this ended with the 2024 election, look at what the same people are doing in Europe, because that is the playbook they intend to bring back here [to the USA].
A German court sentenced a journalist to seven months in prison for a satirical image of the interior minister. Prosecutors raided the home of a pensioner who called the vice chancellor an idiot in a meme. Police carried out 46 home searches in a single day for online speech.
Election officials strike opposition candidates from ballots. A Romanian court annulled a presidential election. French judges banned Marine Le Pen from office and a court ordered her to wear an ankle monitor. German bureaucrats kept a local political candidate off the ballot for his interpretation of “Lord of the Rings.”
What they do over there matters over here. The European Commission fined X [Twiter] €120 million after, in the words of the House Judiciary Committee, it “successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules.” Global means you.
“In Germany, if you criticise the government, strangely, the Secret Service says you are criticising the state itself, the institutions,” Pauline Voss, a politics reporter for the German outlet NIUS, told me on Monday. “But they say, ‘We are the state, we are the institutions, and you are not allowed to criticise us’.”
Voss described the Government’s “Meldestellen,” where “people can come and say, ‘Somebody said this or that’, and then they write it into a list, and even if it’s not criminal, then they take it in a list of things you are not allowed to say.”
That’s what the Stasi did.
Every target in this story wears the same label the media put on Americans, even though even the left-wing scholars who study fascism say the label is false. Roger Griffin, whose definition of fascism the field “broadly adopted,” says “none of the leaders of illiberal democracies are actually fascist.”
“The left doesn’t stop,” Voss told me. “There’s no idea of looking at what they’ve done and then maybe learning from that and noticing, ‘Okay, we made them stronger. Maybe we should stop with all of that’.”
Elon Musk shared yesterday’s story. That is the reach that subscribers make possible, and it is why we do this work. We broke the Twitter Files. We exposed the Censorship Industrial Complex. This week we got the German story from a reporter on the ground within a day of the vote, and we traced the “far right” label back 200 years to show how a word became a weapon. No advertiser pays for that. No foundation pays for that. Our paying subscribers do.
They labelled you first. They are testing the rest of it in Europe. Public exists to tell you what they are doing before they do it here. Please upgrade to a paid subscription [on Substack] today.
About the Author
Michael Shellenberger is an American author, environmental policy writer and investigative journalist. He is the founder of the Public newsletter on Substack and is the C.B.R. Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech at the University of Austin. He is also the author of several books, including ‘Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All’ (2020), ‘San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities’ (2021) and ‘The Left’s War on Reality’ (due to be released in January 2027). You can follow him on Twitter (now X) HERE.
Featured image taken from ‘Britain’s free speech shame I’ve seen liberty on trial’, Unherd, 2 October 2025
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