Letter From The President

July 14, 2026

To our American supporters, Happy Independence Day!

The United States has passed 250 years since its unprecedented founding. To be an American means we carry both the privilege and the responsibility to lead on what ourWestminster Declaration rests on: open discourse is the central pillar of a free society.

But periods of expanding liberty, symbolized above all by 1776, when a new country placed speech before the state in its founding charter, give way to periods in which elites attempt to reassert control.

Westminster Free Speech Forum 2026

The Westminster Free Speech Forum returned in June for its fourth and largest year, growing from 60 to 100 participants, from 15 to 20 countries represented, and culminating in CW's first-ever gala award dinner, bringing together more than 100 guests from around the world. 

CW's yearlong project to document and expose Europe's Censorship Industrial Complex was the starting point for this year's Forum. Participants told us the European Commission continues to aggressively pursue censorship, particularly of X, and especially ahead of national elections across Europe. This pressure campaign is not new and is not limited to European borders — the House Judiciary Committee documented in February that since 2020, the Commission has held more than 100 closed-door meetings with major American platforms, including X, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube, pressing them to revise their content moderation policies. In other words: the European Commission has spent five years pressuring American tech companies to censor American speech, and what we heard in Westminster is that the campaign is intensifying.

The threat to free speech from Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and beyond is not receding.

Hence, our strategy of vigilance, including through reporting, communications, and in-person meetings, remains essential to continue. 

Projects already in motion from this year's Forum include the Forum's first public events, held in European capitals, where elected leaders will challenge the censorship regime head-on; a new international declaration taking aim at the next frontier of speech control; the first annual ranking of censorship across Western nations; and another major investigation into Brazil. More on each as it becomes public, with several announcements coming this fall.

On stage at the gala, I presented the first-ever Westminster Free Speech Courage Awards to three of our Brazilian allies: Eli Vieira and David Ágape of FSU Brazil, and Congressman Marcel van Hattem. Each has done extraordinary work exposing censorship in Brazil at real personal and professional risk. The Westminster Free Speech Forum not only exists as a lasting strategic hub for the fight against global censorship, but also as a place to recognize individuals who have shown relentless commitment and bravery in the fight. We look forward to growing this tradition in the years to come.

The Censorship Files Documentary

At the gala, we screened a seven-minute preview of our forthcoming documentary, The Censorship Files. The room held the world's leading investigators, policymakers, attorneys, and advocates in the fight against censorship — the people who know this story best. Their verdict: this film must be finished, and it must be seen.

Matt Taibbi and I have completed filming. What remains is post-production, and we are in the final stretch of raising the funds to do it.

The Westminster room saw seven minutes. Help us give the world the rest.

I had the opportunity in June to present in London as the keynote speaker at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship Conference (ARC), speaking on the idea at the bedrock of Civilization Works’ mission: to defend the pillars of civilization. 

The keynote tackled a question Alex Gutentag, CW’s Director of Research, and I have spent over three years investigating, one that sits at the heart of everything CW does: if most people in the West still favor civilization and its pillars, how do anti-civilizational policies keep advancing? The answer is that their architects have built elaborate dream worlds — narratives that misdescribe reality and blame civilization itself for the harms their own policies create.

The solution? Make clear the harms that anti-civilization policies cause, and show how they link together in a single decivilizing project.

That is exactly what our next major project is built to do.

CW’s New Blueprint

CW staff will unpack our research in a major project this fall.

We will create a database built to correct the historical memory and record on the top civilization-critical issues, encompassing CW's core program areas while expanding into new territory. 

We will map the machine — and we will put faces to its costs: like sterilized detransitioners, recovering homeless addicts, and young people who overcame their climate anxiety. This blueprint will shape public understanding and serve as the platform for our work over the next decade. More to come.

250 years in, the American commitment to free speech is still the exception, not the rule. Most of the world's governments, including our closest allies in Europe, are moving the other way. Keeping that commitment alive, at home and abroad, is the work. Join us.

Michael