Letter From The President

September 18, 2026

On September 6th, Germany’s AfD (Alternative for Germany) party won a historic victory in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. Despite being labelled “far-right extremist” by the established parties, AfD has doubled its support across Germany, driven in part by an economy the establishment wrecked with their energy decisions.

But above all, the victory is what happens when censorship lifts. Germany’s 2017 Network Enforcement Act required social networks to delete posts that violated German hate speech law within 24 hours or face fines of up to $57 million. By 2023, only 40% of Germans told pollsters that people in Germany can express their political opinions freely. 

That changed when Elon Musk bought Twitter: Germans could finally speak freely and learn what was actually happening in their country, including the higher crime rates that came with mass migration.

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said on the victory, “We are all deeply shocked,” before declaring that, no, it was the AfD that had “seized” power, as though it had staged a coup rather than receiving twice as many votes as his own party.

In the establishment’s telling, citizens aren't voting to close their borders because migrants commit crimes, undercut working-class wages, and strain the welfare state. They're voting that way because Elon Musk's algorithm made them angry, racist, and "far right" — a label meant to paint these parties as fascist and undemocratic, even as they win election after election, and even as scholars of fascism say the term doesn’t apply. As Alex Gutentag and I argue in our upcoming book, The Left's War on Reality, this is the logic of a dream world, one whose adherents can't admit their own failure, so they invent whatever they need to keep the voters wrong.

And there is a great deal to deny. When these actors finally reckon with what their policies produced — not just mass censorship, but the sterilization of children, the deaths of mentally ill addicts, the collapse of public education — they will be horrified. 

Instead, the censors are clamping down. They can’t win the argument, so they are moving to end it.

The Global Crackdown

The US lit the fuse on the global populist revolt, handing the public square back to the public. Demands for censorship fell dramatically over the last 18 months. Now, demands are surging back. In a single week in August, four powerful figures — from the US to the UK to the EU — said they want governments to control your social media feeds.

In early September, Australia’s Albanese government introduced draft legislation that would let the government impose sweeping censorship on American social media platforms, including X, and perhaps even on Americans, with fines up to $109.2 million for practically any reason whatsoever, with the transparent intention of silencing rising public opposition to mass migration.

The minister, Anika Wells, said, “There is a global reckoning coming for big tech. And it started in Australia.” The bill came ten days after Labor lost a seat it held by 11.5% to One Nation, the party running against mass migration, and nine months after an Islamic State attack killed 15 people at Bondi Beach.
As Australian Liberal Senator Alex Antic put it, “The reality here is that the online environment, including platforms like X, has finally given Australians the ability to communicate without fear of censorship, and the political establishment doesn’t like it. The Bill will chill free expression for Australians who are increasingly skeptical of institutional narratives on culture and politics.”

Again, the government’s answer to angry voters is to silence them. From country to country, censorship continues:

• Britain has made over 62,000 arrests over the last five years for "communications offences," which have included doing nothing more than watching a TikTok video.

• French President Emmanuel Macron wants to shut down X and an independent TV network. In response, a former French Supreme Court justice is warning that Macron may impose sweeping censorship ahead of next year's presidential election.

• Alexandre de Moraes, the Brazilian Supreme Court Justice who oversaw sweeping, illegal censorship of his political enemies — and nearly shut down X — created a blacklist of government workers that even included another Supreme Court justice, new documents reveal. 

• And our recent continuation of CW’s Twitter Files Brazil reveals Moraes was allegedly protecting one of the most corrupt bankers in Brazilian history, meaning the same censorship machine that silenced Bolsonaro’s movement also protected the corruption of the people running it. President Trump could now re-impose sanctions on Moraes based on the historically massive bank fraud.

Their Rules, Your Speech

The biggest threat to free speech in the US still comes from outside its borders. The people who built the censorship apparatus in the United States did not give up when we exposed them. They moved overseas. Foreign governments are building the tools to censor what Americans say on American platforms. If they succeed abroad, the model comes home. 

Civilization Works exists to stop them. Four years ago, we broke the Twitter Files. Today we know exactly how the censors operate — who they are, how they coordinate, and where they've gone. And free speech has two homes it didn't have then: X and Substack.

Here's how the work fits together. Our sister company, Public News, works within the news cycle — we had the AfD victory from a reporter in Germany within a day of the vote. CW then maps that story onto the larger machine, through investigations, documentaries, movement building, and on-the-ground testimony. In November 2024, I flew to Australia to brief MPs in Canberra and speak in Sydney against the last Australian censorship bill. Two days after I spoke, the government withdrew it.

That's the work: not just breaking the story, but dismantling the machine behind it, and rebuilding a pro-civilizational West in its place.

Help Fuel CW’s Next Chapter

CW is at an inflection point. Your support is what lets us move the moment the ground shifts, at home and abroad, while slower institutions are still drafting their statements. It staffs rigorous researchers and investigators across our program areas. It funds the partnerships with reporters overseas that turn a local story into a global one. And it lets us hire the people who will grow CW from an organization into a movement.

That growth is already underway: we're hiring a Senior Vice President of Development to lead our fundraising and drive concrete wins on the civilizational pillars we defend. Reporting directly to Michael Shellenberger, this senior leader will own our project-based fundraising strategy end to end, from identifying prospects to closing major gifts to deepening our relationships with existing donors. Funding this role is one of the highest-leverage gifts you can make; every dollar toward this hire is a dollar that returns many times over in support for our investigators and reporting.

The censors are regrouping. So are we. Join us.

Michael