While President Donald Trump was tightening the sphincters of dictators and fascists around the world in recent days, you may not have noticed that last week the attorney general of Washington state threatened independent journalists for continuing to investigate Somali daycare centers.
In a statement on the X platform, Attorney General Nick Brown warned independent reporters that if they don’t stop covering the Somali daycare fraud situation, his office might charge them with a hate crime. Because he truly cares about the fictional kids in those centers, right?
My office has received outreach from members of the Somali community after reports of home-based daycare providers being harassed and accused of fraud with little to no fact-checking.
— Attorney General Nick Brown (@AGOWA) December 31, 2025
We are in touch with the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families regarding the claims…
More to the point, he said, “My office has received outreach from members of the Somali community after reports of home-based daycare providers being harassed and accused of fraud with little to no fact-checking. We are in touch with the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families regarding the claims being pushed online and the harassment reported by daycare providers.”
This just scratches the surface. Our own Victoria Taft covered the state’s efforts to bury the daycare fraud story at length. She reported: “Washington state officials have begun a sweeping and alarming effort to stop any reporting about potential fraud by Somali daycare center owners — or any owners — by scrubbing public information about these state-licensed daycare facilities from state records. Worse, a proposed bill in the new legislative session would prevent ‘investigative journalists or media from checking into daycare fraud in Washington state’ under a ‘daycare secrecy bill,’ as one government watchdog put it."
Based on Victoria’s reporting and other reports, while all eyes are on Minnesota, it looks Washington state is in an even bigger panic. I wonder why.
Censorship Across the Pond
Now, let’s turn to the European Union (EU), where censorship is a favorite activity. On Dec. 24, 2025, the New York Times reported on the plight of a handful of innocent tyrannical censors at the hands of "mean orange man." How the Times actually framed it in the headline says just about all you need to know: “They Seek to Curb Online Hate. The U.S. Accuses Them of Censorship.” A more accurate headline would be: “Trump Institutes Travel Ban on Some of the Most Despicable Censors in the World.”
According to the Times’ reporting, the Trump administration barred five European free-speech deniers from entering the U.S. for what the administration alleges is the “online censorship of Americans.”
he five are Thierry Breton, former European Commissioner for Internal Market (France) and key architect of the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA); Imran Ahmed, British chief executive officer of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH); Clare Melford, co‑founder and chief executive of the Global Disinformation Index (GDI); Anna‑Lena von Hodenberg, executive director and co‑CEO of the German NGO HateAid; and Josephine Ballon, co‑chief executive officer of HateAid (Germany).
In a statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained why they are not welcome in the United States. He said the five “have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize, and suppress American viewpoints they oppose. These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states—in each case targeting American speakers and American companies.”
This marks an escalation of tensions between the U.S. and the EU over the increased pressure the latter is placing on the major social media platforms to censor users, particularly Americans. In the EU’s censorship crosshairs are the X platform, and Facebook and Instagram, both of which are owned by Meta.
The Trump administration decided that the mere presence of the five individuals in the U.S. would have “potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences” for America. And so, the State Department is imposing visa restrictions on these “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but these travel bans come on the heels of the EU imposing its first penalty under the Digital Services Act in December, when it fined the X platform $140 million for what it described as practices that were misleading and that did not allow researchers access to internal processes. X owner Elon Musk says that’s bunk and that the penalty is really just because he won’t cave to the EU’s censorship demands.
These are Cold War-level behaviors. Back when the USSR was a thing, U.S. executive administrations would routinely use travel bans to send a message any time they felt the Soviets crossed a line. Given the Orwellian nature of today’s EU, it now seems to be asking for the old Soviet treatment from the White House.
German journalist Pauline Voss wrote about this and a related free speech story for Michael Shellenberger's Substack: “The story is important for American audiences, both because what’s happened in Europe is a warning for what could happen in the United States, and the Trump administration’s actions have intensified the conflict between the U.S. and Europe.”
I am very grateful that @shellenberger publishes my investigation on HateAid and how this organization helped to create the german censorship complex. Read the full article here:https://t.co/WBrsxGlc2s
— Pauline Voss (@Pauline__Voss) December 26, 2025
The main thrust of Voss’s piece details how leftists in the German government used an NGO to censor their enemies and then tried to lie about it: “In June of (2025), the government made HateAid a ‘Trusted Flagger,’ under the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA), which authorizes censorship. The Trusted Flagger status gives the organization the right to have its reports prioritized by social media platforms and forces operators to act quickly when HateAid flags comments. HateAid effectively becomes a kind of online sheriff.”
Voss reported that, while slow and persistent, HateAid has effectively shaped the discourse on sanctioned speech in Germany – what will be permitted and what will not. She wrote that all of this has emboldened politicians “who believe they have the right to crack down on unwelcome opinions. ‘Free speech needs boundaries,’ said Ballon, HateAid’s CEO. ‘Without boundaries, a tiny group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything that they want, while everyone else is scared and intimidated.’”
Ignore that last part about people being “scared and intimidated” by free speech. That’s a conditioning term used to lull you into assuming that freedom of speech is scary and intimidating for the public. We all know it’s quite the opposite.
Critics of HateAid say it skirted the more obvious government form of censorship in a very complex way. First, it would pressure advertisers not to advertise on certain platforms over “brand safety” issues. If HateAid deemd some speech “hate,” “misinformation,” or “unsafe,” and you allowed it on your platform, the NGO would campaign against you to your own advertisers and potential advertisers, along with ad agencies and rating firms.
HateAid appears to have worked closely with social platforms and regulators on reporting and enforcement workflows under Germany’s NetzDG and now EU frameworks. What this means is that HateAid helps give NGOs “priority escalation paths” regular users don’t have access to, which allow for faster takedowns of content and accounts it targets.
HateAid offers “legal assistance” to platform users who feel unsafe, which really means that its legal arm provides the threat of coordinated legal action against platforms that don’t bend the knee to them on certain censorship requests. The end game here is not just to get the platform to censor content that may have already been online, but to train the platforms to self-censor — to preemptively remove certain content if HateAid decides it knows what’s best for them.”
HateAid presents itself as a watchdog and a public servant when in reality it’s an aggressive and merciless censor of online content and targeted users.
All of this is a reminder that the people who want to take away your freedoms and force you to live under the tyranny of the woke left are still here. They continue to work in the shadows, waiting for the day when the U.S. doesn’t have as strong an advocate for free speech in the White House. They're playing the long game, and so must we.
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