Self-styled free speech warrior Elon Musk’s X (Twitter) banned me after I published a copy of the Donald Trump campaign’s JD Vance research dossier. X says that I’ve been suspended for “violating our rules against posting private information,” citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier. First, I never published any private information on X. I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.

On the one hand, this is a very funny end to my Twitter journey. On the other hand, I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public.

This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety. Not a single media organization was willing to publish a document that would have been a no-brainer during or prior to the heyday of Edward Snowden’s disclosures. That illustrates the dramatic shift in attitudes about what the news media thinks the public should know, and the role the mainstream plays in steadily ceding that territory to the national security threat machine. Media’s job, I believe, is to push back against these various forms of censorship. I’ll keep doing that here on this newsletter, where you can find me going forward. If you agree with what I laid out, I hope you’ll subscribe.