It is no doubt that throughout the years and throughout the world, not a soul can resist the overwhelmingly jubilant tune of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy." But why? What does it mean for a composer to strike such a universal chord? Most people today think that we can separate the artist from his creations, as they praise degenerates like Richard Wagner while neglecting the fact that he was a raging anti-Semite. Ludwig van Beethoven on the other hand was of a completely different character, and that can be heard in his music. In this week's Midwest Meeting, David Shavin, musician, researcher, and editor at EIR, presented Beethoven and his unrelenting commitment to the ideals of the newly founded American Republic, as well as his passion to bring that same love of mankind to a Europe utterly dominated by oligarchism.

Megan Dobrodt, President of the Schiller Institute in the US, was the guest speaker on this week's Fireside Chat. She presented the choice before us in the case of Afghanistan, but considered through the eyes of scientists James Dwight Dana and Vladimir Vernadsky. It is necessary to first discuss the nature of mankind if we wish to properly discuss how to create a lasting policy of peace.

The upcoming events of the Schiller Institute will make clear that there is no need for humanity to suffer from the accelerating breakdown crisis of civilization. On July 24, we will present an in depth dialogue, "There Is No Climate Emergency;" on July 31, a conference on the opportunity to use the withdrawal of U.S.-NATO troops from Afghanistan to move out of the era of endless wars, into cooperation based on mutual benefit; and on August 14, what are the lessons of Lyndon LaRouche's forecast of the end of the Bretton Woods system, on August 15, 1971, and of the advances he made in physical economy to overcome the succession of increasingly bad policy decisions made after Nixon's move. In introducing this arc of events, Helga Zepp-LaRouche spoke of the disastrous flooding in western Germany, which resulted from a lack of preparedness and a failure to invest in infrastructure — not so different from the lack of preparedness when it came to dealing with the COVID pandemic. Instead of compounding the effects of these crises by making more bad policy decisions, let us learn from the development of the science of physical economy by Lyndon LaRouche, so we can move from these deadly events into a new era of peaceful collaboration and development.

To win this fight, citizens of all nations must give up the mentality of victims, and get rid of the belief that those oppressing mankind are all-powerful! The Great Reset and the Green New Deal can be defeated, provided we bring the U.S. into an alliance with other sovereign nations which oppose them, starting with Russia and China. To those of you who fought against the regime change operation against President Trump -- the same networks of the British and U.S. "Deep State" which ran Russiagate are behind the smears and attacks on Putin and Xi! Don't fall for their divide-and-conquer psy-ops! Register here for our online conference, Sat., July 24, "There Is No Climate Emergency" harleysch@gmail.com

Something may be developing in Afghanistan, involving forces from the United States, Russia, China, Pakistan, and several nations of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. You can tell, because everything in the power of British “Intelligence” is being done to force Biden to denounce China and Xi Jinping, now through re-running “RussiaGate” as “the Chinese hacked Microsoft.” The United States, the British declare, must not be allowed to do with China what it has just done with Russia through person-to-person talks between the heads of state. American representatives, however, have been involved in high-level discussions whose prospects for changing disastrous, decades-long failed policy are as promising as our efforts, and those of our allies, will make them. All concentration must be forced in the direction of undermining the axioms of Anglo-American failure that have characterized the past 20 years, since the still-unexplained events of 9/11, and the derived “Responsibility To Protect” preventive war policies—practices declared “crimes against humanity” at Nuremberg in 1949, policies that were also instigated, as in 2002-2003 through British Intelligence’s “dodgy dossier.”The international strategic deployment which is the subject of the three-movement organizing process of the next month, indicated by the “date-markers” July 24, July 31, and August 14, requires what Lyndon LaRouche referred to as “visualizing the complex domain.” In the spirit of “listening to the wise words of Lyndon LaRouche,” it were advisable to consult his conception of creativity in music in order to understand how to better inform what we are actually trying to do in these next 30 days. The following is from a September 14,1995, memo, “Comment On Rene Sigerson’s Memo On Opus 131.” “How Musical Ideas Become “The relevant special significance of the Op. 131, is that its organization, as a whole, around transitions, forces the musician to attend to the reality, that the idea of the composition as a whole, is nothing other than a platonic ‘One,’ for which the ordering of the ‘Many’ according to nothing but a constant notion of change is the crucial feature of the development. Compare this with the case of our now-much-cited case of the Eratosthenes’ estimate of the curvature of the earth. It is the manifest inconsistency among a series of astronomical observations, which is the experiential referent for Eratosthenes’ idea of the curvature of the earth. It is the process of reducing that series of errors to a notion of ordered change, which leads to the idea of curvature. So in a musical developmental process, it is the adducing of the existence of an ordering principle which subsumes a series of developmentally ordered changes, which implies the idea of the composition as a whole. “Thus, if one states the formal expression of the developmental ordering of the entirety of the Opus 131, the idea of the composition as a whole is implicitly stated as the platonic idea of a unified process of Becoming. This implies the corresponding attempt to generate the notion of a Good.” Leibniz’s idea of the Good in politics, an idea which was the bedrock of the American Revolution’s “the pursuit of Happiness,” is what the Schiller Institute, as another form of expression of the intent of the LaRouche’s Presidential campaigns, is daring to promulgate through proposals like the present Afghanistan initiative that we have suddenly, without preparation or warning, “so nobly advanced.” The Good always poses the greatest threat to the self-doomed imperialists of several empires, most emphatically the British. The “arc” of our intervention including its July 24, July 31 and August 14 inflection points, is a single process of change, a “One,” intended to secure the establishment of an international agreement, among Russia, China, The United States, and India, to spearhead the successful and timely creation of a world health platform as the basis for the eradication of poverty and pandemic disease planet-wide. That proposal, not “zero carbon emissions,” is a worthwhile goal for 2030-2040. It should be adopted by those nations, as China adopted the ending of poverty for itself, and accomplished it; but, now, given to the world as the mission for Earth’s next generation (next 25 years.) Earth’s next 50 years as discussed in the eponymous work of Lyndon LaRouche, is the “envelope,” as well as the “pedal point” for the discussions of the next month, particularly that of August 14-15. Given “the march of folly” we see displayed once again in the completely predictable “resurgence” of the coronavirus pandemic, as well as in the foolish “war maneuvers and war games” against Russia and China, that health platform may be the only available pathway to avoid the self-immolation of trans-Atlantic civilization which the tragic, “Wagnerian” performance of many nations’ present leadership-circles foreshadows. Afghanistan has been proposed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche as the theater of battle upon which we must intervene for the adoption of that “reversal of fortune.” We can be the non-tragic exception to the rulers. We are capable of changing the axiomatic, compulsive doom. Afghanistan is only the graveyard for empires; for patriots and world citizens, it can be the land of a thousand cities, and the New Silk Road just as it once was, but better. What we propose may be opposite to every instinct of the world’s ruling bodies of the past half-century, but it is natural to those who consider humanity’s General Welfare to be the first and only truly human unit of measurement of progress. The too-long-deferred dream of FDR, Sukharno, Nkrumah, Nehru, JFK, Pope Paul VI, Martin Luther King, and many others, the dream of Hamilton’s First and Lincoln’s Second American Revolution, is achievable, if we choose to visualize it as Beethoven and LaRouche do.

Hussein Askary of the Schiller Institute paints a picture of a possible future for Afghanistan that is dominated by economic development and peaceful relations both internally and with neighboring nations, which should guide our actions in relation to Afghanistan today. As Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated on July 10, "after the hasty withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from Afghanistan, this country has become, for the moment but likely not for long, the theater of world history...In Afghanistan, it holds true more than anywhere else in the world: The new name for peace is development!"

A sign at an organizing table in New Jersey manned by The LaRouche Organization yesterday posed these alternatives for Afghanistan, and by implication for the world: “Terror, War and Drugs; or Peace Through Development.” The first option would have a devastating impact on every man, woman and child in the world, given the fact that a destabilized Afghanistan will continue as the source of 80% of the world’s opium and as a training ground for ISIS and al-Qaeda. The second option—by following the proposal offered by Lyndon LaRouche even before George Bush launched the war 20 years ago—would allow Afghanistan to end its history as the “graveyard of empires,” and to become the hub for an expanded New Silk Road, with rail lines connecting the landlocked countries of Central Asia to the ocean via a north-south rail line through Kabul and Pakistan, as well as east-west connections following the ancient Silk Road.LaRouche’s proposals began with the necessity that all the countries in the region—Russia, China, India, Pakistan, Iran, and the five Central Asian nations, meet and cooperate with the Afghanis to assure development, to the benefit of all, as the only means by which the terrorism and the drugs could be eliminated. There are now, over this past week, developments which convey the very real potential that this is possible. The U.S. military withdrawal after 20 years of useless, destructive, deadly warfare, has sparked actions by all of the regional nations, which held a series of meetings this week largely focused on the urgency of bringing real development to Afghanistan. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Foreign Ministers’ Council, which includes China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, as well as ten other nations as Observers or Dialogue Partners, met in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on July 13-14. At the center of the discussions, including the sideline discussions, was the idea that the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor could be extended, branching out from the rail line running from China through Pakistan to the Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea. From Islamabad, the branch would pass through Peshawar, the Khyber Pass, to Kabul, then onward north to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and on to the Eurasian Land-Bridge lines connecting China to Europe. This plan was launched in February in a meeting of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Uzbekistan, called the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor. This and other development plans were also on the table at a July 15-16 meeting in Tashkent of the “International Conference on Central and South Asia Regional Connectivity, Challenges and Opportunities.” Dilshod Saidjanov, an Uzbek spokesman, told India’s Asia News International (ANI): “Economic development is the way to make Afghanistan stronger and probably more peaceful. Everyone wants better development in Afghanistan.” Pakistan has proposed the establishment of an “SCO Development Bank,” to further generate credit for these development projects. Will the U.S. join these efforts, or allow the “war party” which dominates both U.S. political parties and the media to act against them, under the evil lie that they are simply another expression of China trying to “take over the world.” A sliver of hope that the U.S. will take the sane approach of cooperation in development was seen in a State Department release on July 16: “Announcing the U.S.-Afghanistan-Uzbekistan-Pakistan Quad Regional Support for Afghanistan-Peace Process and Post Settlement.” These are indeed the nations through which the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor would pass. The announcement states: that “the parties intend to cooperate to expand trade, build transit links, and strengthen business-to-business ties.” Such a shift in the now-normal U.S. policies of sanctions, wars and regime change subversion should be strongly encouraged. Next week’s issue of Executive Intelligence Review will contain a package on this critical moment in Afghanistan, a moment in which the fate of the entire world could be determined, for good or for ill. An international agreement to cooperate with Afghanistan and its neighbors to transform the region into a central hub for the global New Silk Road process would also serve as a model for ending other crisis spots, in the war-ruined nations of Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. This is the principle of the Schiller Institute’s “Coincidence of Opposites”—bringing seemingly intractable conflicts to an end by addressing the higher-ordered principle located in the common interests of all people, for peace through development. Such an optimistic approach may seem impossible, but the alternative is unthinkable. Humanity has risen up out of Dark Ages in the past, creating a Renaissance when nothing less will work. This moment must find a people with no less of the creative will required to build such a new Renaissance.

In response to reports that an Israeli firm is serving clients by embedding spyware in the mobile phones of their adversaries, Edward Snowden called for ending the "international spyware trade." And while the Biden administration called on its allies to join it in a campaign against alleged Chinese cyber warfare -- charges which, like its charges against Russia, are evidence-free -- it is considering monitoring private texts on SMS carriers to "deter misinformation"! Are you tired of the hypocrisy of this "brave new world"? Then join the Schiller Institute for online conferences on July 24 ("There Is No Climate Emergency"), July 31 ("Afghanistan at a Crossroads"), and August 14, which will take up Lyndon LaRouche's initiatives to overturn the City of London/Wall Street central bankers actions since August 15, 1971, when they created the global casino economy to protect the swindles of the floating exchange system.

The Schiller Institute is preparing a conference at the end of this month with experts who are passionate about Afghanistan’s prospects of becoming, not only a rapidly developing nation, but the pivot of economic development in South Asia, and even the catalyst in a change of relations among the major powers. Our conference will be aimed as a spark, with many nations already meeting in the Central Asian region to discuss next steps after the NATO withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan.The Schiller Institute’s meeting will be held at a true turning point of 21st Century history: The major powers and the regional neighbor countries alike need to eliminate terrorist threats and remove the scourge of Afghan heroin fed by decades of war; and this opens the possibility of development of healthcare and education, transport routes and power and water, with international cooperation in contributing capital goods. As Afghanistan’s ambassador to China, Javid Ahmad Qaem, expressed it in an interview with Global Times July 16, “The only place where they [China, India and the United States] could really cooperate, and at least there could be a starting point to cooperate between these rivals, if I can call them that, is Afghanistan.” The people of the United States and the European NATO members need this development more than Afghanistan does. As NATO forces have done to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya since the 1990s, so have we, in America and Europe, done to ourselves. Our industrial economies and our labor forces have been left to crumble and become impoverished while we trusted the endlessly deployed fighters and their spectacularly expensive equipment to make us “number one” in the world. We admired Wall Street speculating on decaying economic infrastructure until it has fallen apart. Only six months ago the United States electric grid could not keep scores of Americans from dying of cold in long blackouts, while millions of others huddled in misery during a freezing Polar Vortex. This past week Germany’s and Belgium’s flood control infrastructure was washed away in floods which have killed hundreds despite nearly a week of precise warning. America has done nothing for 25 years to counteract a steadily intensifying drought which is threatening to turn the West back into uninhabited desert. “Climate change” hysteria is not a policy to save the planet, but a threat to reduce the human race and push it back centuries in productive capacity. Between now and the meeting on Afghanistan’s development, the Schiller Institute on July 24 holds a combative conference with scientists, engineers and others to defeat the Green New Deal, stop power blackouts and prevent the wholesale shutdown of power supplies and industry. (“There Is No ‘Climate Emergency’—Apply the Science and Economics of Development To Stop Blackouts and Death”) The withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan is no setback if it is taken as an opportunity to make the contributions American technology can make to the progress of developing countries. Instead of tolerating think-tanks’ and Defense Secretaries’ talk about “winning” endless and fruitless wars, we can devote ourselves to the arts of peace against pandemic and famine, and rebuild our own economies into the bargain.

The doublespeak media leaders of the United States, New York Times and CNN for example, made clear yesterday their hope that hundreds of Germans will have died in the natural disaster to make it possible for Green Party co-leader Annalena Baerbock to rally and win the Chancellorship. The Times headline—“Germany Floods: Climate Change Moves to Center of Campaign as Toll Mounts”—is sufficient to give you the idea.The lead article in Neue Solidarität spoke instead to reality: “Gegen die Launen der Mutter Natur, hilfts nur der Ausbau der Infrastruktur!” (The Takedown of Infrastructure Helps the Moods of Mother Nature) That article says: "The worst flood to date in Central Europe, the so-called Magdalene flood in July 1342, occurred long before CO₂ levels rose in the atmosphere. At that time the water was in the cathedrals of Würzburg and Mainz, the cities on the Rhine, Main, Weser and Elbe were overrun by floods, and thousands of people were killed…. “The reconstruction of infrastructure must be used to rebuild the businesses hit by the floods, so that the people in the region can get back their jobs and thus their livelihoods. The goal must be that the people affected should be better off after the reconstruction than before the disaster…. “Whether such natural events, which are always to be expected, turn into catastrophes depends above all on whether people have created the necessary infrastructure in time to enable them to cope with them. We do not need a vague ‘climate protection,’ but rather concrete measures to protect people.” Touring the flood area, Chancellor Angela Merkel fell headlong into a torrent of climate hysteria, featuring the absurd statement, “The German language hardly knows any words for the devastation that has been caused here.” She might have tried Nachlässigkeit, German for “negligence.” The government apparently had meteorological warnings beginning July 12-13 that heavy rains were likely to cause serious flooding in tributaries of the Rhine-Meuse River systems, but the warnings were turned into public service bulletins largely through certain apps rather than all-points alerts. Large numbers of people did not evacuate, despite being in known danger of inundation. Moreover these tributary rivers are, from EIR reports, not dredged or canalized, nor are the dams on them maintained. But to Merkel, the storms’ force “had something to do with climate change. We have to hurry, we have to get faster in the fight against climate change.” So Europeans in the Rhine and Meuse watersheds cannot expect in this government’s “recovery” package, any improvements in the flood-control and water management infrastructure, but only faster bans on energy sources and faster increases in their electric bills. The floods in the Elbe River system in the East of the country in 2002 followed a full week of heavy rains, and were more devastating and much more widespread than these; they spread across Eastern Europe and even into Russia. Perhaps global warming became even more extreme by 2002 than it had been back in 2021, when there were already hardly any German words to describe it? The situation is exactly the same in the North American West, where a gradually intensifying drought condition has been known to be developing for 25 years, with no action ever initiated to build “great projects” of water transfer infrastructure from wet regions of the continent, nor to build power plants capable of desalination along the surrounding oceans and seas of water. Instead, “global warming” (now “climate change”) is pronounced the reason that nothing can be done but sacrifice to “save the planet.” Helga Zepp-LaRouche, federal chairwoman of the Civil Rights Movement Solidarity party in Germany, said that the European Union’s so-called climate-change recovery package “could only have been devised by people who have no interest in people, who do not care about the development of the developing sector, but who want to continue the colonialist system.” Mark Carney, the UN’s Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance and former Governor of the Bank of England, proposed buying CO₂ emission rights from developing countries — provided that they renounce economic development and the expansion of agriculture. There is already an agreement between Norway and Gabon, in which Gabon has committed itself to forgoing economic development of its rainforests — which cover 90% of the country’s area. For this they will get a ridiculous €150 million over ten years! Said Zepp-LaRouche: “I find that absolutely disgusting and I hope that the legitimate will of the majority of people in the world will prevail instead, to claim their right to development.”

"Man-made Climate Change" is NOT the cause of the catastrophic flooding in western Germany, despite the narrative in the mainstream media and coming from clueless leaders like Chancellor Merkel. There has been a monumental failure to dredge the tributary rivers, to upgrade the canal systems and to maintain dams, due to austerity policies and Green ideology, aka Fake Science. Given that there have been incidents of serious flooding before, why were no measures taken to prepare for the possibility of heavy rains? The same problem confronts the western states in the U.S., where no competent measures of water management or enhancement have taken place during the last 25 years of drought conditions. The problem is man-made idiocy, not climate change. Sign up for the Schiller Institute conference on July 24, "There Is No Climate Emergency", to learn what must be done.

July 17 -- How is it that a nation, whose leaders proudly assert their right to unilateral enforcement of a Rules-Based Order (RBO), based on their economic and military power, can get trapped into a series of unwinnable "endless wars"? Unless this question is answered, it is virtually certain that those leaders infected by this delusion will follow the same strategy responsible for the present wars, resulting in even more destructive wars, including a possible thermonuclear confrontation which could exterminate the human race.

Join us LIVE on Saturday at 2pm EDT, and register today for the July 24 Schiller Institute conference. It is essential to now end any respect for the assertion that there is a “climate emergency” which demands drastic reductions in human activity—agriculture, industry, power, and water use--to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. This is a lethal falsehood. The concept of ever-greater energy flux density—as put forward by statesman-economist Lyndon LaRouche, is essential for human progress. The drunken shift out of high-density electricity generation—coal, oil and nuclear--into low-energy dense, unreliable wind and solar, has reached the stage in the Trans-Atlantic of pending blackouts in the United States and Europe. The problem lies with the false axioms expressed 50 years ago in the destruction of the Bretton Woods financial system. Russia, China, India, and the United States must come to a set of agreements that promote scientific, technological, and medical progress throughout the world at unprecedented rates, if humanity is to knowingly survive the next decade. How that can be done is the subject of the July 24 assembly of the Schiller Institute

The United States is quite literally descending into fascism, with the creation of a new federal intelligence agency to engage in a domestic war on terror, government-directed censorship of speech in the public commons of today (social media), and comparisons by Biden between the present moment and the Civil War -- in which millions of Americans were engaged in literal military combat against each other. Reversing this descent into authoritarianism requires identifying the threat, of course. But it also requires an affirmative statement of what the mission of the United States should be. And perpetual opposition to China and Russia ain't it!As the American military departs Afghanistan, will American engineers and contractors play a useful role in planning and constructing infrastructure in that nation, as part of a global development policy?Will feisty American farmers, ranchers, citizens, and energy experts overturn the Green New Deal fraud and demand reliable energy for the future?The shared enemy of mankind is that oligarchical outlook and financial-intelligence-media power that seeks to destroy productivity through a new "green" religion while creating chaos and the threat of war through color revolutions and intelligence assessments painting the world's major powers as implacable enemies.Lyndon LaRouche spend half a century fighting to institute a just world economic system, based on the dignity of each human individual as made in the image of a living God, a system committed to the development of new platforms of infrastructure and productivity, unlocked through advancements in science and technology fostered by long-term investments in such frontier areas as space and nuclear fusion.Next weekend, on July 24, the Schiller Institute will hold an event addressing the absolute conflict between seeing the future in terms of "green" power sources -- which have been promoted with the intent of preventing development -- versus major investment in transportation, power, industry, and trade. And on August 14, the LaRouche Legacy Foundation will hold a seminar on the economic work of Lyndon LaRouche, on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Nixon's end of the Bretton Woods system, about which LaRouche achieved notoriety.From the standpoint of that future orientation, the Great Reset, the push for war with China and Russia, and the drive for fascism within the United States come together as a single goal of a financial oligarchy intent on preventing it.That oligarchy can be defeated, and a beautiful future can be created, if we make it happen.

During a press briefing on Thursday, Jen Psaki explained that the White House is coordinating with social media companies to stop "disinformation" about Covid-19. "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation," she said, matter-of-factly. But the White House is not just making general suggestions -- it is pressing for their enforcement. And this violates the First Amendment.She said that the White House expects the platforms to "measure and publicly share the impact of misinformation... This should be provided not just to researchers but to the public." She also stated that the White House has proposed "a robust enforcement strategy."She said that the administration is urging social media platforms to "promote quality information sources" over "low quality information."Pushing for action, she reminded that "It's important to take faster action against harmful posts. As you all know, information travels quite quickly on social media platforms sometimes that's not accurate." Joe Biden, asked on Friday for comment about Facebook's role in Covid, responded that because the only pandemic is now among the unvaccinated, "they [Facebook] are killing people." Glenn Greenwald slammed the government calls for censorship: "The Biden administration is telling Facebook which posts it regards as 'problematic' so that Facebook can remove them. This is the union of corporate and state power -- one of the classic hallmarks fo fascism -- that the people who spent 5 years babbling about fascism support." The White House is admitting that they're compiling lists of people who they claim are posting content they regard as "problematic" and that constitute "misinformation" and are demanding Facebook remove them. This is authoritarianism:https://t.co/gxrdUDblyS— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) July 15, 2021 While there is indeed an enormous amount of nonsense posted about Covid-19, one can ask whether banning discussion is even helpful. Given the absolute and complete discrediting of the media and expertariat generally, banning the discussion of a certain viewpoint may have the opposite effect! If a viewpoint cannot be publicly expressed on Twitter, then it cannot be met with thoughtful replies that encourage reflection (Although this is not the norm on Twitter, it does happen.) Some of the claims -- such as about VAERS figures -- are easily refuted. And the 180-degree turn on the Wuhan lab leak -- censored when Trump said it and now embraced to create a war with China -- hardly gives credibility to the would-be arbiters of truth!But more essentially, it is absolutely clear that if companies (whose private nature is much ballyhooed by censorship proponents) are taking actions due to pressure from the government, the First Amendment prohibition on limiting speech -- which applies to the government -- will apply to them as well! This not mere speculation. It comes from Supreme Court decisions:In a 1973 Supreme Court case, the Court held that Congress "may not induce, encourage, or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish." An article written by Glenn Greenwald in February -- on the occasion of social media CEOs being brought, yet again, to Congress to be scolded -- quotes an ACLU Director, Ben Wizner, "For the same reasons that the Constitution prohibits the government from dictating what information we can see and read (outside narrow limits), it also prohibits the government from using its immense authority to coerce private actors into censoring on its behalf." The ACLU had successfully defended the National Rifle Association in a 2018 suit against New York State and Gov. Cuomo on the basis that threats against business entities that facilitated the actions of the NRA constituted a viewpoint-based attack on the NRA's freedom of speech.A 1963 Supreme Court case took up the state of Rhode Island's issuing to bookstores lists of books the government considered "objectionable," with a "request" that they "voluntarily" cease selling the book. The Supreme Court ruled this a violation of the First Amendment, even though the state legislature did not directly pass a law preventing the sale of certain books: "The [Rhode Island] commission deliberately set about to achieve the suppression of publications deemed 'objectionable,' and succeeded in its aim." The threat from the state was clear to the Court: "People do not lightly disregard public officers' thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around." The Court summed it up: "Their operation was in fact a scheme of state censorship effectuated by extra-legal sanctions; they acted as an agency not to advise but to suppress."What is required is either a Supreme Court ruling or new legislation to make clear the limits of government interference in social media discussions, and the limits of the social media companies themselves to censor viewpoints they consider objectionable, but which are not illegal.