When the U.S. Censored a Movie About the American Revolution and Imprisoned Its Producer


Spirit of '76 painting | Credit: Archibald Willard/Wikimedia Commons

What if I told you that the U.S. government once imprisoned a filmmaker for making a movie about the American Revolution because it depicted British troops in an unflattering light?

In today’s edition of the Injustice System newsletter, let’s talk about censorship, freedom of speech, and the infuriating—if aptly named—1917 case of United States v. “The Spirit of ’76.”

When President Woodrow Wilson led the U.S. to war against Germany in 1917, he also vowed to crush all enemies that arose closer to home. “There are citizens of the United States, I blush to admit,” Wilson declared, “who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of our national life….[T]he hand of our power should close over them at once.”

Congress responded to this call for domestic repression by passing the Espionage Act, which made it illegal to “cause or attempt to cause insubordination, disloyalty, mutiny, or refusal of duty, in the military or naval forces of the United States.” In effect, the Espionage Act made it mostly illegal to speak out against American involvement in World War I.

Perhaps the most famous victim of this notorious law was the socialist politician and labor union leader Eugene Debs, who was imprisoned for the “crime” of giving an anti-war speech to an audience at an afternoon picnic. In Debs v. United States (1919), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his conviction. “One purpose of [Debs’] speech, whether incidental or not does not matter, was to oppose not only war in general but this war,” stated the majority opinion of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. “The opposition was so expressed that its natural and intended effect would be to obstruct recruiting.”

The ruling in Debs echoed Holmes’ earlier decision in Schenck v. United States (1919), which upheld the Espionage Act conviction of a socialist who had been arrested for distributing anti-war pamphlets. “When a nation is at war,” Holmes declared, “many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured.”

Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was also targeted by federal prosecutors at this time under the Espionage Act. But his saga is not as famous in free speech lore as it should be, probably because his case never made it to the Supreme Court.

Goldstein’s “crime” was producing a silent film about the American Revolution titled The Spirit of ’76. Among other things, the film reportedly contained scenes that depicted British troops bayoneting women and children. Because Britain was then an ally of America’s in the First World War, the U.S. government quickly suppressed the film and prosecuted Goldstein for interfering with the war effort. “History is history, and fact is fact,” conceded the trial judge. But “this is no time” for “those things that may have the tendency…of creating animosity or want of confidence between us and our allies.” Goldstein was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two years later, his conviction was upheld on appeal.

Tragically, it seems that Goldstein never recovered from this persecution by the U.S. government. According to Michael Innam of the New York Public Library’s Rare Book Division, “upon his release [from prison], Goldstein moved to Europe and attempted without success to reestablish his film career. After being expelled from Nazi Germany in the mid 1930s, he returned to the United States where, so far as is known, he died in obscurity.” As for the “offending” motion picture itself, Inman noted that The Spirit of ’76, “like a great many films of the silent era…is now considered lost, with no print known to survive.”

Is there a lesson to be learned from this terrible story of injustice? Perhaps this: Sometimes all three branches of the U.S. government come together for the purpose of trampling upon the Constitution. Be alert.

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Speculation Explodes Following Disappearance Of 10th Expert With UFO And Nuclear Secrets

Speculation Explodes Following Disappearance Of 10th Expert With UFO And Nuclear Secrets

Authored by Steve Watson via Modernity.news,

Following the revelation that yet another government contractor with links to nuclear secrets and suspected dark project UAP information has vanished, speculation as to what exactly is going on has massively intensified.

The case of Steven Garcia, a 48-year-old property custodian at the Kansas City National Security Campus in Albuquerque, New Mexico, marks the latest entry in a disturbing sequence of deaths and vanishings among individuals connected to NASA, nuclear weapons components, and sensitive aerospace research.

Los Angeles Magazine contributor Lauren Conlin joined “Jesse Weber Live” to discuss the case, noting its eerie parallels to prior incidents.

Garcia’s disappearance is being framed as the 10th missing person case in the UFO mystery.

The disturbing pattern of deaths continues to baffle.

Garcia was last seen leaving his Albuquerque home on foot on August 28, 2025, carrying only a handgun. He left behind his phone, keys, wallet, and car. Officials have described him as potentially a danger to himself, but no trace has been found in the remote area where he lived.

Conlin emphasized the chilling similarities during the NewsNation segment. “This one is chilling to me because, as you said it echoes Neal McCasland’s disappearance. It was like the same thing in the state of New Mexico,” she stated. McCasland, a retired Air Force major general with deep UFO community ties, vanished from the same region earlier in 2026.

Garcia held top security clearance at the Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC), which manufactures over 80 percent of the non-nuclear components for U.S. military nuclear weapons.

“So Stephen Garcia, I mean he had a top security clearance at KCNSC,” Conlin explained. “They manufacture 80% of non-nuclear components that go into building military nuclear weapons and I mean he oversaw tens of millions dollars of assets, equipment some classified.”

She added that Garcia’s role involved handling “some classified, some not,” leaving open questions about his knowledge base. “We don’t know what was going on in this guy’s head right, the officials had said that he may have been a danger to himself.”

Neighbors noted he lived in a very remote area and worked in aerospace research. Conlin even raised a provocative possibility on air: “I have to wonder, again I know this sounds crazy but it could be an option here is the government doing this? Are they taking out their own people because of XYZ.”

The timing adds to the intrigue. Garcia’s disappearance occurred amid heightened congressional scrutiny of UAP (unidentified anomalous phenomena) videos and related programs, including a deadline set by Rep. Anna Luna for the release of specific footage.

Multiple individuals on the list of those who have vanished or died worked at or with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Los Alamos National Laboratory, or Air Force Research Laboratory projects involving asteroid defense, rocket engines, and classified aerospace systems.

No official connections have been publicly confirmed by law enforcement between the cases, yet the geographic clustering in New Mexico and California, combined with shared professional networks in nuclear and space tech, continues to fuel speculation.

Online discussions on X and Reddit’s r/UFOs and related communities have exploded with theories attempting to explain the pattern. Many users point to foreign intelligence operations, suggesting adversaries like China or Russia may be targeting U.S. experts to steal or neutralize knowledge of advanced technologies, including those potentially linked to UAP reverse-engineering programs. Ex-FBI officials have been cited in reports noting that foreign services have long pursued Americans with critical tech secrets.

Others speculate a domestic cover-up angle: that insiders with knowledge of classified UAP programs or non-human technology are being silenced to delay or control disclosure efforts, especially as Congress pushes for more transparency on UAP videos and related footage. Some tie the cases to specific projects like advanced alloys (e.g., Mondaloy) or propulsion systems funded through overlapping NASA, DoE, and Air Force channels.

A smaller but vocal group questions whether personal factors—extreme stress from high-clearance work or mental health crises—could explain the cluster, though critics argue the sheer number and similarities make coincidence unlikely.

Calls for an independent task force or deeper FBI probe appear frequently in threads, with users linking the pattern to historical UFO lore around sites like Roswell and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

Whatever the explanation, the cases underscore ongoing questions about transparency in America’s most sensitive scientific and defense programs. As more details emerge on Garcia and the others, the public demand for answers only intensifies. The full picture may yet reveal connections that challenge assumptions about how these secrets are guarded—and at what cost.

Your support is crucial in helping us defeat mass censorship. Please consider donating via Locals or check out our unique merch. Follow us on X @ModernityNews.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/16/2026 – 06:30

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Zelensky Goes Full “Lord Of War” As Ukraine Pitches Battle-Tested War Robots To Highest Bidder

Zelensky Goes Full “Lord Of War” As Ukraine Pitches Battle-Tested War Robots To Highest Bidder

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky took the stage and stated that Ukraine’s military-industrial base has created some of the world’s most advanced unmanned platforms, already deployed against Russia and forever changing how warfare is conducted.

“For the first time in the history of this war, an enemy position was taken exclusively by unmanned platforms, ground systems, and drones,” Zelensky said in a post on X.

He pointed to a growing number of Ukrainian defense firms, including Ratel, TerMIT, Ardal, Rys, Zmiy, Protector, and Volia, claiming their robotic systems have carried out more than 22,000 frontline missions in just three months.

Zelensky’s broader message seemed more like a PR pitch for Ukraine’s defense firms, which are capable of producing millions of FPV drones annually, as well as deep-strike systems, interceptors, ground robots, and maritime drone boats.

“Ukraine’s robots were sculpted by combat. I’ve seen the video footage of their UGVs taking hostages. This is what future battles will look like,” Foundation Robotics co-founder Mike LeBlanc said in a statement.

LeBlanc’s team is preparing its Phantom humanoid robots for testing and continues to develop militarized humanoid prototypes designed to operate alongside warfighters in high-risk environments.

In February, Foundation sent two Phantom MK1 robots to Ukraine for testing, according to a TIME Magazine article.

Ukraine’s capital markets have been frozen by war, leaving many of the country’s battlefield-proven “war unicorns” starved of traditional funding. However, the Middle East conflict has accelerated a new export pathway, as drone warfare and AI-enabled kill chains reshape how militaries think about defense.

Reuters has reported that Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are exploring Ukrainian interceptor drones as a more affordable response to the emergence of Iranian one-way attack drones. At the same time, Ukrainian firms or their European subsidiaries are eyeing U.S. civilian and defense markets to sell their combat-tested systems. The first plausible path into the U.S. market appears to be through affordable counter-drone solutions and other layered air-defense technology.

Meanwhile, so-called “experts” cited by The Moscow Times called Zelensky’s X posts “mainly a PR move,” but highlighted how robots “are already transforming both tactics and strategy” in the four-year war. 

Zelensky is correct: “The future is already on the front line.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/16/2026 – 05:45

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Trump’s ‘Great Healthcare Plan’ To Replace Obamacare Isn’t Much of a Plan


topicshealthcare | Photo: iStock

For the better part of a decade, Republicans ran on a single mantra when it came to health care: repeal and replace Obamacare. When the slogan was conceived, it made political and strategic sense.

But Republicans never had a plan for what to replace it with. Multiple proposals at various levels of completion circulated, but there was never any agreement about even the broad outlines of a GOP health care plan, much less the myriad complicated specifics.

When pressed, Republicans often defaulted to vague, poll-tested language to describe their ideas, such as “personalized” and “patient centered”—or, in the case of President Donald Trump, “great” and “terrific.” In debates leading up to the 2016 election, Trump stumbled over phrases like “lines around the states,” likely a reference to allowing interstate purchase of insurance, and praised European socialized medicine. When asked about his health care policy ideas during his 2024 campaign, he claimed to have “concepts of a plan.”

In January 2026, Trump finally delivered something he dubbed “The Great Healthcare Plan.” Whether it’s great might be a matter of debate. But it is in no way, shape, or form an actual plan.

Trump’s health care proposal consists of a single page laying out four big goals: “lower drug prices,” “lower insurance premiums,” “hold big insurance companies accountable,” and “maximize price transparency.” Each item gets a few brief bullet points’ worth of explanation.

And that’s it.

These are not inherently problematic goals: Cost reduction is always welcome, health care is indeed beset by opaque pricing, and while big corporations aren’t the biggest problem with American health care, accountability is generally a good thing.

But these slogans give no clue as to how Trump actually thinks the system should work. The closest thing to a major proposal in the document comes in the accountability section: “Send the money directly to the American people.”

“The money” that this is presumably referring to is the roughly $35 billion a year that, since 2021, had been spent on topping up Obamacare’s subsidies for private individual insurance. Actually doing so would require legislation, which doesn’t exist, and policy details, like how to allocate those funds, which also don’t exist. Spending that money on direct transfers would mean persisting with tens of billions in unnecessary health care spending on top of the existing system.

But even this level of analysis treats Trump’s pseudo-proposal too seriously. The rollout of the Great Healthcare Plan was attended by little more than a brief Oval Office speech and a handful of online posts. It generated little notice, even among Republicans in Congress, who barely seemed to register that it existed. Trump briefly mentioned the plan in his State of the Union, but there was certainly nothing like a floor debate or a push for a vote—because, well, there wasn’t anything to vote for or against.

That’s because legislation, much less a debate about the details that legislation would entail, wasn’t the point. The point was to have a piece of paper that Republicans can point to when asked about health care policy. Trump has a plan, they can now say, and it’s great. It says so right in the name!

The fact remains that American health care needs serious surgery. Decades of subsidies, spending, and tax system distortions have rendered it a confusing, frustrating, bloated, and—for taxpayers as well as individuals—increasingly unaffordable mess. Health care spending is the biggest single driver of long-term debt and deficits, and one of Medicare’s main funds (itself a sort of accounting fiction) is set to become insolvent in under a decade. But since Trump was first elected, Republicans have explicitly promised not to touch Medicare.

Quality, substantive policy ideas do, in fact, exist; Cato Institute Health Policy Studies Director Michael Cannon has long touted a system of very large health savings accounts that would radically shift not only how health care is financed but how health care decisions are made. Republicans don’t want to master the wonky details, and they don’t want to be seen as disrupting the status quo, unsustainable as it is.

That’s how, more than a decade and a half after the passage of Obamacare, Republicans ended up with Trump’s Great Healthcare Plan, a proposal so empty it makes nothingburgers look like they have the calorie count of the entire dessert menu at a Cheesecake Factory. There’s no there there. But rest assured—it’s probably “patient centered” and “terrific.”

The post Trump's 'Great Healthcare Plan' To Replace Obamacare Isn't Much of a Plan appeared first on Reason.com.

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Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is


An unoccupied house in California. | Illustration: Midjourney

San Diego voters will decide in June whether to approve a tax on empty homes. The $8,000 tax would affect homes that are unoccupied more than 182 days a year. The tax is projected to cover 5,000 homes and expected to bring in as much as $24 million in revenue, which city officials say they will spend on affordable housing projects.

The post Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is appeared first on Reason.com.

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UK Voters Call For Lower Taxes & Energy Bills As Economic Concerns Grow

UK Voters Call For Lower Taxes & Energy Bills As Economic Concerns Grow

Via CityAM,

  • According to a new poll, most British voters want lower energy costs and tax cuts to support growth.

  • A large majority rated the UK economy as poor and showed little faith in current progress.

  • Business leaders are also increasingly pessimistic, citing geopolitics and rising costs.

British voters want Rachel Reeves to cut taxes and reduce energy costs in order to focus on growth, as a majority of people felt the UK economy was “poor”, new research has shown.

Polling by Freshwater Strategy for the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), a free market think tank, suggested that the vast majority of Brits wanted the Labour government to focus on economic growth more than it currently does. 

The findings back up the Labour government’s primary mission, which is to grow the UK economy

But respondents in a survey and focus groups suggested that voters supported small-state policies to deliver improved growth, as much of the public was confused about the measurements used by the government to track achievements. 

Polling found that 77 percent believed energy costs should be reduced, while 72 percent backed lower taxes for workers. A slightly lower portion, 66 per cent, backed tax cuts for businesses

When faced with a direct choice, Britons backed economic growth even if it led to some environmental damage, while most also wanted energy to be cheaper, even if it meant slower progress to net zero. 

Taxes and energy costs top Brits’ priorities

Respondents to the survey of 3,000 voters were also more likely to say that GDP growth benefited the government more than individuals. 

In a damning indictment, nearly two-thirds of people (65 per cent) rated the UK economy as “poor” but overestimated the average wealth of Brits compared to Germans, Australians, and Americans. 

Kristian Niemietz, editorial director of the IEA, said the lack of progress made in the last 18 years “should be the number one public policy issue of our time”. 

“While political discourse in Britain may not always reflect it, Britain is clearly not a country that is comfortable with economic stagnation and relative decline,” Niemietz said.

“We still have the social expectations associated with a growing economy. What we do not have is the economic performance to match those expectations.”

Middle East war rattles finance chiefs

Low sentiment across the public reflects wider pessimism among business leaders, with one survey of 79 chief financial officers suggesting that confidence had fallen to a six-year low. 

Deloitte’s finance chief survey suggested that the war in the Middle East had weakened top business leaders’ hopes of an economic recovery, as geopolitics was cited as the top risk. 

Levels of concern around geopolitics were at a record high, according to the survey, while rising energy prices and the prospect of higher interest rates were also among the top risks. 

Deloitte UK chief economist Ian Stewart said: “Rarely in the last 16 years have UK chief financial officers been more focused on cost control than today. 

“This challenging environment is prompting chief financial officers to scale back expectations for margins and sharpen their focus on cost reduction and cash conservation. 

“The immediate priority for finance leaders is to strengthen balance sheets in the face of external headwinds.”

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/16/2026 – 05:00

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Continuing Slump In Global Media Climate Agitprop Bodes Ill For Future Net Zero Support

Continuing Slump In Global Media Climate Agitprop Bodes Ill For Future Net Zero Support

Authored by Chris Morrison via THE DAILY SCEPTIC,

Decades of careful grooming of incurious journalists designed to whip up a non-existent climate emergency have failed to halt a dramatic continuing collapse in mainstream media stories backing the Net Zero fantasy. Last year saw a 14% global slump in climate-related stories compared to 2024, which was already 38% down on peak Greta hysteria in 2021. Perhaps there is only so long that once trusting consumers are prepared to read, let alone pay for identical, narrative-driven drivel that is often so one-sided that it is an insult to the intelligence. Exhibit 1: the BBC’s October 2023 classic – Climate change could make beer taste worse

The greatest declines over 2025 were found in Africa, the Middle East and North America. Interestingly, the failed Amazon COP30 meeting in November 2025 was followed the month after by coverage falling off a cliff in Latin America (-61%), Oceania (-52%) and the European Union (-41%). A period of private grief seems to have given  the long-suffering public a merciful break from the relentless cacophony of climate catastrophising. 

News of the continuing falls in climate change and global warming coverage are contained in the latest annual report from the Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) at the University of Colorado Boulder. To produce its latest findings, MeCCO tracked the volume of newspaper, wire services, radio and TV climate stories across 59 countries and seven regions. The work is said to have used a consistent methodology since 2004.The graph below shows clearly the spikes in the Greta hysteria around the start of the current decade, and the earlier Gore grift that followed the release of his ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ film.

University journalism courses often run climate modules but prospects for aspiring students looking to make the world safe for Net Zero fanatics do not look good. The Guardian can only do so much, but in the UK, coverage was 34% down in the 12 months to November 2025. In the USA, the sackings have started with a vengeance. Last year, new managers at CBS News removed most of the climate crisis team. Recent reports suggest that everyone on the climate beat has now been binned. In February 2026, the Washington Post cut 14 climate writing positions, leaving only five journalists in place.

Last year was a bad time for the climate groomers that are largely funded by Green Blob billionaires seeking societal upheaval by depriving modern (and developing) industrial countries of vital hydrocarbons. Groomed journalists working in narrative-driven mainstream media are seen as key to driving up fear of the invented climate crisis. One of the first lessons taught to useful idiot fear mongers is that the opinion, often incorrectly referred to as a theory, that human cause most if not all recent  climate change, is ‘settled’. The incurious are not encouraged to ask if this is the first scientific opinion to be declared settled, or at least the first since the Roman Popes of old adjudicated ex cathedra on these matters.

In the UK, the National Council for the Training of Journalists (NCTJ) is a respected industry-based charity that has operated since the 1950s. But its climate change training is laughable. In what other investigative fields are journalists encouraged to rely on a claimed ‘consensus’, and encouraged not to disclose alternative views? What quicker way is there, it might be asked, to replacing the writer with an AI tool? Funded by the Google News Initiative (GNI), the NCTJ offers a free e-learning course on climate change reporting. As with all climate science grooming agitprop sessions, there is a warning about avoiding ‘false balance’. In effect, this means denying publicity to sceptical scientists who investigate opinion by following the time-honoured process of scientific falsification.

GNI is a major funder of the attempts made to silence dissenting climate opinions. One of the major weapons deployed involve so-called ‘fact-checkers’ which, in the Daily Sceptic’s own experience, do little more than attack inconvenient science findings with opinionated claims of ‘misinformation’. Discussing the underlying science does not appear to be a priority, rather the negative verdicts are helpful in cancelling advertising, and diminishing impact in the social media sphere.

In the UK, GNI is a funder of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Until recently, this operation ran a six-month groomer for climate writers under its Oxford Climate Journalism Network (OCJN) operation. The course has also attracted considerable funding from the former Extinction Rebellion paymaster Sir Christopher Hohn, and over four years it hosted around 800 journalists from 80 countries. Alas, the indoctrination pitstop pulled down the shutters late last year. The “flagship online course” will no longer be setting tasks asking participants to write a news story showing why mangoes are less tasty this year due to climate change. We can only pray that similar restrictions now apply to other climate-challenged comestibles.

It seems the world is getting tired of clickbait, centrally-determined climate claptrap that for too long has provided an unscientific base for the Net Zero fantasy. Pseudoscience gaslighting has allowed rigged computer models to predict headline-grabbing Armageddon ‘tipping points’, and contributed to the mainstream spread of unchallenged lies that extreme weather events are getting worse. Good news stories such as the major ‘greening’ of the Earth are ignored, while the vital role played in this by the gas of life carbon dioxide is downplayed. None more so than SciLine, a Green Blob-funded operation connected to the Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science.

“In many cases, CO2 disproportionately favours weeds over crops causing more problems for agriculture”, it helpfully notes in its guide to journalists.

Tyler Durden
Thu, 04/16/2026 – 03:30

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Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is


An unoccupied house in California. | Illustration: Midjourney

San Diego voters will decide in June whether to approve a tax on empty homes. The $8,000 tax would affect homes that are unoccupied more than 182 days a year. The tax is projected to cover 5,000 homes and expected to bring in as much as $24 million in revenue, which city officials say they will spend on affordable housing projects.

The post Brickbat: Home Is Where the Heart Is appeared first on Reason.com.

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