🌊 Our Censorship Story

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By Max Frost

On Monday, we published a story documenting why we have been able to report the news more freely in recent months. In response, some people accused us of making up allegations of censorship or expressed that censorship is solely a feature of right-wing governments. 

In response, we need to tell you a story that we never could because of censorship. 

Last summer, we (the Maxes) planned a trip to the “Rust Belt” of the UK, a strip of northern England where industry had collapsed and living standards have declined in recent decades. As part of this trip, we visited Dewsbury, a town of 64,000. 

Dewsbury has seen better days. Once a mill town known for its thriving markets, the mills have since shut and the market has been reduced to a shell of itself. On an afternoon stroll down the main street, we passed more homeless people than we saw anywhere else in England, were offered a tour of a crack house, and met a man who showed us his ankle monitor to tell us that he was currently violating his house arrest. According to the UK government, around 15,000 people around Dewsbury live in areas classified as “most deprived.”

As the city’s fortunes declined, its affluent Britons left and immigrants arrived. Today, it’s almost perfectly divided along a river: North of there is predominantly white, with many Eastern European immigrants; south of the river is Savile Town, an almost exclusively Muslim Indian and Pakistani area.

Savile Town is home to the European headquarters of Tablighi Jamaat, an evangelizing, conservative Islamic movement. Thousands of people have moved from India and Pakistan to Dewsbury in order to be more closely affiliated with Tablighi Jamaat.

And with this has come tensions. 

In 1989, as Dewsbury’s demographics were shifting, the anti-immigrant British National Party (BNP) organized a rally there. Rumors that the protesters intended to burn a Quran sparked a counter-protest and riot, during which Muslim youth attacked a pub with locals inside. 

The clash opened a rift in the community that has never fully healed, particularly as Dewsbury has continued to emerge as a flashpoint in the UK immigration debate. 

After al-Qaeda bombers blew up trains and buses across London on July 7, 2005, it emerged that the ringleader was from Dewsbury. A year later, the town made national news when a female teacher was suspended for refusing to take off her niqab (which leaves only the eyes visible) during class. A decade after that, a Dewsbury teen blew himself up with ISIS in Syria and made headlines as “Britain’s youngest suicide bomber.” 

We wanted to know what life was like in this controversial city, so last year, we made a trip. We got in touch with two prominent locals – one white Englishman and one Muslim councilman – who agreed to take us around, teach us about the city, and have an honest conversation about the situation there. 

Now, you may be thinking, “I don’t recall reading about this!”

Well, that’s because we weren’t allowed to publish the story. 

The problems started during our visit.

Editor’s Note

We once told this story to someone who replied by saying something like, “You can’t know what you don’t know.”

In other words, you have no idea what stories are being hidden, or which viewpoints or information are being suppressed. That’s why it’s so vitally important to have a free press. It doesn’t matter the party or politics involved, when people in power try to suppress information, we are skeptical.

Speaking of sharing viewpoints, here are some of the emails we got in response to yesterday’s story on the network state:

Mitchell wrote in:

David had a similar take:

And Olivia wrote:

And lastly, here are the past week’s reports in case you missed them: 

• Silicon Valley’s Tech Utopia

• Inside America’s Secret Bunker System

• Inside the India-Pakistan Crisis

• Inside a Controversial AI Breakthrough

• Is the US’ freedom of the press on par with Sierra Leone’s?

Thanks for reading. Enjoy your Saturdays. Until tomorrow,

Max and Max