The Patriot Post® · Please Stand By for More Government Censorship
If there’s one thing we know about the New Left, it’s that adherents have totally abandoned the efforts of yesteryear’s liberals to defend free speech at all costs. Instead, leftists have become mortal enemies of free speech, using the levers of power in government, media, and Big Tech to squelch the speech of political rivals. Today, censorship is a left-wing value.
It’s no exaggeration to say the government was involved with Big Tech censorship. Twitter silenced conservatives, and it was in league with the FBI to do so. It was election interference, plain and simple.
Likewise, Facebook interfered in our elections, sometimes at the behest of Joe Biden’s administration.
Censorship has real-world consequences, too. The Patriot Post’s Facebook page has suffered immense traffic suppression since June 2020. Only a fraction of our 750,000 followers see any of our posts, and traffic from Facebook to our website has plummeted to less than 10% of what it once was. There’s no way that happened naturally.
Alright Jackson, we already know this, you may be thinking.
You might, but many, if not most, Americans don’t. Worse, it’s not as though leftists repented once they got caught. The jackbooted censors never apologized and never promised to quit or do better. (Elon Musk has made Twitter/X a bold exception.) Instead, they learned a more important lesson: It worked. They won in 2020 and 2022 largely because of censoring opposing speech.
That’s why they’re ramping up to do it again.
Virginia Democrat Senator Mark Warner, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, admitted this week that the FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) are communicating again with Big Tech platforms. The goal of their collusion is “removing disinformation on their sites as the November presidential election nears.”
The FBI confirmed it, saying it “remains committed” to determining what people can and can’t say, using “foreign malign influence operations” as an excuse. Don’t like bulk-mail ballots or think Hunter Biden’s laptop was real? You’re probably a Russian bot.
Indeed, history tells us what leftists and deep state actors view as “disinformation.” It’s frequently known by another word: truth.
Oddly enough, Warner says these discussions ramped up in March, which just so happens to be the same month the Supreme Court heard arguments in Murthy v. Missouri. As our Thomas Gallatin reported at the time, “The question is whether the federal government — in this case, the Biden administration — can pressure social media companies into removing posts from their platforms if said posts are deemed problematic by the government.”
A decision probably won’t come until June, but Team Biden was no doubt encouraged by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. “My biggest concern,” she opined to the plaintiffs’ attorneys during hearings, “is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods.” The other left-wing justices concurred, but even comments and questions from the right side of the bench could indicate the justices are reticent to block all federal censorship efforts.
As Warner put it, “There seemed to be a lot of sympathy that the government ought to have at least voluntary communications” with social media companies.
Even if the Supreme Court rebukes the government, a lot of damage has already been done and can happen between now and then. Moreover, Biden has been known to ignore the Supreme Court before.