Executives for Big Tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, sat before the Senate last week and gave testimony effectively admitting that they colluded with the Biden administration to silence users’ speech on their platforms. This is a bombshell admission that should be front page news everywhere, but, predictably, the mainstream media is ignoring it. Why? Because the MSM clearly has bought into the false idea that “misinformation” should not be protected by the First Amendment. That assumption comes with an obvious follow-up question: Who gets to decide what is “misinformation”?

The whole principle behind the First Amendment protection of speech is the fact that no one has the corner on all truth. Furthermore, any government given the power to silence speech will ultimately abuse that power to the detriment of truth and the freedom of its citizens. History has demonstrated this reality again and again.

Back to the hearing. One particular exchange between Republican Senator Josh Hawley (MO) and Meta executive Chris Cox was quite illuminating in the degree and sheer brazenness in which the Biden administration has repeatedly violated Americans’ free speech rights. Hawley noted that while a private company like Meta is not bound by the First Amendment, the U.S. government is. He then read several emails from employees at Meta in which they relayed actions they took at the behest of the Biden administration to remove “misinformation” surrounding COVID from their platform.

Hawley asked: “Isn’t there a difference between you, as a platform, putting forward information and censoring your users at the behest of the White House, the administration more broadly, and the CDC? Isn’t there a distinction there?”

Cox responded: “We specifically wanted to work with public health experts to understand the difference between information and behavior, and so we did consult with the CDC, World Health Organization, and others to understand how the platform policies we built were affecting public health.”

In other words, the simple answer is “No, there is no difference.” Cox may have squirmed around it, attempting to justify the coordination, but he never denied it. Hawley pushed further, observing that Meta didn’t just “consult” with the Biden administration but actually “censored on their behalf.” Hawley said: “These emails show you took censorship steps. You took down accounts. You planned misinformation policies. You adjusted your policies at the behest of the United States government. I mean, that’s not just some theoretical thing. That’s actually targeting your users’ speech.”

A word comes to mind that perfectly describes this type of coordination between government and private companies. That word would be fascism. Here we have, as so often is the case, Joe Biden projecting onto Republicans the very activity he and his administration are the most guilty of doing. It is the Biden administration that is trying to control Americans’ speech, not “semi-fascist” MAGA Republicans.

The real threat to Americans’ constitutional rights is not coming from Republicans; it’s coming from the party that has increasingly demonstrated that it cares nothing for protecting individual citizens’ rights. Democrats see those rights — rights like freedom of speech — as a threat to their political goals of benevolently providing “rights” to favored groups, usually at the expense of hated groups.

Democrats are increasingly showing themselves to be the party most threatening to the American Republic, irrespective of Biden’s fanciful claims otherwise.