Recently, I wrote a column about Meta’s restoration of free speech protections after the company admitted to censoring users on platforms like Facebook. The company also revealed that it was pressured by the Biden Administration to conduct such censorship. Now, Google has taken the same step in restoring a number of YouTube accounts and pledging to show greater respect for free speech.
Google made the disclosure in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH):
“Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and elections integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”
This is another major victory for free speech. Google specifically acknowledged past political censorship and stated that it “values conservative voices on its platform.”
The company, for the first time, admitted that it yielded to comprehensive pressure from the Biden Administration to censor Americans. It acknowledged that the Biden censorship pressure was “unacceptable and wrong” and pledged to resist such pressure in the future.
Meta has substantially reduced censorship by replicating the approach of Elon Musk at X. These changes are a testament to Musk’s legacy in the restoration of free speech on social media. As I previously noted, we need companies like Facebook and Google. These are companies that are big enough to stand up to the European Union (EU) and its unrelenting campaign against free speech.
The censorship on Google and YouTube had a harmful impact beyond the loss of free speech. It suppressed opposing views on Covid policies from the efficacy of masks to the need to shut down our schools.
The very figures claiming to battle “disinformation” were suppressing opposing views that have now been vindicated as credible. It was not only the lab theory. In my recent book, I discuss how signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration were fired or disciplined by their schools or associations for questioning COVID-19 policies.
Some experts questioned the efficacy of surgical masks, the scientific support for the six-foot rule and the necessity of shutting down schools. The government has now admitted that many of these objections were valid and that it did not have hard science to support some of the policies. While other allies in the West did not shut down their schools, we never had any substantive debate due to the efforts of this alliance of academic, media and government figures.
Not only did millions die from the pandemic, but the United States is still struggling with the educational and mental health consequences of shutting down all our public schools. That is the true cost of censorship when the government works with the media to stifle scientific debate and public disclosures.
The disclosure is also a blow to many Democratic members of Congress who long attacked witnesses, including myself, who testified against the coordinated censorship by corporate and government officials. Before the release of the Twitter files, members insisted that there was no evidence of such coordination. Some still deny such coordination despite multiple companies now confirming it.
The greatest challenge, however, still lies ahead for these companies. The EU remains the greatest threat to free speech facing Americans. After Musk purchased X with a pledge to restore free speech, figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton demanded that the EU use its infamous Digital Services Act to force X to censor Americans.
The Trump administration has warned the EU about its efforts to censor Americans. Meta and Google can now join X in creating a formidable corporate alliance for free speech. For the first time, the free speech community might have a coalition of government and corporate allies that could stand up to the EU.
There will likely remain a degree of mistrust from the free speech community towards these companies after years of censorship and stonewalling. However, we also need to accept our allies where and when we can find them. Free speech is in a free fall in Europe and many on the left are encouraging similar censorship laws for the United States. We need these companies and should support them as they take meaningful actions in favor of free speech.
We have been discussing the recently declassified material related to the Russian investigation, including disclosures of the role of former CIA director John Brennan at the end of the Obama Administration to reinforce the unfounded allegations of Russian collusion and influence. After an earlier intelligence assessment rejecting the narrative was effectively quashed, Brennan reportedly hand-picked the team to do a second rushed 2016 U.S. intelligence community assessment in the final days. We are now learning more about the person Brennan selected to head that team. Just the News and other outlets are revealing not just the extreme political bias of Susan Miller, but her remarkably poor handle on some key facts. The one unassailable fact that comes out of her postings is her declaration that “[I] am not a Trump fan.”
A review of Miller’s social media postings reveals intense hostility toward Donald Trump and his supporters, including calling the President a “dictator” and MAGA supporters “Nazis.” What is particularly notable is that she still maintains that the widely ridiculed Steele Dossier, secretly funded by the Clinton campaign, “might be true.” Despite the findings of the Special Counsel and various investigations, she has insisted that Trump may indeed be a “Russian asset” or a “Kremlin asset”
Miller recently retired but says that she continues to train CIA officers.
Brennan choose wisely if he wanted to ensure that a reliable political ally would draft the assessment. However, she has said that there were others in the CIA who wanted an actual finding that Trump’s election was illegitimate. That was the narrative pushed by Hillary Clinton and many Democrats after the 2016 loss. She suggested that that may still be true, a form of election denial that is still accepted on the left as they criticize Trump for his questioning of the 2020 defeat.
Miller appears to be one of the last diehards claiming that the Steele dossier could have also repeatedly still proved correct in its allegations.
Some interviews are striking in their conflicting elements, like insisting “all of us went in with a completely open mind” but that “they [the Russians] definitely wanted him [Trump].”
Miller also seemed to view the CIA’s role as part of a resistance, or at least counterforce to Trump: “I headed up the report team. … I wanted people who would speak truth to power.”
On social media, Miller comes across as unhinged at times in responding to stories with screeds like “This is awful! Further proof that Trump is a dictator.” She also wrote, “Good grief. As if we needed proof that MAGA types are nazis…”
She responded to a foreign poster by saying, “Yes….the Hitler analogy is not lost on a bunch of us…..sadly….”
In one of the most bizarre series of statements, Miller accuses Trump, Barr, and Durham of putting “me on trial” because she was interviewed in the various investigations.
She insisted in an interview with Times Radio in July that Trump got Barr and Durham “to open a trial on us…I spent 8 hours on trial; other team members also had trials. Not unexpectedly, nothing criminal was found.”
Just the News notes that Miller said again in June that “Trump put me on trial….criminal complaint after inauguration.” There is no indication of what that criminal complaint entailed, where it was filed, or what happened to it.
Miller appears to be struggling to make the case against Brennan and herself in carrying out this intelligence assessment. It is telling that, within the entire CIA establishment, Brennan would select Miller for this controversial report. What is even more chilling is that top intelligence officials would continue to cling to debunked sources like Steele. It is the kind of intransigence common among those living in echo chambers created by news and social media sites. CIA analysts are supposedly trained to avoid such confirmation bias.
All of this makes for a great pitch to join figures like Clapper or McCabe with MSNBC or CNN contracts. It is less compelling in defending the work product of the CIA on this report.
On Saturday, Antifa and other radicals launched another violent attack on conservatives. Pastors were holding what they described as a permitted Christian worship event in a park when black-clad Antifa members tried to storm and tear down a barricade. To their credit, the Seattle police moved in and arrested the radicals. However, what happened next is even more concerning: Mayor Bruce Harrell seemed to blame the Christian group and demanded to know why they were given a permit at all for an event in the area.
Police in Seattle are shown in videotapes taking down several black-clad and masked individuals who tried to overcome the fencing and storm the stage. That is clearly an improvement over the “summer of love” approach previously in Seattle.
SEATTLE: Attendees of the praise and worship gathering hosted by MayDay USA tell @choeshow it's time for church-goers to share the love of Jesus Christ in the darkest places of the world.
Their message comes amid Antifa, transgender activists, and other far-left militants'… pic.twitter.com/NKJbnZSKWH
Seattle is proud of our reputation as a welcoming, inclusive city for LGBTQ+ communities, and we stand with our trans neighbors when they face bigotry and injustice. Today’s far-right rally was held here for this very reason – to provoke a reaction by promoting beliefs that are inherently opposed to our city’s values, in the heart of Seattle’s most prominent LGBTQ+ neighborhood.
When the humanity of trans people and those who have been historically marginalized is questioned, we triumph by demonstrating our values through our words and peaceful protest – we lose our voice when this is disrupted by violence, chaos, and confusion.
While there are broad First Amendment requirements around permitting events under free speech protections, I am directing the Parks Department to review all of the circumstances of this application to understand whether there were legal location alternatives or other adjustments that could have been pursued. The Police Department will complete an after-action report of this event, including understanding preparation, crowd management tactics, and review of arrests and citations.
We have discussed other Democratic politicians like Nancy Pelosi demanding reviews or revocation of permits going to Christian or conservative groups. The problem is that conservative or religious views are treated as triggering — a common claim in higher education.
I do not know anything about this Christian group, but they were clearly the victims, not the cause, of this violence. The suggestion that the location was too triggering for transgender activists is yet another example of a failure of leadership on the left.
These two groups clearly disagree on transgender policies. Fine. Protest and counterprotest. However, the police showed how to maintain a principled line. They did not take sides. They protected the free speech rights on both sides and confined their role to maintaining the peace.
Democratic politicians and pundits continue to legitimate Antifa and even align themselves with the vehemently anti-free speech group. This includes selling Antifa gifts on popular sites.
As I have previously written, it has long been the “Keyser Söze” of the anti-free speech movement, a loosely aligned group that employs measures to avoid easy detection or association. Yet, FBI Director Chris Wray repeatedly pushed back on the denials of Antifa’s work or violence. In one hearing, Wray stated, “And we have quite a number” — and “Antifa is a real thing. It’s not a fiction.”
Some Democrats have played a dangerous game in supporting or excusing the work of Antifa. Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. This was after Antifa had been involved in numerous acts of violence, and its website was banned in Germany.
Ellison’s son, Minneapolis City Council member Jeremiah Ellison, declared his allegiance to Antifa in the heat of the protests this summer. During a prior hearing, Democratic senators refused to denounce Antifa. Likewise, Joe Biden has dismissed objections to Antifa as just “an idea.”
Democratic leaders are playing a dangerous game in pandering to these extreme elements of their party. In the end, they will fare no better than their enemies as this mob turns on enabling establishment figures.
We have been following the rise of political violence on the left since the Trump election. In reality, attacks on conservative and pro-life faculty and students is nothing new. Today, I am speaking at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill on free speech after a student recently trashed a pro-life table on the campus in Asheville. Now, on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, a professor allegedly trashed a table of the College Republicans over their support for Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brad Schimel. The accused José Felipe Alvergue, is not just a professor but the chair of the English department.
Tatiana Bobrowicz, the chair of the College Republicans at the school, said she set up the table supporting Schimel outside the student center about 8:30 a.m. Tuesday, with candy, doughnuts and literature. Then a man walked up and demanded to know what they were doing. He accused them of being too close to a polling location (which was located in the nearby student center).
Bobrowicz tried to explain that they were not in violation (which allows for tables beyond 100 feet) and that location was approved by the university. She then said that the man declared “the time for this is over,” flipped the table over and then walked away.
Bobrowicz immediately called the police and the UW-Eau Claire identified the man as José Felipe Alvergue, the chair of the English department. He has been put on leave by the university.
In his university bio, Alvergue identifies as “a member of the Salvadoran diaspora.” He adds this rather cryptic statement about “unlocking empathy”:
” I believe that we can’t unlock the empathy hidden behind words if we don’t understand what is at stake in the risk writers and artists take when they decide to transform the matter which makes up the world around them into the story words communicate.”
He is now charged with disorderly conduct, according to Wisconsin court records. While this is a relatively minor crime, it was a crime committed against both students and free speech on campus. He must appear for a court appearance on May 7. He would be hardly unique in advocating or even being convicted of political violence on campus.
At Hunter College in New York, Professor Shellyne Rodríguez was shown trashing a pro-life display of students.
She was captured on a videotape telling the students that “you’re not educating s–t […] This is f–king propaganda. What are you going to do, like, anti-trans next? This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”
Unlike the professor, the students remained calm and respectful. One even said “sorry” to the accusation that being pro-life was triggering for her students.
Rodríguez continued to rave, stating, “No you’re not — because you can’t even have a f–king baby. So, you don’t even know what that is. Get this s–t the f–k out of here.” In an Instagram post, she is then shown trashing the table. Hunter College, however, did not consider this unhinged attack to be sufficient to terminate Rodríguez.
Another example comes from the State University of New York at Albany, where sociology professor Renee Overdyke shut down a pro-life display and then resisted arrest. One student is heard screaming, “She’s a [expletive] professor.” That of course is the point.
If convicted, Alvergue would be not just guilty of the underlying charge but committing political violence against students. There does not appear to have been mitigating circumstances or any provocation other than students who hold an opposing view from his own.
He then walked away rather than address the matter with the students and the authorities. If convicted, the question is whether conservative students should have to wait for Alvergue to find a way to “unlock [his] empathy” through what is clearly uncontrollable rage.
Americans constitutionally protected right to free speech “has been under worse attack in the last decade than at any other point in our nation’s history,” Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway told lawmakers during a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Tuesday.
“The tentacles of the censorship-industrial complex are choking out freedom of expression, debate, and the right to criticize powerful institutions such as corporate media and the government,” Hemingway said.
Throughout her opening statement, The Federalist’s editor-in-chief highlighted how the federal and state governments have “fund[ed] and promote[d] censorship and blacklisting technology,” and have even gone as far as to “direct Big Tech companies to censor American speech and debate.” She specifically cited how academic institutions “such as Stanford University and the University of Texas are given large grants, not to defend free speech, but to conduct research on so-called ‘disinformation’ for use by the censorship regime.”
“Non-profit think tanks such as the Aspen Institute post so-called ‘disinformation’ seminars to groom journalists to publish pro-censorship propaganda and to suppress important stories, such as the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell,” Hemingway said. “Non-profit censorship groups such as the Global Disinformation Index and for-profit censorship businesses such as NewsGuard produce widely used censorship tools and blacklists to favor left-wing media while working to silence media that fight false narratives.”
As described by Hemingway, censorship tools employed by groups such as GDI and NewsGuard “routinely rate leftwing news outlets, that are no threat to the permanent bureaucracy, higher than those that challenge prevailing orthodoxies.” These deceptively crafted lists are subsequently used by companies to “boycott some publications and reward others with advertising,” she explained.
Watch Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway's full opening remarks before the U.S. Senate on the censorship-industrial complex. pic.twitter.com/PYZ49DkaxJ
“The Washington Post and New York Times routinely receive the highest marks. Those publications won Pulitzers for their role in the Russia collusion hoax, and we have some participants in that hoax here on this subcommittee,” Hemingway said. “My publication, The Federalist, exposed that hoax through dogged reporting and investigation, as we did with the media’s vicious lies against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We exposed much of the censorship industrial complex, too, even suing the State Department after discovering its role in promoting and marketing censorship tools that are being used against us even as we sit here today.”
As noted by Hemingway, The Federalist is no stranger to being a target of the expansive censorship-industrial complex.
During the summer of 2020, for example, the left-wing Center for Countering Digital Hate colluded with NBC News to try and strip The Federalist of its Google ad revenue. As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd reported, “NBC News reported that Google banned The Federalist due to a shoddy report from the network’s ‘verification unit,’ and the Center for Countering Digital Hate took issue with The Federalist’s reporting about the race-motivated rioting and violence that plagued the nation during the summer of rage.”
Hemingway also cited a 2023 report by the House Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government “documenting how Stanford University colluded with two governmental entities to pressure social media companies into censoring true information, jokes, satire, political reporting, and analysis, all of which they claimed was ‘disinformation.’” The Federalist editor-in-chief noted how she and Federalist CEO Sean Davis were targeted by this censorship operation.
“One of the censored items was a story about a TV appearance in which I said of the media, ‘They lie, they lie, they lie, and then they lie.’ Gallup reported in February that my view is held by 70 percent of Americans, who say they don’t trust corporate media to report news accurately, fairly, or fully,” Hemingway said.
Hemingway concluded her opening statement by noting the difficulties in “facing” the vast censorship-industrial complex, and that while it “would have been easy to fold,” doing so is “exactly what censors want: to make it impossible to report the truth about their lies.”
“They know our voice is so powerful and influential that they can’t accomplish their goals unless they shut us down. They will not succeed,” Hemingway said. “We will never stop. The more they try to shut us down, the harder we’re going to work to stay open, because it’s not about us — it’s about whether we will have a civilization where people are allowed to say and think things tyrants don’t want us to.”
Shawn Fleetwood is a staff writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He previously served as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
After speaking at the National Press Club, I will be testifying today before the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary on free speech and censorship. My testimony is below.
The hearing, titled “The Censorship Industrial Complex” will be held in Room 226 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building at 2 p.m.
We now know a great deal about the censorship system developed under the Biden Administration in coordination with academic and corporate units. Indeed, the release of new information since January has proven a windfall for those of us who have been seeking greater transparency for years. There is still much to be done. It is essential for Congress to complete this work and allow for total transparency on the past funding and coordination by the government.
The past efforts to block investigations and withhold information on the censorship system have failed. However, the motivation is telling. While publicly declaring the need to combat misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation, the Biden Administration and its allies in the censorship system struggled to withhold information on their actual targets or actions. The reason again is obvious. The public understands the threat to free speech and strongly supports an investigation into the FBI’s role in censoring social media.
Almost 250 years ago, Tom Paine famously wrote that “These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.” That was the first line of a work published by Thomas Paine in the Pennsylvania Journal on December 19, 1776, a work which would become known as “The American Crisis.”
We are living through a new crisis in the fight for free speech. The anti-free speech movement that has swept over Europe has now reached our shores. The United States remains a final line of defense for free speech, a nation founded on free speech as our indispensable right as a free people. This is a crisis of faith as the “summer soldier and sunshine patriot” finds every excuse for remaining silent as others are censored or canceled for their views. Congress must step forward to demand both greater transparency and protection for free speech. This new “American crisis” can be our greatest American moment in speaking in one voice – Democrats, Republicans, and Independents – in support of the right that defines us as a people.
Below is my column in the Hill on the recent World Forum where leaders gathered to declare “A New World Order with European Values.” Globalists gathered in Berlin to seek a new era based on European values that not only involve the expansion of transnational systems but the contraction of free speech rights.
Here is the column:
“A New World Order with European Values.” Emblazoned across banners and signs, those words met the participants at this week’s meeting of the World Forum in Berlin. Each year, leaders, executives, journalists and academics gather to address the greatest threats facing humanity. This year, there was little doubt about what they view as the current threat: the resurgence of populism and free speech.
In fairness to the Forum, “a New World Order” likely sounds more ominous for some civil libertarians than intended. While the European Union is a transnational government stretching across 27 nations, the organizers were referring to a shift of values away from the United States to Europe.
As one of the few speakers at the forum who was calling for greater protections for free speech, I found it an unnerving message. Even putting aside, the implications of the New World Order, the idea of building a world on today’s European values is alarming for free speech.
Free speech is in a free fall in Europe, with ever-expanding speech regulations and criminal prosecutions — including for having “toxic ideologies.”
The World Forum has a powerful sense of fraternity, even an intimacy, among leaders who see each other as a global elite — a cadre of enlightened minds protecting citizens from their own poor choices and habits. There has long been a push for transnational governing systems, and European figures see an opportunity created by the conflict with President Trump. The European Union is the model for such a Pax Europaea or “European peace.”
The problem is that this vision for a new Holy Roman Empire lacks a Charlamagne. More importantly, it lacks public support.
The very notion of a “New World Order” is chilling to many who oppose the rise of a globalist class with the rise of transnational governance in the European Union and beyond.
This year, there is a sense of panic among Europe’s elite over the victory of Trump and the Republicans in the U.S., as well as nationalist and populist European movements. For globalists, the late Tip O’Neill’s rule that “all politics is local” is anathema. The European Union is intended to transcend national identities and priorities in favor of an inspired transnational government managed by an expert elite.
The message was clear. The new world order would be based on European, not American, values. To rally the faithful to the cause, the organizers called upon two of the patron saints of the global elite: Bill and Hillary Clinton. President Clinton was even given an award as “leader of the century.” The Clintons were clearly in their element. Speaker after speaker denounced Trump and the rise of what they called “autocrats” and “oligarchs.” The irony was crushing. The European Union is based on the oligarchy of a ruling elite. The World Forum even took time to celebrate billionaires from Bill Gates to George Soros for funding “open societies” and greater transnational powers.
The discussions focused on blunting the rise of far-right parties and stemming the flow of “disinformation” that fosters such dissent. Outside of this rarefied environment, the Orwellian language would border on the humorous: protecting democracy from itself and limiting free speech to foster free speech.
Yet, one aspect of the forum was striking and refreshingly open. This year it became clear why transnational governance gravitates toward greater limits on free speech. Of course, all of this must be done in the name of democracy and free speech.
There is a coded language that is now in vogue with the anti-free speech community. They never say the word “censorship.” They prefer “content moderation.” They do not call for limiting speech. Instead, they call for limiting “false,” “hateful” or “inciteful” speech.
As for the rise of opposing parties and figures, they are referred to as movements by “low-information voters” misled by disinformation. Of course, it is the government that will decide what are acceptable and unacceptable viewpoints.
That code was broken recently by Vice President JD Vance, who confronted our European allies in Munich to restore free speech. He stripped away the pretense and called out the censorship.
With the rise of populist groups, anti-immigration movements and critics of European governance, there is a palpable challenge to EU authority. In that environment, free speech can be viewed as destabilizing because it spreads dissent and falsehoods about these figures and their agenda. Thus far, “European peace” has come at the price of silencing many of those voices, achieving the pretense of consensus through coerced silence.
Transnational governance requires consent over a wide swath of territory. The means that the control or cooperation of media and social media is essential to maintaining the consent of the governed. That is why free speech is in a tailspin in Europe, with ever-expanding speech regulations and criminal prosecutions.
Yet, it is difficult to get a free people to give up freedom. They have to be very afraid or very angry. One of the speakers was Maria A. Ressa, a journalist and Nobel laureate. I admire Ressa’s courage as a journalist but previously criticized her anti-free speech positions. Ressa has struck out against critics who have denounced her for allegedly antisemitic views. She has warned that the right is using free speech and declaring “I will say it now: ‘The fascists are coming.’”
At the forum, Ressa again called for the audience of “powerful leaders” to prevent lies and dangerous disinformation from spreading worldwide.
But the free speech movement has shown a surprising resilience in the last few years. First, Elon Musk bought Twitter and dismantled its censorship apparatus, restoring free speech to the social media platform. More recently, Mark Zuckerburg announced that Meta would also restore free speech protections on Facebook and other platforms.
In a shock to many, young Irish voters have been credited with killing a move to further expand the criminalization of speech to include “xenophobia” and the “public dissemination or distribution of tracts, pictures or other material” from viewpoints barred under the law.
Anti-free speech forces are gathering to push back on such trends. Indeed, Hillary Clinton has hardly been subtle about the dangers of free speech to the new world order. After Musk bought Twitter with the intention of restoring free speech protections, Clinton called upon the European Union to use its infamous Digital Services Act to make Musk censor her fellow Americans. She has also suggested arresting those spreading disinformation.
The European Union did precisely that by threatening Musk with confiscatory fines and even arrest unless he censored users. When Musk decided to interview Trump in this election, EU censors warned him that they would be watching for any disinformation.
For many citizens, European governance does not exactly look like a triumph over “oligarchs” and “autocrats.” Indeed, the EU looks pretty oligarchic with its massive bureaucracy guided by a global elite and “good” billionaires like Soros and Gates.
Citizens would be wise to look beyond the catchy themes and consider what Pax Europaea would truly mean to them. We have many shared values with our European allies. However, given the current laws limiting political speech, a “New World Order Based on European Values” is hardly an inviting prospect for those who believe in robust democratic and free speech values.
A.F. Branco Cartoon – The legacy Media (CNN, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, NY Times, etc.) have lost all credibility among most of America because of the outright lies and bias toward the left they have shown over the past few decades. The new Alternative media, such as Warroom with Steve Bannon, Dan Bongino, The Gateway Pundit, and many others, are being turned to as reliable sources for information.
Mark Halperin and Guest Slam Tone Deafness and Bias of Media Outlets Like MSNBC: ‘Utterly Broken’ (VIDEO)
By Mike LaChance – The Gateway Pundit – Feb 27, 2025
Mark Halperin recently had a conversation with Marc Caputo, formerly of Politico, and they tore into MSNBC for the outlet’s inability or flat out refusal to course correct after the outcome of the 2024 election. They make some great points, especially about the hiring of Jen Psaki at MSNBC and how no one in the mainstream media seemed to have a problem with it. MSNBC is in the process of imploding. Joy Reid was just fired and Rachel Maddow has lost a significant portion of her staff and yet they show no signs of trying to fix the problems that are killing the network… READ MORE
A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions (art and politics) and translated them into cartoons that have been popular all over the country in various news outlets, including NewsMax, Fox News, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Rep. Devin Nunes, Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Chris Salcedo, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and President Trump.
I am returning today after speaking at the Broadmoor in Colorado Springs about my book, “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.” Last night, I was approached by a student named Andrew who asked whether he should just remain quiet at his college, where professors routinely slam conservatives and teach highly ideological views as gospel. I went on a walk this morning around dawn and spotted this swan. I immediately thought of the young man who came up to me after my talk.
Andrew, when you find yourself surrounded by ducks, don’t try to be a duck.
There are three simple reasons. First, you will make a uniquely poor duck, and the flight South will be exhausting. Second, none of the other ducks are likely to believe that you are really a duck. Finally, and most importantly, you are not a migratory bird. You only go through this life once and either live it on your own terms or live an inauthentic life.
We have discussed how the current orthodox and intolerant environment in higher education has resulted in a culture of self-censorship. (here, here, here, and here). Surveys show conservative students are 300 times more likely to self-censor. Even the largely liberal faculty at leading schools report self-censoring to avoid being targeted.
This year, Harvard found itself in a familiar spot on the annual ranking of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE): dead last among 251 universities and colleges.
What is most striking is the fact that Harvard has created this hostile environment while maintaining an overwhelmingly liberal student body and faculty. Only 9 percent of the class identified as conservative or very conservative.
Yet, even liberals feel stifled at Harvard. Only 41 percent of liberal students reported being comfortable discussing controversial topics, and only 25 percent of moderates and 17 percent of conservatives felt comfortable in doing so.
During the Harvard debate, I raised the gradual reduction of conservatives and libertarians in the student body and the faculty.
The Harvard Crimson has documented how the school’s departments have virtually eliminated Republicans. In one study of multiple departments last year, they found that more than 75 percent of the faculty self-identified as “liberal” or “very liberal.”
Only 5 percent identified as “conservative,” and only 0.4% as “very conservative.”
According to Gallup, the U.S. population is roughly equally divided among conservatives (36%), moderates (35%), and liberals (26%).
So Harvard has three times the number of liberals as the nation at large, and less than three percent identify as “conservative” rather than 35 percent nationally.
Among law school faculty who donated more than $200 to a political party, 91 percent of the Harvard faculty gave to Democrats.
While Professor Kennedy dismissed the notion that Harvard should look more like America, the problem is that it does not even look like Massachusetts. Even as one of the most liberal states in the country, roughly one-third of the voters still identify as Republican.
The student body shows the same selection bias. Harvard Crimson previously found that only 7 percent of incoming students identified as conservative, but the latest survey shows that number at 9 percent.
Some faculty members are wringing their hands over this continued hostile environment. However, the faculty as a whole is unwilling to restore free speech and intellectual diversity by adding conservative and libertarian faculty members and sponsoring events that reflect a broad array of viewpoints.
Given my respect for Professor Kennedy, I was surprised that he dismissed the sharp rise in students saying that they did not feel comfortable speaking in classes. Referring to them as “conservative snowflakes,” he insisted that they had to have the courage of their convictions.
This ignores the fact that they depend upon professors for recommendations, and challenging the school’s orthodoxy can threaten their standing. Moreover, a recent survey shows that even liberal students feel chilled in the environment created by Harvard faculty and administrators.
In other words, these are ducks surrounded by ducks who are still afraid of quacking out of turn.
Even a mute swan is actually not mute and are known to trumpet when other animals (including humans) threaten their nests or cygnets.
In other words, Andrew, if you are a swan, be a swan.
You need a quantum computer to keep up with all the lies Democrats tell. The people whose pictures are next to the dictionary definition of “misinformation” continue claiming they want to prevent it. The irony could power a small city.
Before I explain Democrats’ new strategy, let’s revisit just a few of their lies.
They’ve lied about COVID, vaccines, the 2020 election, January 6th, the border, Biden’s health, Kamala Harris’ popularity, and more. At this point, it’s easier to compile a list of what they haven’t lied about—although that might be a very short article.
Take Biden’s health, for instance. According to the Left, Biden is a spry 81-year-old whose physical fitness rivals an Olympic decathlete. Forget the times he’s needed directions to exit a stage or appeared to shake hands with invisible people. These are just “Right-wing conspiracy theories,” they assure us. Pay no attention to the fact that his press secretary has to fend off questions about cognitive tests as if she were playing dodgeball at a middle school gym.
But the lies don’t stop there. Polls, the Holy Grail of Democrat propaganda, are another playground for their creativity.
They’d have us believe that Kamala Harris is an inspirational leader—a cross between Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Beyoncé. Never mind her poll numbers, which are less popular than cold soup on a winter night. It’s not that people dislike her; it’s that they “don’t understand her brilliance,” we’re told. Apparently, Harris’ true genius is just too avant-garde for the unwashed masses.
When it comes to controlling the narrative, Democrats run their misinformation machine with the precision of a Swiss watchmaker. They use their iron grip on media and social platforms to determine what’s permissible to discuss. Don’t believe Hunter Biden’s laptop is real? Good. Because until recently, they didn’t want you to. Now that they’ve quietly admitted its authenticity, it’s suddenly not a story. The Left’s motto? “When caught lying, either double down or move on.”
COVID might be their magnum opus of deception. Remember “two weeks to flatten the curve”? That turned into two years of lockdowns, masks, vaccine mandates, and lives disrupted—all built on shifting narratives. When questioned about the science behind their mandates, they responded with a collective shrug and a mantra: “Trust the experts.” But their experts were often caught contradicting themselves. Masks worked until they didn’t. Vaccines prevented transmission until they didn’t. Yet, questioning any of this earned you a label: “misinformation spreader.”
And then there’s the border. According to Democrats, it’s “secure.” To anyone with eyes, it’s a humanitarian disaster. Footage of people streaming across the border like concertgoers at a music festival? That’s just Right-wing fearmongering, they insist. Meanwhile, cities like New York and Chicago are collapsing under the weight of their sanctuary policies, but don’t expect an admission of failure. For the Left, reality is just another obstacle to overcome with spin.
Speaking of spin, the 2020 election was a masterclass in narrative control.
Question the results? You’re a “threat to democracy.” Ignore the irregularities, the last-minute rule changes, and the statistical anomalies—all “perfectly normal,” they assured us. Then came January 6th, which they’ve weaponized to such an extent that it’s become the Left’s 9/11. To hear them tell it, the Capitol breach was an existential threat to the republic, second only to people questioning vaccine efficacy.
But perhaps the most brazen lie is their insistence that they’re the party of “truth.” They’ve launched a new version of Obama’s infamous “Attack Watch” website, this time with a straight face. It’s a digital tattletale system designed to flag dissent and offer counter-narratives, which are really just rebranded talking points. Back in 2011, Attack Watch was mocked out of existence, but Democrats are banking on the fact that people have short memories.
“Big Disinfo” is their answer. A website dedicated to trying to debunk the truth.
And if you’re wondering where all that extra money went that the Biden team gave to the NGOs to spend as quickly as possible, you guessed it. Big Disinfo promises to defend democracy the lies with fact-checking operations promised to patrol the boundaries of reality.
Their desperation to control the truth is a sign of how tenuous their grip on it has become. They’re the snake oil salesmen of politics, peddling elixirs that don’t work and hoping no one notices. But here’s the catch: the American people are noticing. Polls show increasing skepticism of the media, distrust of institutions, and disapproval of the Biden administration’s policies. The harder the Left tries to sell their version of reality; the more people question the product.
Democrats are trapped in a web of their own making.
Their lies have become so convoluted that even they can’t keep them straight. Like a bad sitcom with too many plot twists, the audience is tuning out. And while they’ll undoubtedly try to spin this as another “Right-wing conspiracy,” the truth is catching up with them. Slowly, but inevitably.
As we head into 2025, expect the Left’s misinformation machine to go into overdrive. The lies will get bigger, the narratives more absurd, and the denials more emphatic. But remember: desperation smells a lot like a Democrat trying to convince you they’re telling the truth. And the stench is getting harder to ignore.
Mark Zuckerberg wants to turn over a new leaf on the social media censorship — but some in the media don’t seem happy about giving up the power to silence people.
Tuesday morning, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta’s social media sites including Facebook, Instagram, and Threads would be eliminating their heavy-handed censorship policies and moving towards a “community notes” model for policing content like X. This includes terminating their “third party factchecking program” where the company paid legacy media organizations to “fact check” content on the site and then used those judgments to censor content.
At this point there’s little reason to believe that Mark Zuckerberg can do much to atone for what he did to suppress speech and damage conservative publications. However, on the surface level this is a significant PR victory for free speech and, unsurprisingly, Facebook’s fact checking partners are not taking it well. Aaron Sharockman, the executive director of PolitiFact which is one of Facebook/Meta’s original fact checking partners going back eight years, just posted this defensive letter on X. Some of the highlights:
The decision to remove independent journalists from Facebook’s content moderation program in the United States has nothing to do with free speech or censorship. Mark Zuckerberg could not be less subtle. …
Facebook and Meta solely created the penalties that publishers faced and the warning labels and overlays that users saw. It was Facebook and Meta that created a system that allowed ordinary citizens to see their posts demoted but exempted politicians and political leaders who said the very same things. In case it needs to be said, PolitiFact and U.S. fact-checking journalists played no role in the decision to remove Donald Trump from Facebook. …
When we make an error, there is a process to correct those mistakes. And there is also a process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information. That’s how the information cycle is supposed to work.
If Meta is upset it created a tool to censor, it should look in the mirror.
PolitiFact has been a thoroughly dishonest and contemptible organization since its inception, but this is a particularly dishonest and self-serving excuse, even for them. And I happen know what I’m talking about. After years of detailed reporting on the dishonesty of so called “fact checkers,” the publication I worked for, The Weekly Standard, made the decision to become, like PolitiFact, one of Facebook’s official fact checking partners. And I can tell you a few things about this arrangement that, if you care about free speech and journalistic integrity, will make your blood boil.
The first is that Facebook paid it’s fact checking partners for participating in this program — in PolitiFact’s case, Meta supplied more than 5 percent of their annual revenue. In practice, this meant that news organizations such as PolitiFact, USA Today, and, yes, The Weekly Standard, participating in this program were taking a large sum from one of the country’s largest and most influential corporations. This was a massive conflict of interest, considering these same publications were also tasked with covering Facebook neutrally when it came up in the news. Which was a lot.
Already news organizations were skittish about Facebook because the death of print media and the subscription model meant they were heavily dependent on Facebook for steering traffic their way to make money on digital advertising. Taking money directly from Facebook meant they had you over a barrel in multiple ways. If there was cause to criticize Facebook’s policies about censoring content or any other matter, doing so meant these publications were biting the hand that fed them.
Soon after the [2016] election, BuzzFeed was reporting, “Facebook employees have formed an unofficial task force to question the role their company played in promoting fake news in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s victory in the US election last week.” The group was operating in open defiance of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said the idea that Facebook had unfairly tilted the election in Trump’s favor was “crazy.” Zuckerberg had already faced criticism earlier, in May 2016, when Gizmodo reported, “Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential ‘trending’ news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project.”
By December 2016, Zuckerberg had caved. Facebook adopted a new policy of trying to combat the alleged “fake news” that troubled Facebook’s left-wing employees. The tech giant would start paying media outlets to “fact-check” news on the site. With media revenue steadily declining — in no small part because Facebook had radically disrupted the traditional journalistic business models — once reputable news organizations signed up to participate in the fact-checking program. Media outlets that were supposed to be objectively covering Facebook were now on Facebook’s payroll, given the power to determine all the news that was fit to print.
Whether or not the tech companies wanted to admit it, much of Silicon Valley’s anger over Trump’s victory was about their inability to control American opinion.
Third, the idea that PolitiFact or any of Facebook’s media fact checking partners were blameless for participating in Facebook’s censorship and stifling free speech is such a dubious and offensive argument it’s incredible anyone would attempt to make it.
In the summer of 2018, the Weekly Standard’s participation in the Facebook’s fact checking program led to far and away the most awkward staff meeting in the eight years that I worked there. I wrote about this episode at length (and in this book), but essentially what happened is that the young journalist The Weekly Standard employed who wrote fact checks for Facebook openly said he was uncomfortable with the responsibility:
He explained that whenever he did one of his fact checking columns, part of his gig involved going into a special portal in Facebook’s backend created for its fact checking mercenaries, where he entered details about his fact check. When he entered a claim of “false,” he was asked to enter the URL of the story where he found the claim – at which point Facebook, according to their own press releases, would then kill 80 percent of the global internet traffic to that story. Our fact checker explained this was making him uncomfortable. Some of these fact checks were complicated, and he felt his judgment wasn’t absolute.
It was a record scratch moment in the staff meeting. After a beat, I spoke up and said something to the effect of “you mean to tell me, that a single journalist has the power to render judgment to nearly wipe a news story off of the internet?” Where our publication had once taken pride in challenging the dishonesty and bias of the corporate media, it dawned on me — and more than a few others in the room — that whatever influence our failing publication had was now being leveraged to act as part of a terrifyingly effective censorship regime controlled by a hated social media company run by one of the world’s richest men.
Suffice this anecdote to say, this all culminated in one editor at the magazine raising his voice — in defense of Facebook — in a way that made everyone in the room rather uncomfortable. Imagine you’re a writer at a conservative magazine and confronting the fact you’re participating in a program where a centi-billionaire pays a bunch of legacy media hacks to disproportionately censor politically inconvenient opinions on the right. I knew it was bad, but I was pretty alarmed to realize not all of my colleagues found this intolerable. But by this point The Weekly Standard was hemorrhaging subscribers and was shut down a few months later. Alas, the more animated editor in that meeting doesn’t appear to have learned from the episode.
After the closure of The Weekly Standard, alumni from that magazine started a new publication known as The Dispatch. Despite what had happened at our ill-fated previous employer, becoming a Facebook fact checking partner was one easy way for a new publication to get revenue, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t long before this new arrangement prompted controversy. A Dispatch fact check claimed two advertisements from the pro-life group Susan B. Anthony List claimed “partly false information.”
The allegedly false information was that the Susan B. Anthony List was claiming Joe Biden and the Democrat Party supported late-term abortion. It didn’t matter that this claim wasn’t even particularly debatable as Biden and the Democrat Party clearly support late-term abortion.
After a lot of online blowback — at the time, one of the marquee names at The Dispatch was David French, an alleged evangelical pro-life stalwart turned Kamala Harris voter — the publication promised to review and correct their error. Despite the public promise, you should not be surprised to learn that, either through negligence by The Dispatch or Facebook, the “process to make sure Facebook and Meta receive the corrected information” touted above got no results. Susan B. Anthony List and its election ads were banned from Facebook in the critical weeks right before the 2020 election, which was decided by a mere 40,000 or so votes.
Mind you, this is all based on my comparably limited experience with a censorship program whose flaws were readily apparent to anyone. It would be impossible to muster enough contempt for an organization such as PolitiFact, who by their own admission did thousands of fact checks for Facebook to enable their direct censorship of ordinary citizens and important political voices alike.
Like I said, I find Mark Zuckerberg’s motivations suspect, to say nothing of the restitution he owes conservative publications like this one that told the truth only to be suppressed and censored. But regardless of how we arrived at this point, Facebook’s statement that what they were doing was wrong and the termination of their fact checking program are important concessions to the reality that ordinary Americans believe in and want free speech.
I imagine it’s hard to accept that you’ve been the villain all along, but Sharockman and PolitiFact don’t get to have it both ways. PolitiFact concedes they took Facebook’s money, but that doesn’t mean they share any responsibility for Facebook justifying censorship with the services they provided? No, PolitiFact knew full well they were providing the bullets for Facebook’s gun, and they were happy to do it because they liked who Facebook was aiming at.
We’ll see if Facebook follows through with its promise to be less censorious, but it’s impossible to read Sharockman’s hackneyed justifications without looking forward to the day where self-appointed fact checkers are irrelevant to what Americans are allowed to say.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
In part one of this investigation into how Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign is deceptively manipulating online platforms, it was revealed that the campaign is operating a Discord server that directs hordes of volunteers to use their social media accounts to deceptively push election propaganda. The goal is to artificially manufacture consensus by making pro-Kamala Harris messages on social media appear more popular than they are, and it is often done in violation of the Terms of Service of the social media platforms. In more extreme cases, they are encouraging people to skirt election laws and using these “astroturfing” campaigns to spread disinformation they think will help win the upcoming election.
Yesterday’s report documented how the Harris-Walz campaign has seen great success in manipulating Reddit’s algorithm, but that isn’t the only social media site they’re manipulating. The campaign has also been targeting Elon Musk’s X, perhaps the most influential site for political news. One particular goal, according to a user of the Harris-Walz campaign Discord server, is to get campaign volunteers to swarm the site and “block [community notes] we don’t like.”
Prior to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the site’s management was known for capriciously removing information and regularly banning users in a way that employed a double standard that heavily disfavored conservative opinion. Musk, a major free speech advocate, sought to institute a more neutral way to deal with misleading tweets, and the “Community Notes” system was born.
Select users who signed up for the program could propose notes to be added to tweets showing that the information was wrong, misleading, or required important context. Other users can then read the proposed notes and vote on whether they are accurate or needed, and if the proposed notes get enough favorable votes, they get appended to the post permanently.
Despite this, virtually none of the false and misleading tweets from Kamala Harris’ campaign have Community Notes appended to them. One likely explanation for this discrepancy is that the Harris campaign is directing volunteers on its Discord server to vote down Community Notes even when those notes accurately say the campaign is being deceptive.
In the “twitter-community-notes” channel found on the Harris-Walz Discord, paid Democrat staffers are also writing dubious Community Notes on X to undermine GOP and Trump messaging. They then encourage volunteers to rate them positively.
Unsurprisingly, these notes are often filled with half-truths, misleading information, or lies, such as explaining how Joe Biden’s son’s brain tumor must have been due to his service in Iraq.
The Harris-Walz server even has a “Twitter (X) Community Notes Training” module, which describes how users can quickly bump up their Community Notes “Rating Impact,” which allows them to write their own Community Notes with a high enough status. They also describe “problems” with Community Notes, such as Joe Biden being tagged in “inaccurate Community Notes,” and how users can rate them negatively.
Since X’s Community Notes upvoting system is designed to mitigate political bias far better than Reddit’s, the Harris-Walz campaign’s attempt to manipulate Community Notes on X hasn’t been as successful.
One Harris-Walz Discord user lengthily expressed his frustrations at the bias mitigation system used by Community Notes (CNs), which was implemented to prevent user manipulation:
While their attempts to abuse Community Notes on X were largely ineffective, it is still a gross violation of X’s Terms of Service, which prohibits artificially amplifying information.
Other Astroturfing Operations
The Harris-Walz Discord server provides access to an app called “Reach” which gives its users access to a database of “entertaining” Harris-Walz campaign content.
X has also introduced “Radar,” a feature that lets users see post volumes on specific topics. Using messaging guidance from three Reach posts, I found evidence of hundreds of astroturfing profiles for the Harris campaign on X. The same search was done on Google with one of the images, suggesting broader reach. While the Google data is larger, it is also likely incomplete while the X data is complete. The scale of this operation continues to grow.
Users can connect their own personal social media accounts to the Reach app, so they can easily repost memes, videos, and other content that promotes the ideals of the Harris-Walz campaign.
While topics relating to current events routinely trend on Reddit and X, other platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram, gear themselves towards entertaining content. To target these platforms, the campaign is also using Reach. Unfortunately for them, the content they provide pretty much resembles your liberal aunt’s Facebook timeline.
To people who have spent years online learning the nuances of meme culture, this is fundamentally repulsive. It embodies the inauthentic nature of the modern internet, which has seemingly replaced the “old net” in the last two decades.
Not only do they love flamboyant actors masquerading as American “men,” they also enjoyed actively promoting it during a football game, boosting their post with unrelated hashtags that happened to be trending at the time. This is yet another shady tactic used to bump up social media posts inauthentically, shamelessly employed by official Harris-Walz volunteers.
But at this late stage in the campaign, it would appear spreading inauthentic content and deceptive messages is all the Harris campaign can do.
The author runs the popular Twitter account @reddit_lies.
Maricopa County Recorder Steven Richer turned to the left-leaning States United Democracy Center and an overseas group bankrolled by the State Department to help his office target election speech that’s disapproved of by the government, according to emails obtained by The Federalist.
Richer thanked States United for offering to let his office “piggyback” on the group’s anti-speech operations, which he described as “deep scanning” the internet for “disinformation,” a term often invoked to censor speech the government disagrees with. States United is a left-wing election law group that consistently opposes Republican election integrity legislation like voter ID laws and supports Democrat attempts to diminish election security, according to InfluenceWatch. The group has praised the weaponization of the justice system against Trump, and was described by The New York Times as part of a “coalition” preparing to “push back” against a potential Trump victory with “extraordinary pre-emptive actions.”
According to email records, States United set up a call with Richer’s staff and the global censorship group, Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD). ISD is a London group that has been accused of wrongly labeling “mainstream views” as “misinformation” and subsequently censoring conservative opinions online, according to InfluenceWatch. The group was the recipient of a 2021 grant sponsored by the State Department’s Global Engagement Center, which “fund[s] the development of censorship tools,” as The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland has reported. The ISD works with governments, leftist 501(c)(3) groups, and Big Tech companies as well as some of the left’sbiggestfinancialbackers.
Richer later suggested Arizona State University officials should fire Faculty Associate Aaron Ludwig for retweeting election concerns, apparently looping States United in on the process.
Briefings by Professional Censorship Gurus
“Thanks very much to States United for the kind offer to let us piggyback on some of the deep scanning you’re contracting for election threats and disinformation,” Richer emailed then-States United Senior Counsel Bo Dul on June 17, 2022. Richer indicated his office and “some … partners at the county” do some of this work already, but that he would “love to fill any holes” with the offer from States United.
A few minutes later, Dul told Richer that the States United senior adviser “leading our disinfo work,”Caroline Chambers, would be “circl[ing] up with our partners at ISD and your team to set up a call soon.” Before working for States United, Dul was the senior elections policy adviser and general counsel in the Arizona secretary of state’s office under Democrat Katie Hobbs. Now she’s again working as general counsel for Hobbs, who became governor of Arizona last year.
Chambers sent an email to Dul on June 21 and copied Richer, indicating she wanted to “set up a briefing.” On June 23, a States United staffer emailed Chambers, Dul, and other recipients a link to a Zoom meeting with the subject line “Maricopa County Recorder’s Office x SUDC x ISD Briefing.” The meeting was scheduled for June 28.
A “management analyst and special assistant to the Maricopa County Recorder” emailed staff on June 27, reminding them about the briefing the next morning.
The assistant pointed recipients to “background information on the Electoral Disinformation work the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) performs,” linking to an ISD webpage on “electoral disinformation.” The page boasts about ISD working with States United ahead of the 2022 midterms to “detect, analyze and escalate threats” like “election denialist activity,” and links to news clips of ISD representatives celebrating efforts to pressure Big Tech into censoring more speech.
The June 27, 2022, email from the “special assistant” indicated Richer was traveling at the time of the briefing and may or may not have attended the call but wanted his staff to “go ahead” and attend either way. Asked how long the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has collaborated with States United and ISD and whether they are currently working with those groups, a representative from Richer’s office told The Federalist the recorder has “worked with numerous entities” over “the last several years.”
“We have received information from States United Democracy Center regarding election worker safety and, as we do with all new information, taken it into consideration,” the representative said, before listing ways the office has made itself “widely available to the public.”
Attempt to Cancel a Professor for Retweeting Election Post
Just the next month, Richer emailed Arizona State University officials to suggest they fire Criminology and Criminal Justice Faculty Associate Aaron Ludwig for his online speech. Richer was upset because Ludwig had retweeted election concerns.
“He is a regular purveyor of election disinformation and misinformation,” Richer wrote on July 31, linking to Ludwig’s account on Twitter (now X). “I ask that you assess if he is fit to be part of the ASU faculty.”
Richer claimed Ludwig was “promoting messages that encourage harassment of and violence toward” two Maricopa County Elections Department employees. The recorder included several screenshots of tweets Ludwig reposted, including one that accused the employees of improperly using a security badge and deleting election files and another that was critical of Richer himself.
“The allegations are, of course, errant nonsense that only imbecilic troglodytes could possibly believe after five minutes of research,” Richer spewed in the email, referencing the retweet.
An ASU dean, Cynthia Lietz, sent an email to Richer the same day with the subject line “RE: Aaron Ludwig.”
“Thank you for this important information, we will look into this,” she wrote.
Dul, the States United operative, also emailed Richer and his staff the next day with the subject line “Re: Aaron Ludwig.” The entire body of the email was redacted when released to The Federalist.
Months passed, but Richer wouldn’t let Ludwig’s speech go. He followed up with Lietz on Feb. 6, 2023, in the same email thread.
“Did anything ever come of this?” he asked.
“Yes, we did address this,” Lietz wrote in an email the next day.
Ludwig told The Federalist his supervisors never discussed the matter with him, but he first heard about the situation in April when acquaintances found the interchange in a public records request. He said he thinks Richer’s actions violate the First Amendment.
“The government should not be allowed, and I believe, is not allowed pursuant to the First Amendment, to censor free speech unless it is those few things that can” constitutionally be regulated, he said.
Ludwig was chief of the racketeering and asset forfeiture section at the Arizona Attorney General’s Office from 2011 to 2014, and a special prosecutor for the office until 2015, according to his LinkedIn.
“I led Arizona’s charge against organized crime and the southern border, the transnational criminal organizations including all the drug cartels,” he told The Federalist. “For somebody to attack my background and credentials and professionalism and integrity, and accuse me of being some filthy liar or anything is so offensive. It’s destructive to my reputation. I believe it’s defamatory per se.”
Called Free Speech a ‘Thorn in the Side of My Office’
Richer recently lost the Republican primary for county recorder. He initially campaigned on election integrity, but once in office, he used “his perch as an opportunity to regularly defend the Democrat-run 2020 election in Maricopa County, write op-eds at CNN against the type of election audits he conducted to gain power, draft lengthy screeds lambasting Republican leaders and voters for their election integrity concerns, and push ranked-choice voting and other efforts critics say are disastrous for voter confidence in elections,” as the Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway previously reported.
“The Constitution today is in some ways a thorn in the side of my office. Specifically the First Amendment,” the recorder allegedly wrote in a draft speech, according to Just the News. The outlet also obtained a document with instructions on “banning a user on social media,” which the county reportedly told Just the News was “a draft document of ideas that were brought up in a meeting but never implemented.” Richer has also worked with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — the federal government’s censorship“nerve center” — in his war on unapproved speech.
Richer, who has become a corporate mediadarling for criticizing the election integrity concerns of his former supporters, has also attracted the attention of Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman. During Richer’s unsuccessful primary bid, Hoffman helped fund mailers backing the recorder, as The Federalist previously reported.
Logan Washburn is a staff writer covering election integrity. He graduated from Hillsdale College, served as Christopher Rufo’s editorial assistant, and has bylines in The Wall Street Journal, The Tennessean, and The Daily Caller. Logan is originally from Central Oregon but now lives in rural Michigan.
Hillary Clinton is continuing her global efforts to get countries, including the United States, to crackdown on opposing views. Clinton went on CNN to lament the continued resistance to censorship and to call upon Congress to limit free speech. In pushing her latest book, “Something Lost and Something Gained,” Clinton amplified on her warnings about the dangers of free speech. What is clear is that the gain of greater power for leaders like Clinton would be the loss of free speech for ordinary citizens.
Clinton heralded the growing anti-free speech movement and noted that “there are people who are championing it, but it’s been a long and difficult road to getting anything done.” She is right, of course. As I discuss in my book, the challenge for anti-free speech champions like Clinton is that it is not easy to convince a free people to give up their freedom. That is why figures like Clinton are going “old school” and turning to government or corporations to simply crackdown on citizens. One of the lowest moments came after Elon Musk bought Twitter on a pledge to restore free speech protections, Clinton called upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). This is a former democratic presidential nominee calling upon Europeans to force the censorship of Americans.
She was joined recently by another former democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, who called for government crackdowns on free speech. Other democrats have praised Brazil for banning X. For her part, Clinton praised the anti-free speech efforts in California and New York and called for the rest of the country to replicate the approach of those states.
Clinton added a particularly illuminating line that said the quiet part out loud. This is all about power and the fear that she and others will “lose control” over speech:
“Whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or X or Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are, if they don’t moderate and monitor the content we lose total control and it’s not just the social and psychological effects it’s real harm, it’s child porn and threats of violence, things that are terribly dangerous.”
Clinton continues to offer a textbook example of the anti-free speech narrative. While seeking sweeping censorship for anything deemed disinformation, Clinton cites specific examples that are already barred under federal law like child porn.
Despite the amplified message on sites like CNN, most citizens may not be as aggrieved as Clinton that she and her allies could “lose total control” over the Internet. The greater fear is that she and her allies could regain control of social media. The Internet is the single greatest invention for free speech since the printing press. That is precisely why figures like Clinton are panicked over the inability to control it.
If citizens remain true to their values and this indispensable right, Clinton will hopefully continue to face “a long and difficult road to getting anything done” in limiting the free speech of her fellow citizens.
The most important exchange in Tuesday’s vice-presidential debate has been almost entirely ignored by the corporate media. Not surprisingly, that’s because it makes Walz look like an authoritarian and a fool in one fell swoop:
J.D. Vance: The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to use …
Tim Walz: …[inaudible] threatening or hate speech …
J.D. Vance: … the power of government and Big Tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.
Tim Walz:You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.
J.D. Vance: Tim. Fire in a crowded theater? You guys wanted to kick people off of Facebook for saying that toddlers should not wear masks.
CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell:Senator, the governor does have the floor.
Tim Walz:Sorry.
Ok, let’s unpack what happened here. Walz challenged Vance on Trump’s questioning of the 2020 election results and Jan. 6, and Vance countered by saying that if Walz and his running mate, Kamala Harris, were so concerned about the fate of democracy they wouldn’t be so adamantly pro-censorship. Specifically, Walz has previously said, quite incorrectly from any legal or moral standpoint, that there’s no First Amendment right to “misinformation.”
Walz interjects to, near as I can tell, try and clarify that he was also talking about limiting “threatening” words or “hate speech.” Interestingly, I looked at multiple debate transcriptions, and none of them had this quite audible interjection included — though the first word or two is hard to discern, the part about “threatening or hate speech”is quite clear. In any event, to the extent that Walz is trying to defend himself he’s doing an awful job.
The legal standards for “threatening” speech or incitement might be clearer, but it’s still a fraught issue. As for “hate speech,” he has no idea what he’s talking about. You may not like it, but “hate speech” is absolutely protected speech. The First Amendment is absolutely a right to offend people without legal sanction, even gratuitously. Otherwise, policing speech is just a tool for government oppression. After all, who defines what constitutes “hate speech?” Walz seems to be suggesting he wants to throw people in jail for not using preferred pronouns and the like.
But the coup de grace for sinister ignorance is Walz saying, “You can’t yell fire in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.” Now if you know anything about First Amendment issues, the “fire in a crowded theater” line makes civil libertarians break out in hives. Somewhat surprisingly, The Atlantic had a very good article a few years back about the origin of the phrase:
In reality, though, shouting “Fire” in a crowded theater is not a broad First Amendment loophole permitting the regulation of speech. The phrase originated in a case that did not involve yelling or fires or crowds or theaters. Charles T. Schenck, the general secretary of the U.S. Socialist Party, was convicted in a Philadelphia federal court for violating the Espionage Act by printing leaflets that criticized the military draft as unconstitutional.
In a six-paragraph opinion issued on March 3, 1919, Justice Holmes wrote for a unanimous Court that Schenck’s conviction was justified because the leaflets advocated for obstructing military recruiting and therefore constituted a “clear and present danger” during a time of war. “We admit that in many places and in ordinary times the defendants in saying all that was said in the circular would have been within their constitutional rights,” Holmes wrote. “But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done. The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic.”
The rest of the article is worth reading for the full history, but in short, arresting people for handing out anti-war literature was justified by comparing it to shouting fire in a crowded theater. Which is unconscionable. Holmes himself later did an about-face on his own reasoning a year later, and the Supreme Court decision above was overturned by the court quite definitively by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969. “Fire in a crowded theater” was never a reliable “Supreme Court test” as Walz put it, and it’s been totally inoperable as a matter of law since Walz was in kindergarten.
This is not some small matter here. I have no interest in defending what happened on Jan. 6 (though I do think a great many people have been subject to grossly unfair legal penalties for their participation in the riot, and that this has been done out of partisan spite). But Vance is absolutely correct when he says the Democrat Party’s embrace of censorship is far more threatening than anything on Jan. 6.
How do I know this? Well, to start, unlike Jan. 6, censorship has affected far more people and is an ongoing concern. This publication is involved in a lawsuit with The Daily Wire and the state of Texas against the State Department for promoting Big Tech censorship tools. The State Department justifies what they’re doing as part of a frightening attempt to police “misinformation” — which is routinely defined as any news that liberal academics and federal bureaucrats don’t think is politically expedient.
Earlier this week, Rep. Adam Schiff, who knowingly spread lies about President Trump treasonously colluding with Russia to undermine a fairly elected president, sent a letter to tech companies telling them to censor“false, hateful, and violent content” because it is a “threat” to the upcoming election. But who decides what content is false, hateful, or violent here? Adam Schiff is an especially unworthy judge of these matters, but then again, there’s no elected official that should be deciding who gets to say what. And sending letters that attempt to intimidate private companies into preventing Americans from exercising their most fundamental constitutional right … well, perhaps we live in more civil times, but I have an idea of how the Sons of Liberty would have responded to such a politician.
And it’s not just politicians, the First Amendment is also being actively undermined by the people who, in theory, have the biggest stake in protecting it. Our corporate media’s silence is further proof they quietly agree that the censorship of unruly citizens is necessary. After all, if they continue to do things like refuse a vaccine that doesn’t actually prevent transmission of the disease, stubbornly point out the octogenarian the White House has dementia, and won’t vote for who they’re told to —how exactly do they expect journalism’s current business model to succeed?
The fact remains that fewer people are going to read this very article because it’s being actively suppressed by Big Tech right now. Even if I didn’t have the receipts to show that this publication was being intentionally and unconstitutionally singled out for suppression by the feds, just the fact I typed “vaccine” in the preceding paragraph was probably enough to alert The Algorithms such that this article will forever show up on page six of any relevant search results. The writer in me wants to note the twisted irony of an article warning about the obliteration of the First Amendment being actively censored; the citizen in me just understands this as simple tyranny.
Unlike so many of my peers — alas, I think my parents have taken to telling their friends I sell used cars to spare themselves the shame of admitting I’m a journalist — I’m not going to tell you how to vote. But it is entirely fair to say that Tim Walz and his ilk do not understand the First Amendment, and they sure as hell don’t respect it.
And when people like that get in power, we all lose.
Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator
Below is my column in the New York Post on the recent remarks of former Secretary of State John Kerry to the World Economic Forum, the latest in an array of powerful American politicians warning about the dangers of free speech and calling for government controls. He joins his fellow former Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton in reaching out to the global elite for help in censoring their fellow Americans.
Here is the column:
If you want to know how hostile the global elite are to free speech, look no further than John Kerry’s recent speech to the World Economic Forum. Rather than extol the benefits of democratic liberty versus dictatorships and oligarchs, Kerry called the First Amendment a “major block” to keeping people from believing the “wrong” things.
“You know, there’s a lot of discussion now about how you curb those entities in order to guarantee that you’re going to have some accountability on facts, etc. But look, if people only go to one source, and the source they go to is sick, and, you know, has an agenda, and they’re putting out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to be able to just, you know, hammer it out of existence.
“So, what we need is to win the ground, win the right to govern, by hopefully winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
Free rein on social media
The “freedom” to be won in this election is to liberate officials who like himself can set about controlling what can be said, read or heard. Kerry insisted that the problem with social media is that no one is controlling what they can say or read.“The dislike of and anguish over social media is just growing and growing. It is part of our problem, particularly in democracies, in terms of building consensus around any issue,” he said.
“It’s really hard to govern today. The referees we used to have to determine what is a fact and what isn’t a fact have kind of been eviscerated, to a certain degree. And people go and self-select where they go for their news, for their information. And then you get into a vicious cycle.”
Kerry continued: “Democracies around the world now are struggling with the absence of a sort of truth arbiter, and there’s no one who defines what facts really are.”
It is not clear when in our history we allowed “referees” to “determine what is a fact.”
Since the First Amendment has been in place since 1791, it is hard to imagine when referees were used in conformity with our Constitution. The Founders would have been repulsed by the idea of a “truth arbiter.” Yet it was a pitch that clearly went over big with the crowd at the World Economic Forum.
Located in Geneva, Switzerland, it is funded by over 1,000 member companies around the world. It is the perfect body for the selection of our new governing “arbiters.” The greatest irony was that, after fearmongering about this supposed parade of horrible that comes from free speech, Kerry insisted, “If we could strip away some of the fearmongering that’s taking place and get down to the realities of what’s here for people, this is the biggest economic opportunity.”
It was like Ed Wood denouncing cheesy jump scares in horror movies. Kerry is only the latest Democratic leader or pundit to denounce the First Amendment.
In my book on free speech, I discuss the growing anti-free speech movement being led by law professors and supported by both politicians and journalists. They include Michigan law professor and MSNBC commentator Barbara McQuade, who has called free speech America’s “Achilles’ heel.”
Columbia law professor Tim Wu, a former Biden White House aide, wrote an op-ed declaring “The First Amendment Is Out of Control.” He explained that free speech “now mostly protects corporate interests” and threatens “essential jobs of the state, such as protecting national security and the safety and privacy of its citizens.”
George Washington University Law’s Mary Ann Franks complains that the First Amendment (and also the Second) is too “aggressively individualistic” and endangers “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare.”
‘Will we break the fever?’
Kerry hit all of the top talking points for the anti-free speech movement. He portrayed the First Amendment as hopelessly out of date and dangerous. He argued that citizens would be far better off if an elite could tell them what was information and what was disinformation.
Other political contemporaries are working on the same problem. Hillary Clinton has called upon Europeans to use the Digital Services Act to force the censoring of Americans. She has also suggested the arrest of Americans who she views as spreading disinformation.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D.-Mass.) has called for companies like Amazon to use enlightened algorithms to steer readers to “true” books on subjects like climate change to protect them from their own poor reading choices.
Kerry explained how the true heroes are those poor suffering government officials seeking to protect citizens from unbridled, unregulated thoughts:
“I think democracies are very challenged right now and have not proven they can move fast enough or big enough to deal with the challenges they are facing, and to me, that is part of what this election is all about. Will we break the fever in the United States?”
The “fever” of free speech is undeniably hard to break. You have to convince a free people to give up part of their freedom. To do so, they have to be very angry or very afraid. There is, of course, another possibility: that there is no existential danger of disinformation. Rather there are powerful figures who want to control speech in the world for their own purposes. These are the same rationales and the same voices that have been throughout our history for censorship.
Give me liberty
Each generation of government officials insists that they face some unprecedented threat, whether it was the printing press at the start of our republic or social media in this century. Only the solution remains the same: to hand over control of what we read or hear to a governing elite like Kerry.
In 1860, Frederick Douglass gave a “Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” and warned them that all of their struggles meant nothing if the “freedom of speech is struck down” because “Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist.” Douglass denounced those seeking to deny or limit free speech as making their “freedom a mockery.” Of course, Douglass knew nothing of social media, and he certainly never met the likes of John Kerry.
However, if we embrace our new arbiters of truth we deserve to be mocked as a people who held true freedom only to surrender it to a governing elite.
California has triggered the first lawsuit over its controversial new laws that require social media companies to censor fake images created by artificial intelligence, known as deepfakes as well as barring the posting of images. A video creator is suing the State of California after his use of a parody of Vice President Kamala Harris was banned. The law raises serious and novel constitutional questions under the First Amendment.
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed A.B. 2839, expanding the time period that bars the knowing posting of deceptive AI-generated or manipulated content about the election. He also signed A.B. 2655, requiring social media companies to remove or label deceptive or digitally altered AI-generated content within 72 hours of a complaint. A third bill, A.B. 2355, requires election advertisements to disclose whether they use AI-generated or manipulated content.
The American Civil Liberties Union of California, Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the California News Publishers Association and the California Broadcasters Association opposed the legislation on first amendment grounds.
Elon Musk recently reposted the image of Christopher Kohls, who he defended as fighting for that “absolute Constitutional right to lampoon politicians he believes should not be elected.”
Kohls objected that the new law requires a new font size for the labeling that would fill up the entire screen of his video.
In the complaint below, Kohls noted “[w]hile the obviously far-fetched and over-the-top content of the video make its satirical nature clear, Plaintiff entitled the video ‘Kamala Harris Campaign Ad PARODY.’”
AB 2389 covers “deepfakes,” when “[a] candidate for any federal, state, or local elected office in California portrayed as doing or saying something that the candidate did not do or say if the content is reasonably likely to harm the reputation or electoral prospects of a candidate.”
The exceptions for satire, parody, and news reporting only apply when they are accompanied by a disclaimer. The law is vague and could be used to cover a wide array of political speech. It is not clear what defines satire or parody under the exception. Likewise, “materially deceptive content,” is defined as “audio or visual media that is digitally created or modified, and that includes, but is not limited to, deepfakes and the output of chatbots, such that it would falsely appear to a reasonable person to be an authentic record of the content depicted in the media.”
The Kohls complaint argues that the law flips the burden to creators to establish a defense.
One of the more interesting legal issues is how the law defines “malice.” The legislators lifted the definition from New York Times v. Sullivan on defamation to define the element as the statute requires “malice.” This term does not require any particular ill-intent, but instead applies a definition of “knowing the materially deceptive content was false or with a reckless disregard for the truth.”
That is the long-standing standard for public officials and public figures subject to the higher standard of defamation. However, it is not clear that it will suffice for a law with potential criminal liability and a law with sweeping limits on political speech.
Opinion and satire are generally exempted from defamation actions. Satire can sometimes be litigated as a matter of “false light,” but the standard can become blurred. The intent is clearly to create a false impression of the speaker in making fun of a figure like Harris. Drawing lines between honest and malicious satire is often difficult. Under a false light claim, a person can sue when a publication or image implies something that is both highly offensive and untrue. Where defamation deals with false statements, false light deals with false implications.
For example, in Gill v. Curtis Publ’g Co., 239 P.2d 630 (Cal. 1952), the court considered a “Ladies Home Journal” article that was highly critical of couples who claimed to be cases of “love at first sight.” The article suggested that such impulses were more sexual than serious. The magazine included a photo of a couple, with the caption, “[p]ublicized as glamorous, desirable, ‘love at first sight’ is a bad risk.” The couple was unaware that the photo was used and never consented to its inclusion in the magazine. They prevailed in an action for false light given the suggestion that they were one of these sexualized, “wrong” attractions.
In 1967, the Supreme Court handed down Time, Inc. v. Hill, which held that a family suing Life Magazine for false light must shoulder the burden of the actual malice standard under New York Times v. Sullivan. Justice William Brennan wrote that the majority opinion held that states cannot judge in favor of plaintiffs “to redress false reports of matters of public interest in the absence of proof that the defendant published the report with knowledge of its falsity or reckless disregard of the truth.”
This line is equally difficult under the tort’s standard for the commercial appropriation of use or likeness.
Parody and satire can constitute appropriation of names or likenesses (called the right to publicity). The courts, including the Ninth Circuit, have made a distinctly unfunny mess of such cases. Past tort cases generally have favored celebrities and resulted in rulings like White v. Samsung, a perfectly ludicrous ruling in which Vanna White successfully sued over the use of a robot with a blonde wig turning cards as the appropriation of her name or likeness. It appears no blonde being — robotic or human — may turn cards on a fake game show.
There is also the interesting question of when disclaimers (which are often upheld) ruin the creative message. The complaint argues:
“Disclaimers tend to spoil the joke and initialize the audience. This is why Kohls chooses to announce his parody videos from the title, allowing the entire real estate of the video itself to resemble the sorts of political ads he lampoons. The humor comes from the juxtaposition of over-the-top statements by the AI generated ‘narrator,’ contrasted with the seemingly earnest style of the video as if it were a genuine campaign ad.”
The complaint below has eight counts from (facial and applied) challenges under the First Amendment to due process claims under the Fourteenth Amendment.
Speaking on MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show this week, Clinton was asked about continued allegations of Russian efforts to disseminate Russian propaganda in the United States. Clinton responded:
Hillary Clinton has long been one of the most anti-free speech figures in American politics, including calling upon European officials to force Elon Musk to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). She is now suggesting the arrest of Americans who spread what she considers disinformation. It is a crushingly ironic moment since it was her campaign that funded the infamous Steele dossier and spread false stories of Russian collusion during her presidential campaign. Presumably, that disinformation would not be treated as criminal viewpoints.
“I think it’s important to indict the Russians, just as Muller indicted a lot of Russians who were engaged in direct election interference and boosting Trump back in 2016. But I also think there are Americans who are engaged in this kind of propaganda. And whether they should be civilly or even in some cases criminally charged is something that would be a better deterrence, because the Russians are unlikely, except in a very few cases, to ever stand trial in the United States.”
The interview was chillingly consistent with Clinton long antagonism toward free speech.
START AROUND THE 9TH MINUTE. SHE WANTS AMERICANS LIKE ME PROSECUTED FOR PUBLISHING THE TRUTH.
Clinton, of course, was not challenged by Maddow on the fact that her campaign was the conduit for disinformation linked to Russian intelligence services. Not only did U.S. intelligence believe that the Clinton campaign was used to make the debunked claims, but it was clearly done for purely political purposes.
Clinton efforts were so obvious by July 2016 that former CIA Director John Brennan briefed former President Obama on Hillary Clinton’s alleged “plan” to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The Russian investigation was launched days after this briefing.
(MSNBC/via YouTube)
Her general counsel, Marc Elias, his former partner Michael Sussmann, and the campaign were later found involved in not just spreading the false claims from the Steele dossier but other false stories like the Alfa Bank conspiracy claim.
It was Elias who managed the legal budget for the campaign. We now know that the campaign hid the funding of the Steele dossier as a legal expense.
New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said that Elias denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said that Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
Elias was also seated next to John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, when he was asked about the role of the campaign, he denied categorically any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Even assuming that Podesta was kept in the dark, the Durham Report clearly shows that Elias knew and played an active role in pushing this effort.
The Clinton campaign lied to the media, spread false claims of Russian disinformation, and was accused of being a conduit for Russian intelligence. So, would the “better deterrence” have been for Clinton herself to be arrested?
Sussmann ultimately did stand trial but was acquitted. Notably, John Durham noted that “no one at Fusion GPS … would agree to voluntarily speak with the Office” while both the DNC and Clinton campaign invoked privileges to refuse to answer certain questions.
For a person who is on her fourth memoir, Clinton is remarkably hostile to free speech. Notably, in all of these memoirs, she does not address her prominent role in calling for the censorship and now arrest of those with opposing views. She also does not discuss how her campaign lied to the media and funded the Steele dossier. Perhaps that is coming in the fifth memoir. What is clear is that Clinton herself has no fear that such prosecution would ever await her. She is one of those who may silence others but not be silenced. The public is to be protected from views that she deemed disinformation, misinformation, or malinformation.
To that end, as one of the guardians of truth, Clinton chastised the media for not being more consistently anti-Trump, a daunting prospect since the media has been accused of running almost 90 percent negative stories on Trump. Nevertheless, shortly after the second assassination attack on Trump, Clinton called Trump a danger to the world and added that “I don’t understand why it’s so difficult for the press to have a consistent narrative about how dangerous Trump is.”
Ideally, between the arrests of those accused of disinformation and an effective state media, Clinton hopes to rein in errant thoughts and viewpoints.
In the interview, Maddow did not have even a slight objection to the implications of arresting people with criminal viewpoints. Censorship and criminal prosecutions are such mainstream concepts that they are as unsurprising as a fourth Clinton memoir.
Below is my column in the Hill on the victory of Elon Musk last week against the liberal media outlet, Media Matters. This follows similar recent victories by others against CNN and the New York Times to clear paths to trials. For those who have embraced advocacy journalism as the new model for media, a bill is coming due in the form of defamation and disparagement lawsuits.
Here is the column:
This week, a federal judge ruled that a lawsuit by Elon Musk against Media Matters can move forward in what could prove a significant case not just for the liberal outlet but the entire media industry. The decision comes at the same time as other court wins for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) against the New York Times and a Navy veteran against CNN.
For years, media organizations and journalism schools have expressly abandoned objectivity in favor of advocacy journalism. This abandonment of neutrality has coincided, unsurprisingly, with a drop in public faith in media to record lows.
Former New York Times writer (and now Howard University journalism professor) Nikole Hannah-Jones has been lionized for declaring that “all journalism is activism.”Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle, similarly announced that “Objectivity has got to go.”
“J-Schools” have been teaching students for years to discard old-fashioned ideas of simply reporting facts and as stated at the University of Texas at Austin, to “leave neutrality behind.”
In a series of interviews with more than 75 media leaders, Leonard Downie Jr., former Washington Post executive editor, and Andrew Heyward, former CBS News president, reaffirmed this new vision of journalism. Downie explained that objectivity is viewed as a trap and reporters “feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”
As the public abandons mainstream media for alternative news sources, news organizations are now facing the added costs of bias in the form of defamation and disparagement lawsuits. Media lawyers are citing protections secured by the “old media” while their clients are publicly espousing their intention to frame the news to advance political and social agendas.
CNN, for example, is now facing a trial in a lawsuit by Navy veteran Zachary Young, the subject of an alleged hit piece over his work to extract endangered people from Afghanistan after the Taliban takeover. In a Nov. 11, 2021, segment on CNN’s “The Lead with Jake Tapper,” the host tells his audience ominously how CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt discovered “Afghans trying to get out of the country face a black market full of promises, demands of exorbitant fees, and no guarantee of safety or success.” Marquardt named Young and his company in claiming that “desperate Afghans are being exploited” and need to pay “exorbitant, often impossible amounts” to flee the country.
Discovery revealed how Marquardt said that he wanted to “nail this Zachary Young mfucker.” After promising to “nail” Young, CNN editor Matthew Philips responded: “gonna hold you to that cowboy!” That sentiment was echoed by other CNN staff. In allowing the case to go to trial, a judge found not just evidence of actual malice by CNN but grounds for potential punitive damages.
Likewise, Palin recently won a major appeal before the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which found that Palin was denied a fair trial in a case against the New York Times.
In 2017, liberal activist and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) supporter James T. Hodgkinson attempted to massacre Republican members of Congress on a baseball diamond, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.). The New York Times, eager to shift the narrative, ran an editorial suggesting that Palin had inspired or incited Jared Loughner’s 2011 shooting of then-U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.).
The Times’ editors stated that SarahPAC, Palin’s political action committee, had posted a graphic that put a crosshair on a U.S. map representing Giffords’ district before she was shot, suggesting that this was direct incitement to violence. In reality, Palin’s graphic “targeting” about 20 vulnerable House Democrats all across the country is typical of graphics used in political campaigns by both parties for many decades. No evidence has ever been offered that Giffords’ deranged shooter even saw it.
But Musk’s lawsuit may be the most defining for our age of advocacy journalism. He is suing Media Matters, the left-wing outlet founded by David Brock, whom Time described as“one of the most influential operatives in the Democratic Party.” Although Brock is no longer with the site, Media Matters has long been accused of being a weaponized media outlet for the left. After Musk dismantled the censorship system at Twitter, he became something of an obsession for Media Matters, which targeted his revenue sources. The outlet ran a report suggesting that advertisements of major corporations were being posted next to pro-Nazi posts or otherwise hateful content on the platform. As I discuss in my new book, this effort mirrored similar moves by the anti-free speech movement against Musk to force him to restore censorship systems.
Companies including Apple, IBM, Comcast and Lionsgate Entertainment quickly joined the effective boycott to squeeze Musk. The problem is that it is hard to squeeze the world’s richest man financially. Musk told the companies to pound sand and told his lawyers to file suit.
The allegations in the lawsuit read like a textbook on advocacy journalism. Media Matters is accused of knowingly misrepresenting the real user experience by manipulating the algorithms to produce the pairing alleged in its story.
The complaint accuses Media Matters of running its manipulation to produce extremely unlikely pairings, such that one toxic match appeared for “only one viewer (out of more than 500 million) on all of X: Media Matters.” In other words, the organization wanted to write a hit piece connecting X to pro-Nazi material and proceeded to artificially create pairings between that material and corporate advertisements. It then ran the story as news.
Indeed, two defendant employees of Media Matters did not deny that they were aware of the alleged manipulation and that they were seeking to poison the well for advertisers in order to drain advertising revenues for X.
Although the media covered another judge blocking an effort by state officials to sue Media Matters over the anti-Musk effort, there has been comparably less coverage of the green light for the lawsuit in Texas.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas rejected an effort to dismiss the case on jurisdictional and other grounds. Musk will be able to continue his claims of tortious interference with existing contracts, business disparagement and tortious interference with prospective economic advantage.
Not surprisingly, although the media has heralded lawsuits like the one by Dominion Voting System against Fox News (which led to a large settlement), they are overwhelmingly hostile toward the Musk lawsuits. It is not hard to see why. The Media Matters lawsuit directly challenges the ability of media outlets to create false narratives to advance a political agenda. As with the CNN and New York Times cases, it can expose how the media first decides on a conclusion and then frames or even invents the facts to support it.
While rejecting the longstanding principles of journalism such as objectivity, these media outlets are citing the cases and defenses secured by those now-outdated media organizations. They want to be advocates, but they also want to be protected as journalists.
These cases still face tough challenges, including challenging jury pools in places like New York. However, they are exposing the bias that now characterizes much of American journalism.
In the age of advocacy journalism, a bill has come due. That is why Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters . . . well . . . matters.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
Mark Zuckerberg meets with President Trump in the Oval Office
Below is my column in Fox.com on the admission of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that Facebook yielded to pressure of the Biden Administration to censor citizens. The admission, however, appears more contrived than contrite.
Here is the column:
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” Those words from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg came this week with an admission in a letter that his company, Facebook, did yield to pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor American citizens on a wide array of subjects.
For those of us who have criticized Facebook for years for its role in the massive censorship system, Zuckerberg’s belated contrition was more insulting than inspiring. It had all of the genuine regret of a stalker found hiding under the bed of a victim. Zuckerberg’s sudden regret only came after his company fought for years to conceal the evidence of its work with the government to censor opposing views. Zuckerberg was finally compelled to release the documents by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, and the House Judiciary Committee. Now forced to admit what many of us have long alleged, Zuckerberg is really, really sorry.
In prior testimony before the House Judiciary Committee and other congressional committees, I noted that Zuckerberg continued to refuse to release this information after Elon Musk exposed this system in his release of the “Twitter Files.” Zuckerberg stayed silent as Musk was viciously attacked by anti-free speech figures in Congress and the media. He was fully aware of his own company’s similar conduct but stayed silent. When the White House and President Joe Biden repeatedly claimed that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, Facebook continued to withhold evidence that they too were pressured to suppress the story before the election.
When the censorship system was recently put before the Supreme Court in Murthy v. Missouri, the justices asked about evidence of coordination and pressure from the government. In Murthy, states successfully showed lower courts that there was coercion from the government in securing an injunction. The Biden administration denied such pressure and the Court rejected the standing of plaintiffs, blocked an order to stop the censorship, and sent the case back down to the lower court.
Zuckerberg still remained silent.
But Facebook was not silent when it came to censorship, or “content moderation” as the company prefers to call it. While Zuckerberg now expresses “regret” at not speaking out sooner, his company previously sought to sell Americans on censorship.
In 2021, I wrote about the Facebook commercial campaign in which the company attempted to rally young people to embrace censorship. The commercials show people like “Joshan” who says that he “grew up with the internet.” Joshan mocks how much computers have changed and then objects how privacy and censorship has not evolved as much as our technology. As Joshan calls for “the blending of the real world and the internet world,” content moderation is presented as part of this not-so-brave new world. Joshan and his equally eager colleagues Chava and Adam were presented by Facebook as the shiny happy faces of young people longing to be content modified. They were all born in 1996 — the sweet spot for censors who saw young people as allies to reduce free speech.
For years, young people have been taught that free speech is harmful and triggering. We are raising a generation of speech-phobics and Zuckerberg and Facebook wanted to tap into that generation to get people to stop fearing the censor and love “content modification.” It was time, as Joshan and his friends told us, to “change” with our computers.
Now, Zuckerberg and Meta want people to know that they were “pressured” to censor and really regret their role in silencing opposing voices.
It is the feigned regret that comes with forced exposure.
The Facebook files now put the lie to past claims of the Biden administration and many Democrats in Congress. For years, members attacked some of us who testified that we had no evidence of coordination or pressure from the government. At the same time, they opposed any effort to investigate and release such evidence. The evidence is now undeniable.
The Biden administration has long demanded the removal of opposing views on a wide array of subjects. Democrats in Congress pushed Zuckerberg to expand the scope of censorship to include areas like climate change denial. Jen Easterly, who heads the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is an example of the chilling scope of this effort. Her agency was created to work on our critical infrastructure, but Easterly declared that the mandate would now include policing “our cognitive infrastructure.” That includes combating “malinformation,” or information “based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.”
Consider that for a second: true facts are censorable if the government views them as misleading.
As I write in my book, President Joe Biden is arguably the most anti-free speech president since John Adams. His administration helped create a censorship system that was described by one federal judge as “Orwellian.” Vice President Kamala Harris has been entirely supportive of that effort.
In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated John Adams in the only election where free speech was one of the principal campaign issues. It should be so again. Harris should have to take ownership of the censorship system maintained by the administration.
In my book, I propose a federal law that would bar the government from using any federal funds to support efforts to censor, blacklist, or suppress individuals or groups. It would take the government out of the censorship business. Harris should be asked if she would oppose such a law and dismantle the current censorship apparatus in the federal government.
Democracy is not on the ballot in 2024, as many have claimed, but free speech is.
Jonathan Turley is a Fox News Media contributor and the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster, June 18, 2024).
Jamie Michell, founder of Gays Against Groomers, speaks with The Daily Signal’s Tyler O’Neil on July 18 at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. (The Daily Signal)
MILWAUKEE—Jamiee Michell, a lesbian who founded the organization Gays Against Groomers, finds it ironic and “hilarious” that the Southern Poverty Law Center brands her openly LGBTQ group an “anti-LGBTQ hate group.”
“It classifies us as an anti-LGBTQ hate group, which is the most ironic and hilarious thing ever because everybody in our organization is gay and we even have a few trans people,” Michell tells The Daily Signal in an interview at the Republican National Convention earlier this month.
She says the SPLC, Anti-Defamation League, and other liberal organizations “labeled us anti-ourselves just for speaking out, wanting to protect children.”
The SPLC—which brands mainstream conservative and Christian organizations “hate groups,” placing them on a map with chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—accuses Gays Against Groomers of amplifying “dehumanizing anti-trans rhetoric” and of perpetuating “anti-LGBTQ+ stereotypes by falsely claiming that LGBTQ+ supporters of trans rights are dangerous to society.”
The Anti-Defamation League, which critics fault for a left-wing bias, also brands Gays Against Groomers “anti-LGBTQ extremist.” ADL claims the group “peddles dangerous and misleading narratives about the LGBTQ+ community, focusing on false allegations of ‘grooming’ by drag performers, ‘indoctrination’ by LGBTQ+ educators and ‘child mutilation’ by gender-affirming care providers.”
These attacks on Gays Against Groomers echo the Southern Poverty Law Center’s suggestion that parents who complain about books with pornographic images in school libraries are “book banners” and reminiscent of the “uptown Klans” that opposed desegregation in the 1950s.
Many defenders of explicit books and children’s drag shows suggest there is nothing inherently sexual about images of naked teens or middle-aged men who are scantily clad and gyrate in front of young children.
“We fight the sexualization, indoctrination, and medicalization of children happening under the guise of LGBTQIA+, plus, plus, plus,” Michell tells The Daily Signal. “Nobody will ever say what the plus stands for. I think they’re trying to incorporate the ‘P’ for ‘pedophilia.’”
Michell also highlights the experimental nature of “gender-affirming care,” a euphemistic term for medical interventions aimed at forcing a male to appear female or vice versa. These interventions stunt natural development, may sterilize patients, and have been linked to cases of liver cancer in teens.
“Gender-affirming care” aims to address psychological distress—the feeling of identifying with a gender opposite one’s sex—through bodily alterations, rather than therapy.
Michell particularly notes the fact that some “gender-affirming care” involves “amputating the healthy body parts of young girls.”
“I can’t imagine having to be stuck with the decision I made as a 9-, 10-, 11-, 12-year-old [girl]—like, it’s absolutely insane,” she adds. “It’s been common sense and common knowledge for all of human history that no child can make permanent, lifelong decisions up until like 5 minutes ago.”
Michell describes herself as a former “tomboy” and says she would be quite susceptible to claims that she might be transgender were she growing up today.
“I would have absolutely been preyed upon by this cult, this cultish agenda,” she says. “If my parents bought into that, they would have medically transitioned me, without a doubt.”
Many gay or lesbian people might be convinced that they are “really” transgender because they don’t follow masculine or feminine stereotypes, Michell says. She calls gender ideology a form of “conversion therapy,” referring to efforts to induce a person with same-sex attraction to reject a homosexual lifestyle.
“It is a form of conversion therapy, except it’s way worse—it’s like a thousand times worse,” Michell says. “Regular, old-fashioned conversion therapy is just trying to change your mind, right? This conversion therapy leaves kids with missing body parts and sterilized, so it’s much worse.”
While the legacy media and most LGBTQ groups suggest that everyone who identifies as LGBTQ supports porn in schools, “gender-affirming care” for minors, and “Drag Queen Story Hours,” Michell says: “Every single gay person I know—and even trans people—we’ve all been staunchly against this.”
“It was very important to me to create a group to fight back against it from inside the community, to differentiate, draw a big red line between us and them, show that not all gay people, not all trans people want to hurt children,” she says.
She pushes back against the idea that pornographic materials in school are important to “normalize” LGBTQ individuals.
“I’d say that we already feel normalized,” she says. “We are so welcome in society, we’ve overdosed on tolerance. You see every major corporation panders to us, bends the knee to us, every major politician on the Left.”
“No, children don’t need to learn how to become inclusive by reading pornographic material,” Michell adds. “No, they don’t need to see a man dressed scantily, nearly nude, with fake breasts, to learn about tolerance and acceptance.”
“Our community has been hijacked, they’re using us to push this pornographic filth in our name,” she says.
Although many on the left end of the political spectrum suggest that conservative Christians pose the greatest threat to LGBTQ individuals, Michell says the Left itself poses a far worse threat.
“What the gay alphabet mob is doing is hurting us more than even the Westboro Baptist Church could hope to,” she says, referring to a church that is notorious for obnoxious protests of military funerals, LGBTQ events, and political gatherings.
Due to recent activism, “people are equating all gay people, all trans people, with child predators,” Michell laments. “Gay people fought for a very long time to rid themselves of that stigma. I truly believe that they’re hurting us more than even the most extreme bigots could ever dream to.”
She argues that the SPLC and ADL attacks have put a target on their backs.
“Our inbox is filled with death threats,” Michell says. “I’ve been doxxed, which worries me. … Is today the day I’ve got to use the Second Amendment?”
JD Vance is a marked man. After accepting the nomination for vice president, Vance has been the subject of endless media attacks. Recently, Vice President Kamala Harris even questioned his “loyalty” to the country despite his serving as a Marine in the Iraq War. Yet, one of the most chilling attacks came from Germany where the publishing house Ullstein Buchverlage has stopped printing the sold-out German translation of Hillbilly Elegy, his 2016 autobiography.
As we have discussed previously in this country, it is the modern left’s equivalent of book burning. After all, why burn books when you can simply prevent their being printed under blacklisting campaigns?
In this country, we have seen the left successfully force book bans for writers and even justices who espouse opposing viewpoints. We have seen actual calls for book burning recently (here and here).
Ullstein is facing a high demand for Vance’s best-selling book Hillbilly Elegy, but has refused to print more copies due to his political viewpoints (unrelated to the book).
First published in 2016 and made into a movie in 2020, the book returned to the top position on The New York Times‘ bestseller list after Trump chose Vance as his running mate.
Some in the United States are already balking at the selling of any book by Vance. Seven Stories Press wrote, “Seven Stories Press is extremely thrilled to have never published JD Vance.”
Ullstein published the German translation of Hillbilly Elegy in 2017 and held the rights to reprints.
The company cited Vance’s allegiance with Trump and his politics as the reason in a statement to German media:
“At the time of its publication, the book made a valuable contribution to understanding the drifting apart of US society…In the meantime, he is officially acting alongside him and advocating an aggressively demagogic, exclusionary policy.”
German author Gerd Buurmann posted a mocking response that we should be happy that Ullstein had just thrown Vance’s book out of its catalogue and not into the fire – a reference to the notorious Nazi book burnings of the 1930s.
Other Germans have raised the same objections and referenced the painful history of book bans and burnings in Germany under the Nazis.
German readers want to read the book, which Ullstein acknowledged is one of the most influential works of this generation. However, because the company disagrees with his political viewpoints, it moved to block others from reading the book.
We have seen similar campaigns leading to the banning or burning of books by figures like JK Rowling because of her opposition to some transgender policies. The left now protests any programs on Rowling’s work and opposes the selling of her enormously popular Harry Potter series or even video games based on the series. When authors have defended her right to be published, they have also been subjected to cancel campaigns.
Yet, Ullstein’s decision is particularly chilling as a publishing house. Again, we have seen editors at publishing houses sign petitions to bar books by conservative figures like Justice Amy Coney Barrett from being published.
In 1933, thousands of books by Jewish and leftist writers were burned throughout Germany. Publishing houses further banned the printing of these books. The books were announced as corrupting the minds of German citizens. Many books were banned or burned on the basis of the authors being Jewish or known socialists or anarchists.
Now the left has developed a taste for censorship and blacklisting. Editors and publishing houses are blacklisting those with conservative or libertarian views as forms of dangerous viewpoints or disinformation.
Ullstein will, of course, not stop people from reading the work of JD Vance. While it may make it more difficult for Germans to find copies, ideas like water have a way of finding their way out. Blacklisting and censorship have not succeeded in killing a single idea. What it does is reveal the true character and values of those who want to prevent others from hearing opposing viewpoints.
The U.S. State Department is violating the U.S. Constitution by funding technology to silence Americans who question government claims, says a lawsuit filed Tuesday by The Federalist, The Daily Wire, and the state of Texas.
The three are suing to stop “one of the most audacious, manipulative, secretive, and gravest abuses of power and infringements of First Amendment rights by the federal government in American history,” says the lawsuit. It exposes federal censorship activities even beyond the dramatic discoveries in a pending U.S. Supreme Court case, Murthy v. Missouri (also known as Missouri v. Biden).
This lawsuit alleges the State Department is illegally using a counterterrorism center intended to fight foreign “disinformation” instead to stop American citizens from speaking and listening to information government officials dislike. Other recent investigations have also found government counterterrorism resources and tactics being used to shape American public opinion and policy.
Through grants and product development assistance to private entities including the Global Disinformation Index (GDI) and NewsGuard, the lawsuit alleges, the State Department “is actively intervening in the news-media market to render disfavored press outlets unprofitable by funding the infrastructure, development, and marketing and promotion of censorship technology and private censorship enterprises to covertly suppress speech of a segment of the American press.”
This is just the latest in a series of major investigations and court cases in the last year to uncover multiple federal censorship efforts laundered through private cutouts. The “Twitter Files,” a series of investigative journalist reports, uncovered that dozens of federal agencies pressured virtually all social media monopolies to hide and punish tens of millions of posts and users.
Missouri v. Bidenfound this federal censorship complex has included government officials changing the content moderation and user policies of social media monopolies through threats to destroy their business models. House of Representatives investigations have uncovered U.S. national security and spy agencies creating “private” organizations to circumvent the Constitution’s prohibition on federal officials abridging Americans’ speech. These false-front organizations deliberately avoid creating records subject to transparency laws and congressional oversight, public records show.
Congressional investigations in November revealed that federal officials have specifically targeted The Federalist’s reporting for internet censorship.
In which Sean Davis was censored for saying the best evidence against the integrity of the election was the fact that Democrats/media/Big Tech were censoring anyone who observed their censorship efforts related to the election. pic.twitter.com/r6NdbnSx1f
‘Coordinating the Government’s Efforts to Silence Speech’
The Fifth Circuit refrained from stopping the State Department’s participation in the “vast censorship enterprise” that Murthy v. Missouri uncovered because, the court said, it hadn’t seen enough evidence of that agency’s involvement. This new lawsuit from Texas, The Federalist, and The Daily Wire provides such evidence.
Even though Congress and the Constitution have banned the federal government from silencing Americans, the State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) has morphed into “the lead in coordinating the government’s efforts to silence speech,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit names as defendants the U.S. State Department, GEC, and multiple department officials including Secretary of State Antony Blinken. GEC originated as a counterterrorism agency created by an executive order from President Obama.
Through GEC, the State Department evaluated more than 365 different tools for scrubbing the internet of disfavored information, the lawsuit says. The department also pays millions to develop multiple internet disinformation “tools.” It also runs tests on censorship technologies and awards government prize money to those most effective at controlling what Americans say and hear online, the lawsuit says.
State then shares these censorship technologies with companies, favored media outlets, academics, and government agencies. It markets these government-funded censorship technologies to Silicon Valley companies including Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. The tools included “supposed fact-checking technologies, media literacy tools, media intelligence platforms, social network mapping, and machine learning/artificial intelligence technology,” the lawsuit says.
At least two of the censorship tools the State Department has funded, developed, and awarded have targeted The Federalist and The Daily Wire, the lawsuit says. NewsGuard and GDI wield these tools developed with government assistance to deprive government-criticizing news outlets, including The Federalist and The Daily Wire, of operating funds.
They do this by rating conservative outlets poorly, falsely claiming these outlets purvey “disinformation” and are “unreliable.” That deprives leftists’ media competitors of high-value ad dollars from the big companies that use these rating systems. Such companies include YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Best Buy, Exxon Mobil, Kellogg, MasterCard, and Verizon.
“Advertising companies that subscribe to GDI’s blacklist refuse to place ads with disfavored news sources, cutting off revenue streams and leaving the blacklisted outlets unable to compete with the approved ‘low risk’ media outlets — often legacy news,” the lawsuit says.
Boosting Disinformation While Claiming the Opposite
Ratings companies like NewsGuard and GDI base their low ratings of outlets like The Federalist at least in part on politically charged “fact checks” of a tiny percentage of the outlets’ articles. While these companies’ full ratings criteria are secret, in December 2022 GDI published a top 10 list of its most favored and most disfavored news outlets. The Federalist and Daily Wire appear on GDI’s 10 “riskiest” list.
All of the outlets on GDI’s “least risky” list have helped spread some of the government’s biggest disinformation operations in the last decade. Those include the Russia-collusion hoax and Hunter Biden laptop stories, which influenced national elections in favor of Democrats. The 10 “least risky” outlets have also widely published notable misinformation such as claims that Covid vaccines prevent disease transmission, the Covington student insult hoax, and evidence-free claims that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh is a serial gang rapist.
This federal censorship-industrial complex’s numerous disinformation operations include the Hamilton 68 effort. In contrast, The Federalist not only reported all these stories accurately from the beginning but for most led the reporting pack that proved it. GDI rated The Daily Wire’s “risk level” as “high” and The Federalist’s “risk level” as “maximum.”
While technologies and enterprises the State Department promotes push corporate media’s biggest purveyors of propaganda, they also “blacklist” The Federalist and Daily Wire, the lawsuit says, “negatively impacting Media Plaintiffs’ ability to circulate and distribute their publications to both current and potential audiences, and intentionally destroying the Media Plaintiffs’ ability to obtain advertisers.” Microsoft, for example, uses NewsGuard technology “to train Bing Chat.”
The lawsuit is filed in the U.S. federal court for the Eastern District of Texas. It seeks a court declaration that the State Department’s funding, testing, pressuring, and promoting of internet censorship tools is unconstitutional and an order that it end.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her ebooks include “The Read-Aloud Advent Calendar,” “The Advent Prepbook,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media from Fox News to Ben Shapiro to Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Her traditionally published books include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.
When regimes capture power, it’s often not in the dramatic fashion of the storming of the Bastille. Instead, it’s a bureaucratic takeover, hidden in jargon and filled with clichés, for the greater good. The Federal Communications Commission is poised to vote today on a sweeping set of new rules called the “Preventing Digital Discrimination Order.”
The 200-page report recommends implementing an exhaustive array of new restrictions that will alter the internet forever. It springs from section 60506 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act 2021. This legislation was meant to infuse some federal dollars into America’s sagging internet infrastructure. Unfortunately, this vote will grant the FCC the power to control nearly every aspect of internet infrastructure in the name of our secular gods of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
The TL;DR of the obtuse rules is the ability to censor, control, and regulate internet service providers based on vague laws around equity. Most disturbing is that it doesn’t have to be “discrimination” as it’s generally understood but rather “disparate outcomes,” meaning all internet infrastructure must produce perfect equity or face the wrath of the United States government.
The agency’s unelected officials will convene to deliberate on regulations to integrate the latest progressive ideals regarding race and identity into the internet landscape. It’s expected to pass 3-2. It will stifle innovation and impede internet access opportunities, all in pursuit of achieving equity.
If approved, this would mark the first time the FCC would gain the authority to oversee various aspects of every ISP’s service termination policies, including customer credit usage, account history, credit checks, and account termination, among other related matters.
Experts have been sounding the alarm about what this could mean for internet freedom.
The @FCC is claiming the power to control every aspect of broadband infrastructure and the industry itself.
To call it "extreme" or "radical" doesn't do this proposal justice.
It includes price controls, forced buildout of broadband regardless of ROI, and more. https://t.co/b7HMYW1sDD
Even FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr has blasted the power-grab, calling it a free pass giving the “administrative state effective control of all internet services and infrastructure.”
“President Biden has called on the FCC to adopt new rules of breathtaking scope,” Carr noted on X, formerly Twitter. “Those rules would give the federal government a roving mandate to micromanage nearly every aspect of how the Internet functions — from how ISPs allocate capital and where they build, to the services that consumers can purchase; from the profits that ISPs can realize and how they market and advertise services to the discounts and promotions that consumers can receive.”
“The FCC reserves the right under this plan to regulate both ‘actions and omissions, whether recurring or a single instance.’ In other words, if you take any action, you may be liable, and if you do nothing, you may be liable. There is no path to complying with this standardless regime. It reads like a planning document drawn up in the faculty lounge of a university’s Soviet Studies Department.”
Next week, the FCC will vote on President Biden’s plan to give the Administrative State effective control of all Internet services and infrastructure.
These regulators have established a framework that could penalize any organization seeking to enhance internet accessibility or provide internet services if the agency determines that it did so in a manner that facilitates discrimination. Whatever the regulators decide that means.
Congressional pushback
Ranking Member Ted Cruz (R-Texas) of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, along with 27 fellow senators, is urging the Federal Communications Commission to withdraw its preliminary proposal regarding “Digital Discrimination.” This proposal would grant the federal government significant influence over virtually every facet of the internet, potentially subjecting broadband providers to extensive, vague, and detrimental liability under a “disparate impact” standard.
In a letter to FCC Chairwoman Rosenworcel, the senators wrote:
“Your Draft Order, which largely follows a Biden administration diktat, will create crippling uncertainty for the U.S. broadband industry, chill broadband investment, and undermine Congress’s objective of promoting broadband access for all Americans. We urge you to adhere to the will of Congress and conform to the plain meaning of [the bipartisan infrastructure bill] to avoid causing serious damage to the competitive and innovative U.S. broadband industry.”
Net neutrality back door
This power-grab is also a de facto attempt to bring back net neutrality. Net neutrality, with its burdensome and intrusive regulations, hinders the internet’s natural evolution. The internet has thrived remarkably well without the heavy hand of net neutrality oversight. Moreover, these regulations prevent internet service providers from rightfully charging substantial fees to content giants like video streaming platforms, which are voraciously consuming bandwidth. By prohibiting these fees, net neutrality shifts the responsibility of expanding network capacity entirely onto individuals and away from giant tech platforms.
This, in turn, is expected to result in higher costs for consumers, as they will be forced to bear the burden of more expensive internet packages, even if they don’t use these data-intensive streaming services. As it stands, net neutrality stifles innovation, undermines market forces, and ultimately harms consumers and the internet ecosystem. The idea that they would resurrect these onerous rules through the back door is no less worrying just because it isn’t surprising.
The one silver lining to this is that the disparate impact rules they cite to justify the power-grab have been struck down by the Supreme Court. There will no doubt be immediate lawsuits to try to fight these rules. Across varying industries and government entities, a concerted effort exists to curtail your freedom. From COVID lockdowns to tech censorship, expansive regulations, gun laws, and the jailing of political dissidents, the underlying result is curtailing your freedoms. The regime knows a free internet is one of the last tools the American people have left, which is why it tries to control it at every turn.
In May 2021, L. Gordon Crovitz, a media executive turned start-up investor, pitched Twitter executives on a powerful censorship tool.
In an exchange that came to light in the “Twitter Files” revelations about media censorship, Crovitz, former publisher of the Wall Street Journal, touted his product, NewsGuard, as a “Vaccine Against Misinformation.” His written pitch highlighted a “separate product” — beyond an extension already on the Microsoft Edge browser — “for internal use by content-moderation teams.” Crovitz promised an out-of-the-box tool that would use artificial intelligence powered by NewsGuard algorithms to rapidly screen content based on hashtags and search terms the company associated with dangerous content.
How would the company determine the truth? For issues such as Covid-19, NewsGuard would steer readers to official government sources only, like the federal Centers for Disease Control. Other content-moderation allies, Crovitz’s pitch noted, include “intelligence and national security officials,” “reputation management providers,” and “government agencies,” which contract with the firm to identify misinformation trends. Instead of only fact-checking individual forms of incorrect information, NewsGuard, in its proposal, touted the ability to rate the “overall reliability of websites” and “’prebunk’ COVID-19 misinformation from hundreds of popular websites.”
NewsGuard’s ultimately unsuccessful pitch sheds light on one aspect of a growing effort by governments around the world to police speech ranging from genuine disinformation to dissent from officially sanctioned narratives. In the United States, as the “Twitter Files” revealed, the effort often takes the form of direct government appeals to social media platforms and news outlets. More commonly the government works through seemingly benign non-governmental organizations — such as the Stanford Internet Observatory — to quell speech it disapproves of.
Or it pays to coerce speech through government contracts with outfits such as NewsGuard, a for-profit company of especially wide influence. Founded in 2018 by Crovitz and his co-CEO Steven Brill, a lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur, NewsGuard seeks to monetize the work of reshaping the internet. The potential market for such speech policing, NewsGuard’s pitch to Twitter noted, was $1.74 billion, an industry it hoped to capture.
Instead of merely suggesting rebuttals to untrustworthy information, as many other existing anti-misinformation groups provide, NewsGuard has built a business model out of broad labels that classify entire news sites as safe or untrustworthy, using an individual grading system producing what it calls “nutrition labels.” The ratings — which appear next to a website’s name on the Microsoft Edge browser and other systems that deploy the plug-in — use a scale of zero to 100 based on what NewsGuard calls “nine apolitical criteria,” including “gathers and presents information responsibly” (worth 18 points), “avoids deceptive headlines” (10 points), and “does not repeatedly publish false or egregiously misleading content” (22 points), etc.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
Critics note that such ratings are entirely subjective — The New York Times, for example, which repeatedly carried false and partisan information from anonymous sources during the Russiagate hoax, gets a 100 percent rating. RealClearInvestigations, which took heat in 2019 for unmasking the “whistleblower” of the first Trump impeachment (while many other outlets including the Times still have not), has an 80 percent rating. (Verbatim: the NewsGuard-RCI exchange over the whistleblower.) Independent news outlets with an anti-establishment bent receive particularly low ratings from NewsGuard, such as the libertarian news site Antiwar.com, with a 49.5 percent rating, and conservative site The Federalist, with a 12.5 percent rating.
As it stakes a claim to being the internet’s arbiter of trust, the company’s site says it has conducted reviews of some 95 percent of news sources across the English, French, German, and Italian web. It has also published reports about disinformation involving China and the Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Hamas wars. The model has received glowing profiles in CNN and The New York Times, among other outlets, as a viable solution for fighting fake news.
IMAGE CREDITNEWSGUARD
NewsGuard is pushing to apply its browser screening process to libraries, academic centers, news aggregation portals, and internet service providers. Its reach, however, is far greater because of other products it aims to sell to social media and other content moderation firms and advertisers. “An advertiser’s worst nightmare is having an ad placement damage even one customer’s trust in a brand,” said Crovitz in a press release touting NewsGuard’s “BrandGuard” service for advertisers. “We’re asking them to pay a fraction of what they pay their P.R. people and their lobbyists to talk about the problem,” Crovitz told reporters.
How NewsGuard Starves Disfavored Sites Of Ad Clients
NewsGuard’s BrandGuard tool provides an “exclusion list” that deters advertisers from buying space on sites NewsGuard deems problematic. But that warning service creates inherent conflicts of interest with NewsGuard’s financial model: The buyers of the service can be problematic entities too, with an interest in protecting and buffing their image.
A case in point: Publicis Groupe, NewsGuard’s largest investor and the biggest conglomerate of marketing agencies in the world, which has integrated NewsGuard’s technology into its fleet of subsidiaries that place online advertising. The question of conflicts arises because Publicis represents a range of corporate and government clients, including Pfizer — whose Covid vaccine has been questioned by some news outlets that have received low scores. Other investors include Bruce Mehlman, a D.C. lobbyist with a lengthy list of clients, including United Airlines and ByteDance, the parent company of much-criticized Chinese-owned social media platform TikTok.
NewsGuard has faced mounting criticism that rather than serving as a neutral public service against online propaganda, it instead acts as an opaque proxy for its government and corporate clients to stifle views that simply run counter to their own interests. The criticism finds support in internal documents, such as the NewsGuard proposal to Twitter, which this reporter obtained during “Twitter Files” reporting last year, as well as in government records and discussions with independent media sites targeted by the startup.
Beginning last year, users scanning the headlines on certain browsers that include NewsGuard were warned against visiting Consortium News. A scarlet-red NewsGuard warning pop-up said, “Proceed With Caution” and claimed that the investigative news site “has published false claims about the Ukraine-Russia war.” The warning also notifies a network of advertisers, news aggregation portals, and social media platforms that Consortium News cannot be trusted.
But Consortium News, founded by late Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Robert Parry and known for its strident criticism of U.S. foreign policy, is far from a fake news publisher. And NewsGuard, the entity attempting to suppress it, Consortium claims, is hardly a disinterested fact-checker because of federal influence over it. NewsGuard attached the label after pressing Consortium for retractions or corrections to six articles published on the site. Those news articles dealt with widely reported claims about neo-Nazi elements in the Ukrainian military and U.S. influence over the country — issues substantiated by other credible media outlets. After Consortium editors refused to remove the reporting and offered a detailed rebuttal, the entire site received a misinformation label, encompassing over 20,000 articles and videos published by the outlet since it was founded in 1995.
The left-wing news site believes the label was part of a pay-for-censorship scheme. It notes that Consortium News was targeted after NewsGuard received a $749,387 Defense Department contract in 2021 to identify “false narratives” relating to the war between Ukraine and Russia, as well as other forms of foreign influence.
Bruce Afran, an attorney for Consortium News, disagrees. “What’s really happening here is that NewsGuard is trying to target those who take a different view from the government line,” said Afran. He filed an amended complaint last month claiming that NewsGuard not only defamed his client, but also acts as a front for the military to suppress critical reporting.
“There’s a great danger in being maligned this way,” Afran continued. “The government cannot evade the Constitution by hiring a private party.”
Joe Lauria, the editor-in-chief of Consortium News, observed that in previous years, anonymous social media accounts had also targeted his site, falsely claiming a connection to the Russian government in a bid to discredit his outlet.
“NewsGuard has got to be the worst,” said Lauria. “They’re labeling us in a way that stays with us. Every news article we publish is defamed with that label of misinformation.”
Both Lauria and Afran said that they worry that NewsGuard is continuing to collaborate with the government or with intelligence services. In previous years, NewsGuard had worked with the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. It’s not clear to what extent NewsGuard is still working with the Pentagon. But earlier this year, Crovitz wrote an email to journalist Matt Taibbi, defending its work with the government, describing it in the present tense, suggesting that it is ongoing:
For example, as is public, our work for the Pentagon’s Cyber Command is focused on the identification and analysis of information operations targeting the U.S. and its allies conducted by hostile governments, including Russia and China. Our analysts alert officials in the U.S. and in other democracies, including Ukraine, about new false narratives targeting America and its allies, and we provide an understanding of how this disinformation spreads online. We are proud of our work countering Russian and Chinese disinformation on behalf of Western democracies.
The company has not yet responded to the Consortium News lawsuit, filed in the New York federal court. In May of this year, the Air Force Research Lab responded to a records request from journalist Erin Marie Miller about the NewsGuard contract. The contents of the work proposal were entirely redacted.
Asked about the company’s continued work with the intelligence sector, Skibinski replied, “We license our data about false claims made by state media sources and state-sponsored disinformation efforts from China, Russia and Iran to the defense and intelligence sector, as we describe on our website.”
Punishing An Outlet That Criticized A NewsGuard Backer’s Pharma Clients
Other websites that have sought to challenge their NewsGuard rating say it has shown little interest in a back-and-forth exchange regarding unsettled matters. Take the case of The Daily Sceptic, a small publication founded and edited by conservative English commentator Toby Young. As a forum for journalists and academics to challenge a variety of strongly held public-policy orthodoxies, even those on Covid-19 vaccines and climate change, The Daily Sceptic is a genuine dissenter. Last year, Young reached out to NewsGuard, hoping to improve his site’s 74.5 rating.
In a series of emails from 2022 and 2023 that were later forwarded to RealClearInvestigations, NewsGuard responded to Young by listing articles that it claimed represent forms of misinformation, such as reports that Pfizer’s vaccine carried potential side effects. The site, notably, has been a strident critic of Covid-19 policies, such as coercive mandates. Anicka Slachta, an analyst with NewsGuard, highlighted articles that questioned the efficacy of the vaccines and lockdowns. The Daily Sceptic, for example, reported a piece casting Covid-19 lockdowns as “unnecessary, ineffective and harmful,” citing academic literature from Johns Hopkins University.
Rather than refute this claim, Slachta simply offered an opposing view from another academic, who criticized the arguments put forth by lockdown critics. And the Hopkins study, Slachta noted, was not peer-reviewed. The topic is still, of course, under serious debate. Sweden rejected the draconian lockdowns on schools and businesses implemented by most countries in North American and Europe, yet had one of the lowest “all-cause excess mortality” rates in either region.
Young and others said that the issue highlighted by NewsGuard is not an instance of misinformation, but rather an ongoing debate, with scientists and public health experts continuing to explore the moral, economic, and health-related questions raised by such policies. In its response to NewsGuard’s questions about the lockdown piece, Young further added that his site made no claim that the Hopkins paper was peer-reviewed and added that its findings had been backed up by a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Yet to NewsGuard, Young’s site evidently posed a misinformation danger by simply reporting on the subject and refusing to back down. Emails between NewsGuard and the Daily Sceptic show Young patiently responding to the company’s questions; he also added postscripts to the articles flagged by NewsGuard with a link to the fact checks of them and rebuttals of those fact checks. Young also took the extra step of adding updates to other articles challenged by fact-checking non-governmental organizations. “I have also added postscripts to other articles not flagged by you but which have been fact checked by other organisations, such as Full Fact and Reuters,” Young wrote to Slachta.
That wasn’t enough. After a series of back-and-forth emails, NewsGuard said it would be satisfied only with a retraction of the articles, many of which, like the lockdown piece, contained no falsehoods. After the interaction, NewsGuard lowered The Daily Sceptic’s rating to 37.5/100.
“I’m afraid you left me no choice but to conclude that NewsGuard is a partisan site that is trying to demonetise news publishing sites whose politics it disapproves of under the guise of supposedly protecting potential advertisers from being associated with ‘mis-’ and ‘disinformation,’” wrote Young in response. “Why bother to keep up the pretence of fair-mindedness John? Just half my rating again, which you’re going to do whatever I say.”
NewsGuard’s Skibinski, in a response to a query about The Daily Sceptic’s downgrade, denied that his company makes any “demands” of publishers. “We simply call them for comment and ask questions about their editorial practices,” he wrote. “This is known as journalism.”
The experience mirrored that of Consortium. Afran, the attorney for the site, noted that NewsGuard uses an arbitrary process to punish opponents, citing the recent study from the company on misinformation on the Israel-Hamas war. “They cherry-picked 250 posts among tweets they knew were incorrect, and they attempt to create the impression that all of X is unreliable,” the lawyer noted. “And so, what they’re doing, and this is picked up by mainstream media, that’s actually causing X, formerly Twitter, to now lose ad revenue, based literally on 250 posts out of the billions of posts on Twitter.”
The push to demonize and delist The Daily Sceptic, a journalist critic of pharmaceutical products and policies, reflects an inherent conflict with the biggest backer of NewsGuard: Publicis Groupe.
Publicis client Pfizer awarded Publicis a major deal to help manage its global media and advertising operations, a small reflection of which is the $2.3 billion the pharmaceutical giant spent on advertising last year.
The NewsGuard-Publicis relationship extends to the Paris-based marketing conglomerate’s full client list, including LVHM, PepsiCo, Glaxo Smith Kline, Burger King, ConAgra, Kellogg Company, General Mills, and McDonalds. “NewsGuard will be able to publish and license ‘white lists’ of news sites our clients can use to support legitimate publishers while still protecting their brand reputations,” said Maurice Lévy, chairman of the Publicis Groupe, upon its launch of NewsGuard.
Put another way, when corporate watchdogs like The Daily Sceptic or Consortium News are penalized by NewsGuard, the ranking system amounts to a blacklist to guide advertisers where not to spend their money.
“NewsGuard is clearly in the business of censoring the truth,” noted Dr. Joseph Mercola, a gadfly voice whose website was ranked as misinformation by NewsGuard after it published reports about Covid-19’s potential origin from a lab in Wuhan, China.
“Seeing how Publicis represents most of the major pharmaceutical companies in the world and funded the creation of NewsGuard, it’s not far-fetched to assume Publicis might influence NewsGuard’s ratings of drug industry competitors,” Mercola added, in a statement online.
This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations.
Lee Fang is an investigative reporter. Find his Substack here.
Facebook faced heavy pressure from the Biden White House to censor content on the COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo: Robert Alexander/Getty Images)
FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL: Facebook staffers were leaking to the White House as the tech company and the Biden administration battled over COVID-19 vaccine content and whether Facebook should be censoring it, according to emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
In an April 18, 2021, email that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, produced to the House Select Subcommittee on Weaponization of the Federal Government, executive Nick Clegg told Facebook colleagues that Andy Slavitt, then a White House senior adviser on the COVID-19 response, said Facebook employees were leaking to the White House.
Clegg, who said that he had just had a long call with Slavitt, wrote that “Andy told me in confidence … that internal FB employees are leaking to his team (I assume via Rob F[laherty] accounts of disobliging remarks made about both Andy and Rob by FB decision makers.”
Flaherty was then the digital director at the Biden White House.
Clegg, who is the president of global affairs at Meta, also wrote that Slavitt said Facebook employees suggested that Facebook leadership was planning to manipulate the White House with the data it shared.
“Those remarks [by Facebook decision makers] are coupled with suggestions about how FB should ‘snow’ the White House with info/data about authoritative Covid info in order not to share the most telling/helpful data about content which contributes to vaccine hesitancy,” he added about what Facebook employees were allegedly leaking to the Biden administration.
The leaks occurred at a time when Facebook faced heavy pressure from the Biden White House to censor content on the COVID-19 vaccine. Rep. Jim Jordan, who chairs the government weaponization subcommittee, has been revealing the extent of the pressure in the “Facebook files” posts he releases on Twitter, sourced from documents and emails Meta shared with the subcommittee.
“These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook,” writes Jordan.
These newly subpoenaed meeting notes continue to show the Biden White House’s desire to direct and control content on Facebook.
More evidence of the censorship-industrial complex.
Brian Rice, vice president of public policy at Meta, responded to Clegg’s April 2021 email, saying, “Rob made an offhand comment about conversations with ‘other people from Facebook’ during a recent conversation, this is clearly what he was referencing.”
Rice added, “I haven’t been part of any conversation that includes disparaging remarks made about Andy, or about any strategy to snow the White House[.]”
Documents obtained by the subcommittee reveal that Facebook temporarily throttled the reach of a popular Tucker Carlson video on the COVID-19 vaccine, even while acknowledging that the video did not violate any of Facebook’s rules. The White House also complained to Facebook about the reach of a popular meme suggesting that those who received the COVID-19 vaccine may later sue for injuries.
Flaherty, the then-digital director at the White House, also asked a question suggesting that Facebook might want to curb the reach of Tomi Lahren, a commentator who had announced she would not get the vaccine, and The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet. “If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see [New York Times], [Wall Street Journal], any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people. You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?” Flaherty wrote in an email to Facebook employees.
According to Open Secrets, Meta employees heavily favor Democrat candidates over Republican candidates. In 2020, the year Joe Biden was elected president, Meta employees gave $6.3 million to Democrats and $578,000 to Republicans.
The emails provided to The Daily Signal also indicate the White House told Facebook YouTube was censoring vaccine content more aggressively.
“Andy [Slavitt] attended a meeting of misinfo researchers (didn’t provide names) organized by Rob F[laherty] on Friday in which the consenus was that FB is a ‘disinformation factory’, and that YT [YouTube] has made significant advances to remove content leading to vaccine hesitancy whilst we have lagged behind,” Clegg wrote in the April 18, 2021, email.
Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on Thursday shared what he called “smoking-gun documents” proving Facebook censored Americans on behalf of the Biden administration in a lengthy social media thread.
Jordan wrote the all-caps message, “THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE,” before diving into the lengthy thread reminiscent of the so-called “Twitter Files” used earlier this year to disclose once-internal documents given to journalists once Elon Musk bought the social media platform.
“Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House,” Jordan wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
“During the first half of 2021, social media companies like Facebook faced tremendous pressure from the Biden White House—both publicly and privately—to crack down on alleged ‘misinformation,’” he continued. “In April 2021, a Facebook employee circulated an email for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, writing: ‘We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House’ to remove posts.”
Rep. Jim Jordan, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, shared what he calls “smoking-gun documents” proving Facebook censored Americans on behalf of the White House. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
THE FACEBOOK FILES, PART 1: SMOKING-GUN DOCS PROVE FACEBOOK CENSORED AMERICANS BECAUSE OF BIDEN WHITE HOUSE PRESSURE
Never-before-released internal documents subpoenaed by the Judiciary Committee PROVE that Facebook and Instagram censored posts and changed their content moderation policies because of unconstitutional pressure from the Biden White House.
During the first half of 2021, social media companies like Facebook faced tremendous pressure from the Biden White House—both publicly and privately—to crack down on alleged “misinformation."
In April 2021, a Facebook employee circulated an email for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg, writing: “We are facing continued pressure from external stakeholders, including the [Biden] White House” to remove posts. pic.twitter.com/iDRV3Kk2oO
Jordan then wrote that an April 2021 email revealed that a Facebook executive informed his team that a Biden administration senior advisor was “outraged” that Facebook did not remove a particular post. The post, according to Jordan, was a meme of actor Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at a TV with the caption, “10 years from now you will be watching TV and hear… Did you or a loved one take the COVID vaccine? You may be entitled to…”
In another April 2021 email, Nick Clegg, Facebook’s president for global affairs, informed his team at Facebook that Andy Slavitt, a Senior Advisor to President Biden, was “outraged . . . that [Facebook] did not remove” a particular post. pic.twitter.com/5muflAQjcx
Facebook noted that “removing content like that would represent a significant incursion into traditional boundaries of free expression in the US,” but Andy Slavitt, the Biden senior advisor who was worked up over the meme, “disregarded the warning and the First Amendment,” according to Jordan.
“What happened next? Facebook panicked,” Jordan wrote. “In another April 2021 email, Brian Rice, Facebook’s VP of public policy, raised the concern that Slavitt’s challenge felt ‘very much like a crossroads for us with the [Biden] White House in these early days.’”
Jordan noted that “Facebook wanted to repair its relationship with the White House to avoid adverse action,” and provided a document in which someone who appears to be a Facebook staffer wrote, “Given what is at stake here, it would also be a good idea if we could regroup and take stock of where we are in our relations with the [White House], and our internal methods too,” in an internal document.
“This wasn’t the first time that the Biden White House was angry that Facebook didn’t censor more,” Jordan wrote before listing other examples.
“In July 2021, President Biden publicly denounced Facebook and other social media platforms, claiming they were ‘killing people’ by not censoring alleged ‘misinformation,’” Jordan wrote. “On August 2, 2021, Facebook admitted it was going to change its policies because of pressure from the Biden White House.”
Facebook is accused of censoring Americans on behalf of the White House. ((Photo Illustration by Thiago Prudencio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images))
Jordan then wrote that “it wasn’t just the White House,” because “Facebook also changed its policies in direct response to pressure from Biden’s Surgeon General, censoring members of the ‘disinformation dozen'” for sharing claims about COVID.
But it wasn't just the White House.
Facebook also changed its policies in direct response to pressure from Biden's Surgeon General, censoring members of the “disinformation dozen.” pic.twitter.com/FvGuoqUlns
“These documents, AND OTHERS that were just produced to the Committee, prove that the Biden Admin abused its powers to coerce Facebook into censoring Americans, preventing free and open discourse on issues of critical public importance,” Jordan wrote.
“Only after the Committee announced its intention to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt did Facebook produce ANY internal documents to the Committee, including these documents, which PROVE that government pressure was directly responsible for censorship on Facebook,” he continued. “Based on Facebook’s newfound commitment to fully cooperate with the Committee’s investigation, the Committee has decided to hold contempt in abeyance. For now. To be clear, contempt is still on the table and WILL be used if Facebook fails to cooperate in FULL.”
Jordan ended his thread with, “To be continued…”
Facebook and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Robert Kennedy Jr., a 2024 presidential hopeful, is sworn in before testifying at the Weaponization of the Federal Government hearing in Washington, D.C., on July 20. (Photo: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images)
House Democrats attempted to prevent President Joe Biden’s Democrat primary rival Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from giving public testimony during a hearing investigating government censorship. Kennedy was among witnesses who testified Thursday to the House Judiciary Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government about collusion between the federal government and Big Tech companies to block speech.
Early on, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., cited House Rule 11, Clause 2, “which Mr. Kennedy is violative of,” she said.
“I move that we move into executive session because Mr. Kennedy has repeatedly made despicable antisemitic and anti-Asian comments as recently as last week,” said Wasserman, whose run as former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee came to a controversial end after Wikileaks emails appeared to by appeaed to show DNC staffers tried to tip the scales against the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and in favor of eventual nominee Hillary Clinton.
House Rule 11, Clause 2 requires any House witness with testimony that would “defame, degrade or incriminate any person,” to be given in closed session, out of public view.
During his testimony, Kennedy insisted his remarks were mischaracterized.
“In my entire life, I have never uttered a phrase that was either racist or antisemitic,” Kennedy told the House panel.
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., asked to table the Wasserman Schultz motion, and she responded by asking for a roll call vote. All Republicans on the select subcommittee backed Massie, in voting against going into closed session for Kennedy’s testimony. All Democrats voted in favor of Wasserman Schultz.
Wasserman Schultz said it was voting against “allowing a witness to degrade others and to violate the rules and not have his testimony and degradation amplified rather than given in executive session.”
Rep. Dan Goldman, D-N.Y., said he was voting, “No to hate speech.”
Last week, Kennedy suggested that COVID-19 could have been a deliberate bioweapon from the Chinese, and said: “COVID-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.”
Kennedy, the son of former attorney general and New York Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, and the nephew of former President John F. Kennedy, is challenging Biden for the Democrat presidential nomination
“I was censored, not just by a Democratic administration, I was censored by the Trump administration,” Kennedy said during the House hearing. “I was the first person, as the chairman [Jim Jordan, R-Ohio] pointed out, I was the first person censored by the Biden administration two days after he came into office.”
Massie noted “irony and cognitive dissonance from the other side of the aisle is deafening.”
“This is a hearing on censorship that began with an effort with a formal motion from the other side of the aisle to censor Mr. Kennedy,” Massie said. “They do not want him to speak. Yet that is the topic of this hearing. They have kept him from speaking, the collusion between government and private organizations.”
NASHVILLE – Americans on Broadway responded to critics who say country music star Jason Aldean’s song “Try That In A Small Town” and its accompanying video evoke vigilantism and racism.
“I think it’s a bunch of sissies making a big deal out of, you know — it’s free speech, first of all,” Carmen said outside Aldean’s Nashville bar. “Don’t think it’s a racial thing at all. I think that’s the way he feels about our country.”
IS JASON ALDEAN’S NEW VIDEO RACIST? WATCH:
But Darren was more open to critics.
“Everybody has different opinions. Everybody’s different,” he said. “It’s a big country.”
“I say artistic freedom,” Darren added.
Jason Aldean has faced criticism that his song “Try That In A Small Town,” promotes racism and vigilantism. The country music star denied those accusations. (Rich Polk/Getty Images for iHeartRadio)
Critics have argued the Aldean song’s message — that big city behavior like stomping the flag or swearing at cops wouldn’t be well received in a small town — and the accompanying riot footage in the video promote race-based violence. Video of Aldean and his band was also shot in front of a Tennessee courthouse where a mob lynched a Black man in 1927.
Aldean disputed the accusations, tweeting that no lyrics in the song reference race and that all the clips were of real news footage. He also pointed out that he was performing at the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017 when a gunman opened fire on the crowd, killing 58 and injuring hundreds.
In the past 24 hours I have been accused of releasing a pro-lynching song (a song that has been out since May) and was subject to the comparison that I (direct quote) was not too pleased with the nationwide BLM protests. These references are not only meritless, but dangerous.…
“It is absolutely overblown,” Nancy said. “He’s just saying ‘small town values,’ ‘we’re going to take care of each other.'”
Rose agreed.
“I don’t think it had anything to do with race,” she said. “The song was just a very basic song about living in a small town, and I don’t understand how it was correlated at all with anything else.”
Rose doesn’t believe “Try That In A Small Town,” by Jason Aldean, has anything to do with race. She feels the song is simply about life in a small town. (Teny Sahakian/Fox News Digital)
The video for “Try That In A Small Town” was released Friday and was played heavily on CMT until the network pulled it from rotation earlier this week without explanation. But out of more than a dozen people who spoke to Fox News in Nashville, none saw a problem with the video.
“I thought it’s a beautiful song,” Carol said. “Everybody’s going to take it the way they want.”
“Either it’s freedom of speech or it’s not,” Lori said. “One way or the other. We don’t get it both ways.”
Ethan Barton is a producer/reporter for Digital Originals. You can reach him at ethan.barton@fox.com and follow him on Twitter at @ethanrbarton.
Columnist Dennis Prager attends the premiere of the documentary film “No Safe Spaces,” in which he is featured, at TCL Chinese Theatre on Nov. 11, 2019, in Hollywood. “No Safe Spaces” chronicles the intolerant, anti-free speech mentality of the Left on college campuses, which Prager experienced firsthand at Arizona State University earlier this year. (Photo Michael Tullberg/Getty Images)
In February, I was invited along with Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), and Robert Kiyosaki, author of the bestseller, “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” to speak at Arizona State University at a conference titled “Health, Wealth and Happiness.” The invitation came from the T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, an independent center affiliated with Barrett College, the honors college of ASU.
About a week before the scheduled event, 34 (Ann Atkinson — see below — counted 39) of Barrett College’s 47 faculty members signed a letter to the dean of ASU condemning the event on grounds that Charlie Kirk and I are “white nationalist provocateurs … purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy.”
In June, in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece that went viral, the then-director of the Lewis Center, Ann Atkinson, wrote, “The faculty protests extended beyond the letter. Professors spent precious class time denouncing the program.”
In addition, the “administration’s position … was no secret. All advertising about ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness’ was scrubbed from campus walls and digital flyers. Behind closed doors, deans pressured me to postpone the event indefinitely. I was warned that if the speakers made any political statements, it wouldn’t be in the Lewis Center’s ‘best interests,’ which I interpreted as a threat.”
The consequences? The faculty’s illiberal tantrum was devastatingly effective on two fronts.
First, the scare tactics worked on undergraduates. Many students told me they were intimidated by professors into not attending. Some would attend only if we promised that cameras wouldn’t face the audience …
Second, the event cost its organizers dearly. Shortly after ‘Health, Wealth, and Happiness,’ Lin Blake, the events operations manager at ASU Gammage Theater, was fired … And as of June 30, ASU will dismantle the Lewis Center and terminate my position as its executive director.
As will be clear, these 34 professors epitomize the low moral and intellectual level of nearly all our universities.
I will not address the specious attacks on Kirk. I will only note that this alleged “hater” devoted his entire half-hour speech to explaining why he, though a Christian, observes the Sabbath each week from sunset Friday to sunset Saturday. He spoke about the enriching benefits to his life and to his marriage and family of abstaining from work one day every week, an abstention that includes turning off his cellphone for 24 hours.
Does that strike you as something a hater, let alone a white supremacist, would talk about to students? Furthermore, wouldn’t any student benefit from hearing such a talk, especially from a young person?
Here are some of the accusations of the 34 ASU professors:
“During Black History Month, Barrett is hosting two white nationalist provocateurs who have decried the social prohibition on using the ‘n-word’ and called for the cancellation of Black History Month.”
Their primary “proof” of my being a white nationalist is a statement I once made on my radio show. I told a caller that I believe it is ludicrous that one can never say the N-word — unless, of course, one calls or refers to a black person using that word, in which case, I said, “it is despicable.” You can hear me say it is despicable to call a black person the “N-word” on the broadcast linked to the professors’ letter. The context of my statement about the “N-word” was my saying on the air the word “kike” in quoting the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning David McCullough biography of President Harry S. Truman. A caller asked me why people can say “kike” — the “N-word” for Jews — but never the “N-word.”
That is when I made the commonsense point that there are times when enunciating awful words is warranted — as when one wishes to condemn its use or quote literature, to cite two examples.
In fact, The New York Times recently published an op-ed piece by Columbia University linguistics professor John McWhorter on the “N-word,” in which he and The New York Times repeatedly spelled out the word — precisely to show that sometimes it is entirely legitimate to say or write the word. In short, the professor (who is black) and The New York Times (which is as left-wing as the 34 ASU professors) essentially said what I said about the “N-word.”
The 34 provided two other examples of my being a “white nationalist provocateur”:
One is that I said in 2020, “If you see the entire video, [George Floyd] is sort of hysterical from the beginning of his encounter with the police, who were completely decent with him. He says he can’t breathe; he can’t breathe before they touch him.”
The other is that I condemned Black Lives Matter.
On the basis of these three examples — none of which is in any way racist — the ASU professors labeled and libeled me as a “white nationalist provocateur.”
They owe me a public apology. More importantly, they owe ASU and their students an apology. Should they not apologize and retract their libels, if ASU has any commitment to truth, it should censure every one of the 34.
Every other example the 34 cited to smear me was equally specious and intellectually dishonest. Every example they used to condemn me was taken from a left-wing group called Media Matters, whose raison d’etre is to smear conservatives. Media Matters is as far left as Proud Boys is far right. Imagine if a conservative group condemned liberals using only Proud Boy sources. That would be the equivalent of what the 34 professors did.
This is important to understand because the professors based their entire smear of me on one, radical source. They clearly never read any of my work.
The charge of my being a “white nationalist” is as vicious as it libelous. It would be impossible to find a written word in my 10 books or more than a thousand columns (all available on the internet) or an uttered sentence in 40 years of broadcasting that expresses sympathy with “white nationalism.” I am a religious Jew who hates white nationalism, the doctrine that killed 2 out of every 3 of Europe’s 9 million Jews just a few years before I was born.
My father, an Orthodox Jew, joined the U.S. Navy and risked his life to fight that evil. As anyone who has heard or read me can testify, the motto of my life, taken from Viktor Frankl’s classic “Man’s Search for Meaning,” is that “there are only two races: the decent and the indecent.”
Unlike the 34 professors and the rest of the Left, I divide people by morality, not race or class.
So, given the dishonesty of the smears, why did the 34 professors condemn ASU for having me come to speak at ASU? The reason is that left-wing professors, deans and students are terrified of articulate conservatives coming to their campuses. They rightly fear that if students are exposed to one of us for just 90 minutes, we can undo four years of leftist indoctrination. And here’s one proof: It is almost inconceivable any one or — for that matter, 10 — of these professors would invite me to ASU to debate them.
Meet a few of them — exactly as described on their individual pages on the ASU website.
Dagmar Van Engen, a ‘non-binary’ individual whose preferred pronoun is ‘they,’ and whose “current project argues that transness is central to queer and feminist science [and is the] author of ‘How to F— a Kraken: Cephalopod Sexualities and Nonbinary Genders in EBook Erotica.’”
Lisa Barca, whose “area of expertise includes … Feminism and Gender Studies and (whose) recent research uses an ecofeminist approach to the intersections of speciesism … and other forms of discrimination.”
Alex Young, “a scholar of transnational settler colonialism.”
David Agruss, who has done “research in gender and sexuality studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, and animal studies” and who “filed a lawsuit against Montana State University, saying he was denied tenure and fired because he is gay.
Joseph O’Neill, who “recently led a seminar on the ‘whitewashing of Ancient Greece and Rome.’
Rachel Fedock, whose “research interests include … feminist ethics, Black feminism, abolition, gender, race … .”
Rebecca Soares, an editor of “The Female Fantastic: Gendering the Supernatural in the 1890s and 1920s.”
These are the people who teach your children at Arizona State University — in their “honors” college, no less.
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Dennis Prager is a columnist for The Daily Signal, nationally syndicated radio host, and creator of PragerU.
The Daily Signal publishes a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Heritage Foundation.
A preliminary injunction issued Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Terry A. Doughty explicitly prohibits the White House and several federal agencies from violating the First Amendment by directing social media companies to censor Americans.
Up to and even after the injunction’s release, Democrats have insisted that any suggestion the federal government is colluding with Big Tech to censor conservatives (or pretty much any information inconvenient to the current administration) is a “conspiracy” theory. However, in his injunction, Judge Doughty cited shocking evidence that the deep state’s collusion with Big Tech is very much real. Here are 12 of the dozens of damning instances cited by the judge that demonstrate the severity of our government’s illegal partnership with Big Tech.
1. White House Orders RFK Tweet Removal ‘ASAP’
On Jan. 23, 2021, the White House requested Twitter remove a tweet by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that was critical of Covid-19 vaccines. “Hey folks-Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process of having it removed ASAP,” wrote a Biden official. The White House also expressed a desire to “keep an eye out for tweets that fall in this same genre.”
2. White House Requests ‘Immediate’ Ban On Biden Family Member Parody Account
On Feb. 6, 2021, the White House asked Twitter to ban a “parody account linked to Finnegan Biden, Hunter Biden’s daughter and President Biden’s granddaughter.”
“Cannot stress the degree to which this needs to be resolved immediately,” the official wrote to Twitter. “Please remove this account immediately.” The account was banned within 45 minutes, Doughty noted.
3. Twitter Streamlines White House Censorship Requests
On Feb. 7, 2021, Twitter provided the White House with a “Twitter’s Partner Support Portal” that, according to the injunction, “expedited review of flagging content for censorship.” The portal was created because Twitter felt overwhelmed by the large volume of censorship requests coming from the White House and wanted to both prioritize and expedite the administration’s requests.
4. Twitter Promises White House It Will Boost Censorship
On March 1, 2021, after a meeting with White House officials about “misinformation,” Twitter sent a follow-up email promising that it would do more to suppress “misleading information.”
“Thanks again for meeting with us today. As we discussed, we are building on ‘our’ continued efforts to remove the most harmful COVID-19 ‘misleading information’ from the service,” Twitter wrote.
5. Facebook Fulfills White House’s Covid Censorship Requests
Sometime between May and July, a “senior Meta executive” sent emails to White House officials, letting them know that Meta was fulfilling White House “requests” to censor alleged Covid-19 misinformation. The email also said Meta was “expand[ing] penalties” for “Facebook accounts that share misinformation.”
“We think there is considerably more we can do in ‘partnership’ with you and your team to drive behavior,” Meta wrote.
6. Facebook Agrees to More Sweeping White House Covid Vaccine Censorship Demands
On March 21, 2021, Facebook sent an email to the White House recapping a March 19 in-person meeting during which the Biden administration apparently “demanded a consistent point of contact with Facebook, additional data from Facebook, ‘Levers for Tackling Vaccine Hesitancy Content,’ and censorship policies for Meta’s platform WhatsApp.” In response, according to Doughty, Facebook said it was “censoring, removing, and reducing the virality of” anti-vaccine content “that does not contain actionable misinformation.”
7. Facebook Shadowbans Vaccine Content on WhatsApp at Behest of White House
In the same aforementioned email, Facebook also agreed to shadowban anti-Covid vaccine content on Meta-owned WhatsApp. “As you know, in addition to removing vaccine misinformation, we have been focused on reducing the virality of content discouraging vaccines that do not contain actionable misinformation,” the Big Tech company explained.
8. Facebook Boosts White House’s Vaccine Propaganda
On April 13, 2021, the White House asked Facebook multiple times to “amplify” pro-vaccine messaging in the wake of a “temporary halt” of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. “Re the J & J news, we’re keen to amplify any messaging you want us to project about what this means for people,” Facebook wrote back.
9. White House Demands Censorship of Tucker Carlson Post
On April 14, 2021, a White House official emailed a Facebook executive inquiring into why a Tucker Carlson post with an “anti-vax message” had not been censored. Facebook responded, stating that while the post did not violate community guidelines, it was being “demoted.” Another White House official, unsatisfied with the shadowbanning since Carlson’s post had garnered 40,000 shares, wrote an email demanding an explanation from Facebook. The official also apparently directly called a Facebook executive. Facebook subsequently assured the White House that the video was given a “50% demotion for seven days and stated that it would continue to demote the video.”
10. Twitter Deplatforms Alex Berenson After White House Calls Him ‘Epicenter of Disinfo’
On April 21, officials from the White House and the Department of Health and Human Services met with Twitter for a “Twitter Vaccine Misinfo Briefing.” During the meeting, White House officials “wanted to know” why journalist Alex Berenson had not been “kicked off” Twitter, calling him “the epicenter of disinfo that radiated outwards to the persuadable public.” Berenson was later suspended and eventually deplatformed.
11. Facebook Appeases White House Censorship Demands to Get Back in Biden’s ‘Good Graces’
In July 2021, after intense public and internal pressure from White House officials, including Press Secretary Jen Psaki and President Joe Biden himself, Facebook waged a mass censorship campaign against the “Disinformation Dozen” and anyone connected to them. The “Disinformation Dozen” are 12 users (one of whom is RFK Jr.) who were apparently responsible for the majority of anti-vaccine content. Around that same time, a Facebook official asked one of Biden’s senior advisers for ways to “get back into the White House’s good graces,” adding that Facebook and the White House were “100% on the same team here in fighting this.”
12. White House Successfully Pressures Twitter to Remove Jill Biden Parody Video
On Nov. 30, 2021, the White House emailed Twitter to flag an edited video of First Lady Jill Biden “profanely heckling children while reading to them,” according to the injunction. In response, Twitter slapped a label on the video, warning that it had been “edited for comedic effect.” However, that wasn’t enough for the White House. After several back and forths that included the first lady’s press secretary, Twitter removed the video in December 2021.
The above list is only the tip of the iceberg. The Biden administration’s colossal war on the First Amendment includes an even wider range of targets, such as the Hunter Biden laptop story, the lab-leak theory, anyone who questions the integrity of the 2020 election, anyone who questions the security of voting by mail, anyone who questions climate change, pro-lifers, people who believe in the sex binary, negative posts about the economy, and general criticism of the president. “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote Judge Doughty.
Evita Duffy-Alfonso is a staff writer to The Federalist and the co-founder of the Chicago Thinker. She loves the Midwest, lumberjack sports, writing, and her family. Follow her on Twitter at @evitaduffy_1 or contact her at evita@thefederalist.com.
A documentary on the risks of transgender medical procedures reportedly was pulled from theaters after a pro-trans group complained about the planned screenings. According to Gay City News, the documentary — “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” — was to run June 21 at about 40 AMC Theatres until the Queer Trans Project raised objections to the content.
The QTP issued a public statement Saturday celebrating the cancellation of “No Way Back,” the outlet noted.
“The Queer Trans Project is thrilled to announce a resounding victory in our collective efforts to challenge hate and misinformation,” the statement noted, according to Gay City News. “In less than 24 hours, we received over 1,500 petition signatures and reached over 14,000 individuals on social media through community mobilization and unwavering advocacy. This remarkable achievement demonstrates the power of our united voices and the urgency of defending the rights and dignity of the transgender community.”
The Daily Wire said it reached out to AMC Theatres about the cancellation but did not receive a response.
A press release issued last week announced the screenings and said the documentary was “produced by lifelong California Democrats and LGBT activists” and “takes a non-religious, non-political, and non-ideological look on the subject of gender-affirmative medical practices, the risks and side effects of cross-sex hormones, surgeries, and the long-term health implications of gender medicalization,” the Gay City News said.
A message at the top of the documentary’s website reads, “We’ve been canceled! Intolerant, illiberal, histrionic IGNORANT loudmouths who have not even seen the film have pressured AMC theaters to make the hard decision to cancel our dates! DO NOT LET THEM WIN!”
The site adds that “we will have the film available for streaming and on DVD as soon as possible. SIGN UP FOR UPDATES!”
A link on the documentary’s website leads to a statement about the film as well as a message from Deplorable Films, which headed up the project.
The statement about the film reads:
In response to recent histrionic and intolerant calls for screenings of this important film to be canceled, we will simply respond to the careless assertions made by those behind it.
They call the film ‘right-wing’; this is absurd to the point of being libelous. The filmmakers (some of whom are gay and/or have gay children) are dedicated, life-long, Liberal Democrats. We request any of the detractors to offer actual evidence of them –or this film—being ‘right wing.’
The film is not anti-trans people, nor is it even anti sex change surgery; there are trans people in the film speaking against the sudden rush to powerful drugs and major surgeries that are have increased exponentially in the past decade, and which have statistically caused far more pain and suffering than they’ve prevented.
The “QT Project’s” inference of detransitioning as “conversion therapy” is a weak, underhanded attempt to conflate detransitioning with that despicable and sometimes devastating practice of the past. Nice try, kids. It might be worth noting here that there’s an infamously repressive theocracy on the other side of the globe where ‘gender-affirming’ surgery is the only option given to gay men and women, who may otherwise be executed under law.
Has this “QT” group distanced itself from gay people? Perhaps looking to harm them? The film is very pro-gay. It also makes the point very clearly, that some of the worst harm that ‘gender-affirming care’ is causing is to kids who would otherwise grow up to be happy, well-adjusted gay men and women. Perhaps this is what frightens “The QT Project,” not dissimilar from the theocracy mentioned above.
Or perhaps it is something else; perhaps they are on the payroll of those who profit from this –so much of what they are doing is resulting in the creation of life-long surgical and pharmaceutical patients are doing so to great benefit of certain surgical clinics and pharmaceutical companies.
It is quite evident that those undertaking this crusade against this film have not had the courtesy of seeing it before taking such extreme actions to silence it.
We stand by our filmmakers.
The Daily Wire said one person who appeared in the documentary — a 26-year-old named Abel — told the outlet about his transition to female as a teenager and then his de-transition.
“I would tell anyone who wants to transition, especially the young boys who think life would be easier because they are the perfect image of a masculine male, that the transition will not save them,” Abel told the outlet.
“It would actually destroy their lives. Actually, take a step back and think about this for a while,” Abel added to the Daily Wire. “And even if that is what they think they want—the actual negative side effects, nobody will tell you.”
A woman named Laura also appears in the documentary and told the outlet that she took a high dose of testosterone and got a double mastectomy before de-transitioning at age 22.
“I’m a very vocal advocate of complete bans for transition procedures for minors, both medical and social, because children are not developed,” Laura said, according to the outlet. “They do not have the brains or bodies to be able to make long-term decisions about their reproductive and sexual health, and they just are not able to consent to these long-term procedures.”
Here’s the trailer:
NO WAY BACK: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care (formerly Affirmation Generation) 2 minute trailer youtu.be
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“The Wise of Heart” by Hans G. Schantz (Image Source: Hans Schantz YouTube video screenshot)
Crowdfunding platform Kickstarter recently suspended an illustrated novel project about “defying transgenderism” after the campaign was fully funded.
The author of the project, Hans G. Schantz, stated that his comic was canceled by Kickstarter after initially being reviewed and approved by the company. It was not until after the illustrated novel reached its $3,000 crowdfunding goal that the project was booted from the website.
Schantz said that he increased the novel’s goal to $6,000 before the project reached its May 31 deadline, but Kickstarter shut down the campaign, claiming that it had violated the site’s community rules.
The illustrated novel, “The Wise Heart,” follows the story of a biology teacher who is “thrown in jail for defying transgenderism” and subsequently “faces a show trial amid a media circus.”
Kickstarter Trust and Safety sent Schantz a “generic note” alerting him that his project would no longer be promoted. Backers of the campaign will no longer be charged for their pledges.
“A thorough review of your project uncovered one or more of the following violations: Inappropriate content, including but not limited to explicit or pornographic material [or] Hateful or offensive content that fails to meet Kickstarter’s spirit of inclusivity by promoting discrimination, bigotry or intolerance towards marginalized groups,” Kickstarter told Schantz.
The platform cannot comment on suspension “beyond what is stated in this message,” according to the company’s Trust and Safety.
The author accused the crowdfunding site of failing to live up to its own “inclusivity” standards.
“It’s sad that Kickstarter lacks a sufficient spirit of diversity and inclusion to be willing to tolerate an objective look at the scientific and political issues surrounding transgenderism as presented in the context of a courtroom drama,” Schantz wrote on Substack.
“I infer they received a complaint, the substance of which I was not privy to and took unilateral action without allowing me any input,” he continued. “No due process, no ability to face my accusers or even to be informed of the nature of the accusation. The fact that Kickstarter waited until after the project was already fully funded and nearing a close is a more disturbing trend. Creators would be wise to to [sic] deal with platforms more worthy of their trust.”
“The conduct of Kickstarter in particular and big tech companies in general raise broader issues of how the rule of law has devolved in an online context to sanction injustices that would not be tolerated in a more conventional setting. A contract that allows one party to unilaterally withdraw from the deal already agreed to after the other party has detrimentally relied upon their assurances would not typically be enforceable,” Schantz added.
Since being removed from Kickstarter, Schantz moved his campaign to an alternative crowdfunding platform, Fund My Comic, to assist with funding his project.
Kickstarter did not respond to a request for comment, Fox News Digital reported.
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In ‘The Wise Of Heart,’ A Man Faces Unthinkable Consequences For Stating An Unspeakable Truth
How much trouble can one get into for stating a simple and obvious truth? Quite a lot. And a man learns that in a way he couldn’t have foreseen in The Wise of Heart, a satire by Hans Schantz. Schantz gave Bounding Into Comics the inside scoop on his tale, which twists an old story in a perfect way for modern times.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023) character sheet, Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
The Wise of Heart is crowdfunding on Kickstarter right now. With just a week to go, the 80,000-word illustrated novel is about $225 shy of its $3,000 goal. It needs just a little bit more help, and it’ll be well worth it if readers can push it across the line. This isn’t Schantz’s first rodeo, either. In addition to his previously published works, he’s scheduled to be involved in an interesting event later this year. Keep reading until the end to find out what that is. First, though, there’s the new book.
“The Wise of Heart reworks the story of the hundred-year-old Scopes Monkey Trial amid today’s transgender mania,” Schantz told BIC. “A high school biology teacher, Mike Andrews, agrees to participate in a court challenge to a law forbidding the teaching of biological science. [However], the law isn’t forbidding evolution—as in the original Scopes Trial—but rather the teaching of the biology of sex determination in defiance of a state mandate for gender affirmation.”
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
“The result is a deft and devastating satire that flips the script on the original Scopes Trial as depicted in movies like Inherit the Wind,” he continued. “Instead of the enlightened advocates of progressive evolutionary biology exposing the supposed ignorance of the superstitious religious town folk, The Wise of Heart is all about how today’s progressive advocates of gender affirmation defy the truths of biological science.”
Schantz provided more details on the plot. “The story opens in a small-town diner as the school superintendent, ringleader of the local cabal, persuades the mayor and the local university president to support his plan to challenge the ‘Gender Awareness in Academia’ or GAIA Act. The university president recruits an out-of-town ringer to lead the prosecution, her former student, Senator Roxy Castillo, leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.”
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
“Not to be outdone, the superintendent secures the services of Castillo’s archrival, Senator Chad Travis from Texas, to head up the defense,” Schantz added. “The resulting trial becomes a media circus with a Greek chorus of reporters and commentators popping up between court sessions to casually lie and spin the narrative in their desired direction.”
It’s not all about the subject matter, though. “One of the most interesting characters is Mike’s girlfriend, Acey, whose mother is the university president, and who faces the challenge of trying to find some middle ground,” he explained. “The courtroom drama is a fight to the finish on the science and politics, but serves as a catalyst for a number of great character arcs and conflict-driven personal growth.”
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
Interested readers who back this will not only be the first in line for a copy of the book, but they’ll also help Schantz fund the bold line drawings by artist Elin Chancey that help bring the story to life. Additionally, an extensive sample, including a couple dozen episodes, is already available both on Substack and Arktoons. There’s also an extended trailer that further explains the story and showcases the art.
Again, Schantz isn’t a new author. His sci-fi techno-thriller series, The Hidden Truth, has proven to be popular. And he writes non-fiction as well. Beyond that, he takes the time and effort to run book sales for indie authors on a regular basis. And they highlight some fantastic works that BIC readers will undoubtedly enjoy.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
And that interesting event he’s scheduled to be involved in later this year? That would be BasedCon, which “is a gathering for authors and fans of science fiction and fantasy.” It’s currently planned for September somewhere in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Where exactly? You have to register for the event to find out that info.
The event has already gained attention because it’s a con for those who are “tired of woke propaganda.” Is that a good thing or bad thing? Who knows, at this point? Right now, though, it looks like it’s going to have a significant lineup of guests. Those interested in sci-fi and fantasy will definitely want to check out the website for additional info.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
But first things first. And that’s Schantz’s The Wise of Heart. It’s received an incredible amount of backing already. All it needs is a final few supporters to hit that $3,000 goal. Any amount that people can provide helps, and so does spreading word about the book on social media.
‘The Wise of Heart’ (2023), Hans G. Schantz & Elin Chancey (illustrations)
Paul Hair is an author who writes fiction and nonfiction under his own name and as a ghostwriter. Follow him on Gab (PaulHair). His fascinating books are available at his Amazon Author Page. Help support him by purchasing one or more of his titles. https://www.amazon.com/Paul-Hair/e/B0034OTU50/
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American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
American Family Association
American Family Association (AFA), a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization, was founded in 1977 by Donald E. Wildmon, who was the pastor of First United Methodist Church in Southaven, Mississippi, at the time. Since 1977, AFA has been on the frontlines of Ame
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