Mollie Hemingway Delivers Masterclass Explainer on The ‘Government-Funded’ War on Free Speech
By: Shawn Fleetwood | March 25, 2025
Shawn Fleetwood
Visit on Twitter@ShawnFleetwood
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.
“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
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