Yesterday’s Senate Judiciary committee reading on the repression industrial complex was a difficult one for Democrats.
They were forced to contend that there was never any repression during the Biden leadership, even during Covid! and that the partnership of government organizations with private institutions to fight “disinformation” previously threatened free speech and press freedom. After all, they claimed that the government was only attempting to elude foreign and domestic deception operations, but any censorship that did occur was appropriate and necessary.
Put another way, the repression business advanced always existed, and even if it did, the goals deserved it.
Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., almost came out and said that at one place in the reading. Welch claimed that there was nothing to the Twitter Files tale, even though his team displayed a massive sign showing a picture of , a piece , I wrote in February 2023 about it. The picture had” NOT TRUE” written across it in read words. He claimed that the government’s funding for “disinformation” checking went to private entities” to help store unusual disinformation.” Welch’s story illustrates how all the government did was be on Twitter when people violated the agency’s individual terms of service and community rules. Nothing to be found around!
If there is anything that is” NOT TRUE,” it’s this ridiculous portrayal of what the Twitter Files truly revealed. The Twitter Files, which were released in tranches to a group of reporters soon after Elon Musk bought Online in 2022, exposed a coordinated and persistent efforts by the brains society to co-opt and word British people. In essence, it was a plot to avert a direct attempt by the authorities to judge Americans in a way that would have been blatantly unlawful.
The Hunter Biden laptop case is a perfect illustration of how this turned out. The knowledge community had spearheaded a coordinated effort to discredit leaked details about Hunter Biden long before The New York Post’s debut bomb shovel on the computer in October 2020. Why? Given that the FBI had been seized from a Delaware computer repair shop the day before, the company had been in custody of the computer. The FBI was aware that the laptop contained corrosive facts of the younger Biden’s legal activities, including influence-peddling on behalf of his father and illegal drug use.
The FBI and the intelligence community were aware that all of this might be revealed before the election, but for months it had been prime senior authorities at Twitter and Facebook to deny reports that Hunter Biden had been involved in “hack-and-leak” operations by angry foreign actors. Yet the FBI had established a unique one-way communication channel with Twitter to send files to the business regarding alleged foreign deception. In order to share information about potential international risks to the upcoming presidential election, the FBI arranged for major Twitter officials to obtain specific security approvals as part of this installation.
Naturally, all of this was a ruse to get Twitter to stop covering the Hunter Biden laptop story when it eventually appeared, which the company did, along with Facebook and all of the other major media outlets in the country.
Welch either chose to completely disregard this background or made the awkward error. When he spoke about other aspects of the censorship industrial complex, he also was dishonest or out of his depth, displaying an almost comical level of naiveté about how online censorship operates.
Take, for instance, his portrayal of Newsguard. Newssguard is a for-profit organization with ties to Big Pharma companies like Pfizer and Pfizer, contracts with the federal government, and other institutional clients to assess the reliability of news sites based on arbitrary standards. According to what has been widely reported, the company consistently rates websites like The Federalist as unreliable while consistently promoting corporate media outlets as “generally reliable” that have been the most unreliable and deceptive on everything from Covid to the Hunter Biden laptop story to the Russia collusion hoax.  ,  ,
Welch, however, as if he were reading directly from a pamphlet written by Newsguard’s marketing team, described Newsguard as a company that “provides transparency and reliability ratings so that advertisers can make informed decisions about where to spend their money.”  ,
Welch seemed like a man who had barely had a chance to read his canned corporate talking points before the hearing even started, though I don’t mean to criticize him. However, his attitude is in line with Democrats ‘ general opinion of online censorship, which is that it doesn’t happen but that it’s a good thing if it does.
Senate Democrats made a difficult case on Tuesday, in part because the evidence of a strong censorship industry complex targeting First Amendment-protected speech is, at this point, overwhelming. My colleague Mollie Hemingway testified at the Tuesday hearing, which didn’t help Democrats.
Hemingway explained in her opening statement how The Federalist has been targeted by both publications and individuals for reporting facts and expressing their political views, which the Biden administration and the federal censorship bureaucracy disliked. According to her, the censorship has been very limited, avoiding publications like the Washington Post and New York Times, both of which received Pulitzer prizes for spreading the Russia collusion hoax following Trump’s victory in 2016. Hemingway remarked,” 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 also exposed a significant portion of the censorship industrial complex, and we even filed a lawsuit against the State Department after learning of its role in marketing and promoting censorship tools that are being used against us as we sit here right now.
Hemingway and my colleague Sean Davis were both personally targeted by a federal censorship operation run by Stanford University in partnership with the Cybersecurity &, Infrastructure Security Agency ( CISA ) and Global Engagement Center ( GEC ), which fall under the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, respectively.
Welch and his Democratic colleagues are either among the most illiterate and under-researched Americans in the country or they are either well aware of these facts and have simply chosen to make up their minds.  ,
Because of this, and many more, this has been a public record for years. No one with any seriousness contests the existence of these censorship initiatives and practices, which are frequently housed at universities that conduct “disinformation research” that the government then uses to restrict free speech and debate. No one in good faith disputes the fact that these censorship efforts disproportionately target conservatives and right-of-center publications that challenge traditional narratives and prevailing orthodoxies.
Democrats don’t really see a problem with using the government to censor American citizens, and they will do it again once more once they are back in power, which is why Senate Republicans held a hearing about it this week.
