Even as the left continues to rage over Disney’s short-lived decision to suspend Jimmy Kimmel for lying, Google becomes the latest company to admit that the Biden administration forced it to ban accounts and remove posts that didn’t fit the government’s approved narrative.
The legendary Rush Limbaugh once stated that he didn’t bother to point out hypocrisy on the left because it never stuck to them.
That’s because leftist politicians can always count on mainstream media to cover for them by ignoring unfavorable events or exposing the blatant hypocrisy of their favored politicians. While most people feel a certain amount of shame when they’re caught lying, the left simply ignores it.
While Limbaugh was famously right most of the time, in today’s modern world, where Elon Musk owns X and conservative speech is gaining ground, it’s worth pointing out the left’s abject insincerity.
This is one of those times.
Kimmel’s Outrage vs. Real Authoritarianism
Over the last week, the outcry over ABC’s decision to temporarily suspend late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel has reached a truly absurd pitch.
Just for background, Kimmel made a blatantly false claim about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, even as his ratings have been in a freefall this year.
But according to political activists disguised as comedians, pundits, and journalists, the decision to take Kimmel off the air temporarily at the request of affiliates was somehow the greatest example of authoritarianism in the history of the United States.
CNN’s Jake Tapper even said it was the “most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Oh really?
Because I think the Biden administration’s clear record forcing tech giants to permanently ban accounts and remove posts it didn’t like is a far clearer violation of free speech rights, arguably the worst since the Alien and Sedition Acts passed in 1798.
Not a Conspiracy Theory
The latest affirmation of this came last week when Google and YouTube’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., finally admitted that the Biden administration forced it to ban accounts and remove posts from YouTube — for the sole reason that they went against the government’s narrative.
On Monday, the company agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit that Donald Trump brought against the company in 2021 for banning his account; part of the payout will go to other parties who were also illegally thrown off the platform, among them feminist writer Naomi Wolf and the American Conservative Union.
In a letter to House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, Alphabet wrote,
“Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies. While the Company continued to develop and enforce its policies independently, Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content.”
Alphabet added that the Biden administration, “created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”
The company also admitted that YouTube leaned too heavily on certain so-called “experts” for its health and election policies and will now allow creators whose accounts were suspended under those policies to return.
Last year, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was the first to let the censorship cat out of the bag when he confessed that the Biden administration had threatened his company if it didn’t cave to the government’s censorship demands, a fact that had already been documented by the House Committee on the Judiciary, as well as the case of Murthy v. Missouri.
A Pattern of Censorship
This is hardly surprising. The Biden administration was pretty open about its willingness to censor Americans’ speech, whether it was criticism of masks, vaccines, and transgenderism; the takedown of the New York Post’s exposé of the Hunter Biden laptop; or anyone questioning election integrity, school curriculum and policy, mass immigration, or other political controversies.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) even attempted to launch a “Disinformation Governance Board.” That effort only collapsed because whistleblowers quickly exposed its overtly political nature.
The Biden administration also funded the Global Disinformation Index (GDI), which pressured advertisers to demonetize conservative news sites while labeling left-leaning news organizations as “trustworthy.”
The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) was even worse. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit called CISA the “primary facilitator” of the FBI’s censorship operations.
CISA engaged in “switchboarding,” which is the act of flagging posts as misinformation, malinformation, and disinformation and then pressuring social media companies to delete those posts. The Fifth Circuit ruled in the case of Missouri v. Biden (which was eventually merged into Murthy v. Missouri) that these decisions were not made voluntarily by the companies but coerced by the government.
CISA also attempted to hide its actions from the public after outcry over the Disinformation Governance Board, scrubbing its website of information regarding its censorship activities and moving responsibilities to other organizations.
It wasn’t just CISA and the FBI that were involved in censorship, however. The White House, the Surgeon General, and the CDC directly (and sometimes publicly) pressured individuals and companies to censor others’ “wrongthink.”
Before Murthy v. Missouri was appealed to the Fifth Circuit, U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty granted a preliminary injunction to plaintiffs censored by the Biden administration, calling it arguably the most, “massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Doughty wrote,
“The evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
The Fifth Circuit also saw the scope of the violation of free speech. It ruled that the administration exercised such control over the social media companies that the companies’ actions could not be seen as their own but as that of the State.
Tragically, the nation did not receive a precedent-setting ruling on this case because when it was appealed to the Supreme Court, six of the justices ruled that the plaintiffs did not have standing to bring a suit and refused to rule on the merits of the case.
Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in his dissent,
“This evidence was more than sufficient to establish Hines’s standing to sue…and we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable.
What the officials did in this case was more subtle than the ham-handed censorship found to be unconstitutional in Vullo, but it was no less coercive. And because of the perpetrators’ high positions, it was even more dangerous. It was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.”
Free Speech Under Attack
And where were the so-called free speech defenders on the left when the Biden administration was deleting political dissent from existence?
Cheering.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, D, said her administration needed to collect data through surveillance efforts in order to target and stop so-called hate speech.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., introduced the Nudge Act, which would have forced tech companies to eliminate so-called misinformation on their sites.
Former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton not only pushed for increased censorship in Europe but championed European-style censorship laws in the United States. She even called for the arrest of those pushing so-called disinformation and propaganda.
This from a woman whose completely fabricated lies about Russian collusion led to years of bogus investigations into President Trump.
Former President Barack Obama led the way by regularly engaging in surveillance of journalists and political opponents and pushing for government control over social media, saying that content moderation “doesn’t go far enough” and “regulation has to be part of the answer to disinformation.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D, called Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter (now X) and the restoration of free speech on the platform a danger to democracy, even threatening to stop him through more taxes and new rules on social media.
Of course, Democrats weren’t defending the free speech rights of President Trump and many of his allies when they were permanently banned from Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in January 2021, but they were outraged when Musk purchased Twitter and restored Trump’s account on the platform.
And Kimmel himself cheered when Tucker Carlson was removed from Fox News in 2023, celebrating with a smarmy and crude monologue that gloated over the firing.
So pardon me if I don’t believe the left suddenly loves free speech and hates censorship. Because speech that demands that only one side be heard isn’t free — it’s propaganda.
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