On May 8, the Biden administration’s effort seeking the dismissal of a lawsuit by Texas and two media outlets, The Daily Wire and The Federalist, accusing the U.S. Department of State of enabling, technologically, the censorship of conservative voices failed. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the State Department did indeed engage in efforts to “market and promote the censorship tools and technologies to social media platforms,” citing allegations that the federal agency encouraged social media companies to “de-platform’” the two news outlets.
It’s bad enough that the two conservative outlets were potentially being censored by a federal agency in a country where freedom of speech is supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s even worse that the government tried to silence the victims, preventing them from speaking out and seeking justice.
As an immigrant who fled Soviet Russia, I’m gravely concerned about the emergence of the unfreedom of speech in America, my adopted homeland. Team Biden’s Sovietesque tactics made me reflect on my own experience with censorship in America.
Last month, my Facebook account was restricted after I posted an article I authored that was published by Fox News. Titled “Ignore FBI director’s urgent warning about terrorist threats at our own peril,” I forecasted threats the U.S. homeland will likely face in 2024 based on my experience as an intelligence analyst.
Facebook’s justification for restricting my account was my alleged “violation of Community Standards,” claiming the content shared “went against our rules on dangerous individuals and organizations.”
“You could lose your page forever,” read the warning, “if you get a few more Community Standards violations.”
My analysis was based on the 2024 Worldwide Threat Assessment issued by the Intelligence Community. It echoed the recent warning by FBI Director Christopher Wray about “the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland.” In his recent congressional testimonies, Wray repeatedly stressed the FBI’s concerns about terrorist threats having reached a “whole other level” from the already heightened situation. He warned about “dangerous individuals” coming across the southern border and the possibility of an attack “akin to the ISIS-K attack” in Russia at a concert.
Such policies are absurd and also dangerous. Would Facebook rather keep Americans blissfully unaware and unprepared for the threats we face?
This is not the first time I’ve been censored. In 2021, my former employer, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) redacted 31 pages of typescript in my book, Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America. In it, I predicted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, criticized intelligence agencies’ lack of proper expertise on Russia and Putin, and revealed Putin’s goal to destabilize America. I also disclosed that DIA was purging honest Russia analysts from its ranks in the run-up to the 2016 election, as President Obama’s top intelligence officials were concocting the nonexistent “Russia-Trump collusion.”
So DIA and CIA weaponized the pre-publication review process against me. The process is mandatory for every intelligence officer to comply with to publish a book.
Much like its Russian counterpart, the U.S. government, assisted by Big Tech, is now involved in shaping the American people’s perception of reality. Recall the 51 ex-intelligence officials claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation? Or the spy agencies withholding vital information about Covid origins from the public, according to an oversight investigation led by Rep. Brad Wenstrup.
Big Tech was outright suppressing valid information on the Covid vaccine and silencing prominent epidemiologists, such as Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Marty Makary, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Scott Atlas, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose expert opinions on Covid, government-mandated lockdowns, and the vaccine ran counter to the party line.
Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, for example, had tweeted an article he wrote on natural immunity, but that tweet was marked as a “trends blacklist.” Some of these brave doctors who went to the best medical schools in America were threatened with the revocation of medical licenses. The censorship apparatchiks, such as Twitter’s former chief legal officer, Vijaya Gadde, never went to medical school.
Here’s how journalist Matt Taibbi describes what he found in “The Twitter Files”:
We did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, “Flagged by FBI,” “Flagged by DHS,” “Flagged by HHS,” “Flagged By Treasury.” We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.
The erosion of free speech in America is giving me flashbacks to Soviet Russia. There we were afraid to speak the truth. It was a matter of survivability. Facing the risk of being expelled from school, losing your job, or even being jailed, you begin to self-censor. Self-censorship is the highest form of censorship. It means the government has total control over you. You are no longer an individual but a subject of the state.
Today, many conservatives feel too uncomfortable to openly share their views for fear of being canceled, shadow-banned, or rejected from “polite society.” There’s an emergence of wrongthink and views that don’t align with those of the government and the elites. Back in Russia, there was “correct” and “incorrect” thinking.
Speech control leads to groupthink and eventually results in thought control. Thought control is an attribute of a totalitarian society. And when your thinking isn’t free, you cannot arrive at the truth. Once the truth becomes unattainable, the society’s survivability is at risk. Remember, my birth country, the USSR, no longer exists.
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