Censorship, not Trump, is threat to democracy – Vance

Limits on free speech have become the biggest threat to US democracy, Republican vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance claimed during a televised debate on Tuesday.

Donald Trump’s running mate for the November election faced off with his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, on CBS News.

Vance claimed that “rather than debating and persuading fellow Americans,” Democratic nominee Kamala Harris “would like to censor people who engage in misinformation.”

“Harris is engaged in censorship on an industrial scale. She has done it over a number of issues. That’s a bigger threat to democracy than what Donald Trump said when he said protesters should peacefully protest on January 6.”

Vance was referring to the January 6, 2021 storming of the US Capitol building in Washington by Trump supporters following his election defeat. Trump, whose public statements are alleged to have incited the Capitol riots, faces four federal felony charges in the case. He is accused of acting unlawfully after the 2020 election, by trying to overturn the result.

The former president has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and denounced the case as an attempt to prevent him from returning to the White House. In a series of posts on his Truth Social platform in August he called it “a direct assault on democracy” and a “resurrection of a dead witch hunt.”

In the TV debate, Vance argued: “I believe we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country. Unfortunately, it’s not the threat to democracy that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz want to talk about. It is the threat of censorship.”

He went on to accuse major technology companies of “silencing their fellow citizens.”

In August, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said senior Biden administration officials had pressured Facebook to “censor” some Covid-19 content during the pandemic. He also admitted that Facebook suppressed a New York Post story about Hunter Biden after an FBI warning in the lead-up to the 2020 election.

“A president’s words matter. January 6 was not Facebook ads,” Walz responded, on the issue of the January 2021 Capitol riots.

He asked Vance directly if Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance replied that Trump is “focused on the future.”

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