Senate Dems Claim Censorship Industrial Complex Never Happened — And If It Did It Was A Good Thing
Democrats had a tough time at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing yesterday on the censorship industrial complex.
They had to argue there was never any censorship during the Biden administration (including during Covid!) and that free speech and freedom of the press were never threatened by the partnership of government agencies with private institutions to combat “disinformation.” After all, the government was just trying to catch foreign disinformation operations, they argued, so any censorship that did happen was necessary and proper.
Put another way, the censorship industrial complex never happened — and if it did it was a good thing and the targets deserved it.
At one point early on in the hearing, Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt., more or less came right out and said as much. While his staff displayed a large placard showing a screenshot of a piece I wrote in February 2023 about the Twitter Files — with “NOT TRUE” stamped across the screenshot in read letters — Welch claimed that there was nothing whatsoever to the Twitter Files story. Government funding that went to private entities for “disinformation” monitoring, he said, was actually “to help counter foreign disinformation.” All the government did, in Welch’s telling, was alert Twitter when users violated the company’s own terms of service and community guidelines. Nothing to see here!
If anything is “NOT TRUE,” it’s this absurd characterization of what the Twitter Files actually revealed. Released in tranches to a group of journalists shortly after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, the Twitter Files exposed a coordinated and sustained effort by the intelligence community to co-opt and deputize social media platforms like Twitter into censoring American citizens. Basically, it was a scheme to allow the government to censor Americans in a way that would have been straightforwardly unconstitutional if the feds had tried to do it directly.
The Hunter Biden laptop story is a prime example of how this worked. Long before The New York Post published its first bombshell scoop on the laptop in October 2020 there had been an organized effort by the intelligence community to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden. Why? Because the FBI had been in possession of the laptop since the previous December when the agency seized it from a computer repair shop in Delaware. The FBI already knew the laptop contained damning evidence of the younger Biden’s criminal activity ranging from illegal drug use to foreign corruption and influence-peddling on behalf of his father.
The FBI and the intelligence community knew all of this might come out ahead of the presidential election, so for months it had been priming top officials at Twitter and Facebook to dismiss news reports about Hunter Biden as “hack-and-leak” operations by hostile foreign actors. The FBI had even established a special one-way communications channel with Twitter to send documents to the company about supposed foreign disinformation. As part of this setup, the FBI arranged for top Twitter officials to get special security clearances so the agency could share intelligence about possible foreign threats to the upcoming presidential election.
Of course this was all a ruse to groom and pressure Twitter into censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story when it inevitably appeared, which is exactly what the company did — along with Facebook and every major media outlet in America.
Welch was either totally unaware of this background or simply chose to clumsily misrepresent it. He was similarly dishonest or out of his depth when discussing other aspects of the censorship industrial complex, displaying an almost comical level of naiveté about how online censorship works.
Take his characterization of Newsguard, for example. Newsguard is a for-profit company linked to Big Pharma firms like Pfizer that contracts with the federal government and other institutional clients to rate the trustworthiness of news sites based on completely arbitrary criteria. As has been widely reported, the company consistently promotes 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, while rating sites like The Federalist, which accurately reported those stories, as unreliable.
Yet Welch described Newsguard as a firm “that provides transparency and reliability ratings so that advertisers can make informed decisions about where to spend their money,” as if he were reading directly from a pamphlet written by Newsguard’s marketing team.
I don’t mean to pick on Welch, who came across like a man who barely had a chance to read his canned corporate talking points before the hearing began. But his attitude is representative of Democrats’ general view of online censorship, which is that it’s not happening but if it is then it’s a good thing.
This was a hard case for Senate Democrats to make on Tuesday, in part because the evidence of a robust censorship industrial complex targeting First Amendment-protected speech is, at this point, overwhelming. It didn’t help Democrats that at least one victim of government censorship, my colleague Mollie Hemingway, testified at the Tuesday hearing.
In her opening statement, Hemingway explained how we at The Federalist have been targeted, as a publication and as individuals, for reporting facts and expressing our political opinions — opinions which the Biden administration and the federal censorship bureaucracy didn’t like. The censorship has been highly selective, she explained, sparing outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times, both of which were awarded Pulitzers for spreading the Russia collusion hoax after Trump’s victory in 2016. “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,” said Hemingway. “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.”
That lawsuit against the State Department came after revelations that Hemingway and my colleague Sean Davis were both personally targeted in 2020 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 within the Department of Homeland Security and the State Department, respectively.
Welch and his Democrat colleagues are either well aware of these facts and have simply chosen to misrepresent them, or they are among the dumbest and least informed Americans in the country.
I say that because of this and much more has been a matter of public record for years now. No serious person disputes the existence of these censorship programs and operations, which are often housed at universities that provide “disinformation research” the government then uses to throttle free speech and debate. Nor does anyone in good faith deny that these censorship operations overwhelmingly target conservatives and right-of-center publications that challenge official narratives and prevailing orthodoxies.
The reason all this matters, and why Senate Republicans held a hearing about it this week, is that Democrats don’t really see a problem with using the government to censor American citizens, and they will do it again just as soon as they’re back in power.
Jesus Christ is King
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