More censorship of RFK Jr.

It’s hard to believe that this is happening in America. If you oppose the regime, expect to get silenced. Ask RFK Jr.

But then again, the trend has been around for a while, so I shouldn’t be surprised. When Donald Trump got elected in 2016 the media suddenly decided that allowing anybody else to speak was a bad idea.

No, that isn’t right. The MSM was on board with Obama’s campaign to completely delegitimize Fox News, so the trend goes back to at least 2008.

No matter when it started, the censorship regime is in full swing, justified by the reinvention of the term “misinformation” as “Any speech that is inconvenient to the Elite.”

The censorship regime is neither government nor private sector; it is rather driven by an unholy alliance of government, government- and privately-funded non-profits, government-funded universities, and government-aligned tech and media companies who conspire to shut down the speech of anyone they decide is saying inconvenient things.

As we know, “misinformation” can include anything inconvenient to The Narrative; the Twitter files showed that everybody knew that true information was being censored, so even the claim that this curation of speech is driven by a desire to ensure that only “true” things are spread was complete BS. Even Yoel Roth, Twitter’s chief “Trust and Safety” guy, expressed disgust while shutting down the accounts of Americans saying true things the government didn’t like.

There are many targets of the censors, but the most prominent these days is Joe Biden’s rival for the Democrat nomination for president in 2024.

In any functioning Democracy, political speech would be considered off-limits for silencing, especially in a political campaign. While nominally private companies can “do what they want” on their platforms, it is neither true that this censorship is purely private nor is it true that Leftists actually believe that private companies are free to speak or not speak as they will.

Ask any Christian baker about how friendly the Left is to free speech rights, and rights to silence. It doesn’t exist in the mind of the Left. You can’t say what the Left hates and must say and do what they like.

The censorship regime is not, in fact, exempt from government control in any case. The private companies are regulated by the government, and hence subject to pressure; they take requests from government officials to censor content; they rely on government-funded entities to “fact check” and identify misinformation. They are as independent of government suasion as any university or school that takes government money: they are simply one step removed from direct control.

So when the president’s chief rival in his own political party starts speaking, and big tech starts censoring, that is certainly adjacent to a violation of the 1st Amendment. It is morally so, if not technically legally so. It is repulsive.

When industry and government are so closely linked, there is little difference between “private” and “government” censorship. Suppression of free speech is not suddenly OK when it is contracted out to the private corporations that control the public square.

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 27, 2023

The distance between the government and big tech on censorship is at best razor thin if that. We have emails that show that government officials routinely make requests, and big tech routinely grants those requests, for the taking down of content that the government doesn’t like. We also have lots of evidence, including press conferences, where elected officials threaten legal action and new regulations to force big tech to buckle under to these demands.

The threats were extortionate, and they worked. For all intents and purposes, big tech censorship is government censorship. The government demanded it, and big tech delivered. And even when the demands are not explicit–and we have no idea what is and is not taken off by demand of the government–the threat attached to noncompliance is there. Best avoid trouble.

RFK Jr. was essentially tossed off of Instagram before he put up a single post. I wrote about that earlier, and it suggests that the company (Meta/Facebook) intended to prevent any speech by RFK Jr. before he uttered a word. There were no Terms of Service violations. He simply opposes Biden. We certainly know that Meta does what it can to please the government, and we can be sure that this pleases Joe Biden’s campaign very much indeed. Whether an explicit request went out–we don’t know–it hardly matters.

Meta acts as an agent of the government often enough.

Now YouTube has taken to routinely censoring RFK’s speech, closing access to one of the largest speech platforms in the world, and putting its thumbs on the scale in favor of a president who has made it clear that he would use his power to punish social media platforms that spread “misinformation.”

In the case of my interview with @al_guart, @YouTube probably acted on its own initiative. It has internalized the political wishes of the establishment to the point where it knows what to censor without being told. #Kennedy24

— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) June 27, 2023

This amounts to, at the very least, a huge political contribution to President Biden. But in fact, it amounts to much more of that: it is massive corporations using their power to manipulate the information that Americans can see, with a long record of doing so at the direction of the government. It is direct interference in the election; it may be legal, but it is certainly wrong.

Again, we know with certainty, because everybody involved has admitted it, that YouTube and Meta, and in the past Twitter all followed government directives to remove content from their platforms, initially at least due to coercion by politicians.

This is nothing less than meddling in an election.

I’m not a RFK Jr fan, but I support his right to speak. This level of corporate censorship is beyond concerning. https://t.co/r8WgnnYJOP

— Representative Pat Garofalo (R) ⭐️ (@PatGarofalo) June 27, 2023

Unlike many conservatives, I am not an RFK Jr. fan, although I understand his appeal. To see a Democrat willing to stand up to the woke bullies is refreshing. But he is on the other side of too many issues for me to cheer too loudly for the guy.

But that is irrelevant. Societies that censor people based on their opinions are on the road to tyranny, or already at that destination.

If Republicans demanded that Big Tech throw Democrats off their platforms, the outcry would be deafening. But this? Hardly a squeak.

It’s bad that @YouTube is censoring an American presidential candidate.

But what if, as seems likely, it is acting at the behest of the Biden censorship industrial complex?

There’s a name for a country ruled by a government that censors and suppresses political opponents… https://t.co/WcpqQ5AZZM

— Jay Bhattacharya (@DrJBhattacharya) June 27, 2023

I feared that the guardrails on the government’s policing of speech were removed during the Obama Administration when the war on Fox News really got going. If you recall, the Obama Administration secretly tapped James Rosen’s phone and hardly anybody said “Boo.”

Obama was the good guy and Fox the bad guy, so it was A-OK. There should have been a bipartisan outcry, but there was hardly a whimper. Sharyl Attkisson’s laptop was hacked, likely by the FBI, and again there was little outcry. Shut down inconvenient ideas. It’s good for business.

Now the floodgates are open. Say the wrong thing, and you will get de-platformed.

Perhaps I would be more sympathetic if Big Tech weren’t so cowed by the government and so clearly in their pocket. I don’t thrill to the idea of anybody being forced to platform ideas they find abhorrent. But big tech and big government have merged, and any “independence” is a sham.

Governments are open about their pressure on social media to buckle to their whims. Given that, these platforms should be forced to obey the constitutional protections given to all speech. They act as government agents all the time; they should obey the limits imposed on the government.

You shouldn’t be allowed to have it both ways.

The de-platforming and censorship that is de rigueur in the MSM and on Big Tech platforms is just another example of why independent media like Hot Air plays such a vital role in the information ecosystem. Without platforms such as Hot Air and all the Townhall sites, you would only hear what the Establishment wants you to hear.

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