Democrats have become Stalinist speech police

 Power Line:

On paper, the Democrats have a tenuous hold on power in Washington. Their president is a cipher with severely diminished mental capacities, the Senate is a 50-50 tie, and they hold the narrowest House majority in decades. Nevertheless, the Democrats see what could be a once in a lifetime opportunity, and are pressing forward with their most radical agenda since they seceded in 1861.

Among other things, the Democrats are trying to repeal, in effect, the First Amendment, by barring conservative speech–or, rather, speech that is not consistently left-wing–from the public square.

We have seen this in the moves against conservatives and other independent voices by Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Go Fund Me and other tech titans. While these companies are no doubt motivated in part by ideology in putting their thumbs on the scale of public discourse, the truth is more sinister than that.

The major tech platforms are monopolies with obvious antitrust vulnerabilities, as we saw when the Trump administration brought an enforcement action against Facebook that seeks the divestiture of Instagram. The Democrats have not only urged tech platforms to silence conservatives, they are at least implicitly (God knows what is said in private) holding out the prospect of immunity from antitrust enforcement, which means many billions more in profits. This is the ultimate in 21st-century corruption.

But it gets worse: the Democrats are also trying to drive independent voices off the more traditional broadcast and cable platforms. Dan Gainor of the Media Research Center sent out an email today that included this:

The war against conservatives on social media has turned into a war against conservative broadcast media, as well. The House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology will hold a hearing tomorrow at 12:30 p.m. entitled “Fanning the Flames: Disinformation and Extremism in the Media.” But will the Democrats in this hearing talk about the lies from CNN or MSNBC? Probably not, since the memorandum for the hearing specifically cited articles that bashed Fox News, Newsmax, and “conservative media.”

Two Democratic representatives have gone even further in their fight against the First Amendment. Reps. Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Jerry McNerney (D-CA) wrote letters to the heads of multiple TV providers. The letters demanded answers to questions such as “Have you ever taken any actions against a channel for using your platform to disseminate any disinformation?” and “Are you planning to continue carrying Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN?” Unsurprisingly, the letters made no mention of any liberal news organization.

Please watch the hearing and comment on it.

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They should be reminded that the Russian collusion hoax was disinformation that was bought and paid for by Democrats and then loudly pushed by Democrat media outlets from the NY Times to CNN.  More recently the Democrats have used the Capitol riots to spread disinformation as part of their impeachment efforts.

Stalin and Hitler were big on controlling the media too.  They both sought to suppress competing voices. It is a totalitarian trait that Democrats and their cohorts in Big Tech have adopted.