PrairiePundit

 The Federalist: 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 — W...

Gabe Kaminsky: The Global Engagement Center, an office housed within the State Department and aiming to thwart disinformation and misinformation, has been forced by Congress to close up shop. It’s no mystery why; the taxpayer-backed GEC violated its mandate to work only overseas and devolved into a partisan enabler of speech suppression in the United States. Here’s how. Founded in 2016 and technically the product of an Obama-era executive order on counterterrorism, the GEC lapsed in December and lost congressional funding. Over the last two years, my investigative reporting in the Washington Examiner as well as that of Racket News journalist Matt Taibbi pulled back the curtain of the GEC’s ties to foreign and domestic NGOs trying to defund news outlets they say peddle disinformation – including RealClearPolitics. My reporting showed that the GEC and the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy combined granted almost $1 million to the British Global Disinformation I...

 Newsmax: Microsoft's use of a left-wing censorship tool created by NewsGuard has gotten the serious attention of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. On Monday, Cruz fired off a strongly worded letter to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella demanding to know answers about the Big Tech giant's partnership with one of the left's most notorious media monitors. Cruz's letter addresses Microsoft's promotion and apparent funding of the online "Media Literacy" tool, which was created by NewsGuard to guide "learners of all ages through the overwhelming landscape of online news and information." Conservatives say that NewsGuard's tool and its efforts are simply suppressing viewpoints and news reports using highly subjective ratings. "Given growing concerns about NewsGuard's ideological bias and its efforts to manipulate young minds, I ask for transparency regarding Microsoft's involvement in and financing of this Orwellian censorship project," Cruz wrot...

  The Federalist Wire: The Democrats no longer care about the freedom of speech. They want to crack down on what people are allowed to say. And this bombshell report reveals Joe Biden’s heinous scheme to axe free speech. An eye-opening report by the nonprofit transparency group OpenTheBooks reveals that the Biden administration has spent $267 million since 2021 on research grants referencing the term “misinformation.” ... The answer to misinformation is more speech and not attempts to censor what others are saying.  See also: Bombshell report reveals Joe Biden’s heinous scheme to axe free speech

 Newsmax: The senior Republican commissioner on the FCC is demanding that Big Tech companies fess up about their censorship activities targeting conservatives during the Biden years. In a letter sent Wednesday and obtained by Newsmax, FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr wrote to the CEOs at the four largest tech companies — Apple's Tim Cook, Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft's Satya Nadella and Alphabet's Sundar Pichai — demanding information about the censorship activities. Carr began his letter, "Over the past few years, Americans have lived through an unprecedented surge in censorship" adding, "Your companies played significant roles in this improper conduct." He noted that their companies and others "silenced Americans" for simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Carr also lambasted the tech companies for working with so-called "media monitors" and other "fact-checkers." ... In his letter, Carr asserted that these ...

 The Blaze: ... 1. End government collusion with companies and individuals for censorship purposes. “Within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens,” he said. He also vowed to “ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as mis- or disinformation” and “begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship directly or indirectly.” 2. Investigate and prosecute the digital censorship cabal. “I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified,” he declared. To prevent the destruction of evidence, Trump declared his intentions to “[urge] House Republicans to immed...

 The  DC Daily Journal  reports that the Biden administration is attempting to create a speech police to handle both foreign and domestic speech.  It has the smell of censorship to domestic opponents of the Biden regime. See also: Desperate Democrats' last-ditch election strategy: Vicious lies and smears ... “Why is Vice President Kamala Harris holding a campaign speech from the vice presidential house with the vice presidential seal where she calls Donald trump ‘Hitler’ and ‘a Nazi?'" Bedford says. “I think there’s a depression in the ranks amongst Democratic voters. They’re not feeling too good, they’re not feeling confident, they’re not liking their team, they’re not feeling the same motivation of ‘we hate Donald Trump’ that they may have in the past. And the Democrats are going to go full board to be like, ‘Hey, just a reminder, all you liberal voters out there, all you quiet Democrats, Donald Trump is literally Hitler,’” he adds. ... When you are trying to comp...

 UnHerd: The Democrat plan to censor America They don't believe the First Amendment is fit for purpose Perhaps we should censor the "woke" movement that is behind the desire to censor speech they do not agree with. 

 PJ Media: It began with Rush Limbaugh and moved to Fox News, and then Big Censorship began going after the rest of conservative talk radio. Democrat and leftist pressure campaigns called for advertising boycotts of PJ Media and other alternative conservative media. And eventually, the U.S. government joined in the efforts to shut down conservative thought. This is the story of what a "formal U.S. government program dedicated to killing news websites to kill their advertiser revenue" looks like.   We know about the pressure campaigns by the left. They're why it's not Merck but My Pillow that fills Fox News ad slots and appears in alternative conservative media. These organized programs are why it's Balance of Nature and not Pfizer doing major ad buys on Fox and conservative talk radio. This pressure campaign and censorship are why there aren't A-list advertisers in conservative online publications, but there are photos of somebody's gross teeth in the midd...

 The Federalist Wire: ... In a glaring example of how deeply entrenched censorship has become in the Biden administration, Rob Flaherty, a Biden/Harris surrogate, took it upon himself to personally reach out to social media giants in a blatant effort to scrub criticism of then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden from the internet ahead of the 2020 election. This wasn’t just a one-off power grab; the administration later brought Flaherty into the fold as White House Director of Digital Strategy, where he continues to communicate with Big Tech, pushing them to suppress the voices of private citizens online. On Wednesday, independent journalist Matt Orfalea exposed this collusion by posting footage of a Zoom call on X. The call, which took place in mid-November 2020—just days after the mainstream media had declared Biden the president-elect—reveals the extent to which the Biden/Harris campaign was willing to go to silence opposition. During the call, Flaherty, who served as the Biden/Harris ...

 Daily Caller: Justice Samuel Alito excoriated the Supreme Court majority for “shirk[ing]” its duty to restrain the government’s coercive censorship efforts in “one of the most important free speech cases” to reach the high court in years. The Supreme Court on Wednesday sided 6-3 with the Biden administration in Murthy v. Missouri, finding that two states and five individual plaintiffs lacked standing to seek an injunction against the government’s wide-ranging efforts to suppress speech online. The case concerned the federal government requesting social media companies such as Facebook and Twitter remove certain content related to COVID-19 and other hot-button issues; many of the posts that were censored were factual, and critics argued the Biden administration attempted to censor conservative viewpoints. In his dissent , Alito, who was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, argued that the majority’s decision “permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case...

  Tyler O'Neil : null The foreign policy establishment that once thrived under the control of both political parties has used Big Tech and the Biden administration to codify a “war on wrongthink” that stifles dissent from the elites’ narrative, a journalist and an online censorship analyst warned. “What we’re up against here are not pink-haired, ambi-gendered LGBT-BLM-maximizing identitarian politics when we’re talking about censorship on the internet,” Michael Benz, a former State Department official under President Donald Trump and founder of the Foundation for Freedom Online, said Tuesday at an Oversight Project event at The Heritage Foundation . It’s not “partisan politics” driving censorship, said Benz, but “the foreign policy establishment.” Conservatives and populists “don’t think about the American empire, they don’t think about the managers of the American empire, which is the foreign policy establishment, our State Department, our Pentagon, our intelligence services.” “W...

 Headline USA: U.S. Supreme Court to Hear Case Alleging Government Censorship of Social Media 'Gvernment officials transformed private platforms into state actors...' The Biden regime is accused of illegally trying to suppress speech about COVID-19 that turned out to be more truthful than what the Biden regime was saying.  See also: SCOTUS Set to Hear Free Speech Case on Biden Admin Colluding With Big Tech to Stifle 'Misinformation'

 John Daniel Davidson: If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s interview last week with Mike Benz, you need to take an hour and watch the whole thing . In a mind-bending narrative about the emergence of what Benz calls “military rule” through an online censorship industry in the U.S., he lays out in startling detail just how corrupt and tyrannical the U.S. defense and foreign policy establishment has become. Most importantly, Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, explains how a constellation of federal agencies and publicly funded institutions, under the pretext of countering “misinformation,” rigged the 2020 election and are right now smothering the First Amendment and rigging the 2024 election through massive state-sponsored censorship online. The 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic, says Benz, were the “two most censored events in human history.” And 2024 is shaping up to be the same, thanks to the emergence of a federal censorship-industrial complex....

 NY Post: Amazon ‘censored’ COVID-19 vaccine books after ‘feeling pressure’ from Biden White House: docs The results of the vaccine were that it did not prevent people from getting Covid.  Censoring those who questioned the efficacy of the vaccine meant that it took longer to find a better solution.  It turned out that the Biden regime was guilty of spreading "misinformation" about the efficacy of the vaccine. See also: ‘Who Can We Talk To?’: White House Leaned On Amazon To Suppress Vaccine ‘Propaganda,’ Emails Show And:  DCNF Reporter Reveals How Biden Admin Is Quietly Funding A ‘Censorship Industrial Complex’ In Congressional Testimony And:  Jim Jordan Subpoenas National Science Foundation For Communications Discussing ‘Content Moderation On Social Media’

 Headline USA: A member of Meta’s oversight board said during a recent interview that the Big Tech company “had not done enough” to control users’ speech back in 2020, even though it did everything possible to radically change the outcome of the last presidential election and enforce its censorship tactics after that. ... However, as previous years showed, the Big Tech company was doing everything in its power to change the results of the 2020 election and shut up every dissenter by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story , removing Donald Trump’s campaign ad, suspending his Facebook and Instagram accounts, and making sure that everyone who thought that the 2020 election was stolen wouldn’t be able to express his views, the Federalist reported . ... The censorship of truthful information was more than a mistake.  That censorship was either a gross error in judgment or a deliberate attempt to defeat Trump by covering up Biden's corruption.

 National Review: Michael Shellenberger’s first brush with social-media censorship came in 2020 when he was censored by Facebook for sharing accurate information about climate change. In the years since, Shellenberger has reported extensively on what he calls the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a network of government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and social-media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials for holding disfavored views. Shellenberger was “shocked” by the internal Twitter documents that Elon Musk shared with him and a handful of other independent journalists, including Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. The documents, which served as the basis for their Twitter Files reporting series, revealed examples of U.S. intelligence and security organizations, including the Department of Defense, working with the platform to censor information. “I sort of knew that was happening, but I...

 Breitbart: A whistleblower has reportedly brought to light startling revelations about the Pentagon’s involvement in a domestic censorship program, as detailed in newly disclosed files from the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL). Public  reports  that according to a whistleblower’s files, the Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL), previously thought to be an independent entity, was heavily influenced by government and military personnel. This involvement is far more extensive than previously known, as evidenced by Slack messages and other internal communications. The CTIL Slack channels, specifically those tagged for “disinformation” and “law enforcement escalation,” reportedly included current and former FBI employees, Michigan Cyber Command Center personnel, members of the US Defense Digital Service (DDS), and representatives from at least one European government. The DDS, headquartered at the Pentagon and established in 2015, has been particularly highlighted f...