With the silencing of conservatives on social media, a near-blackout of that story in “mainstream” media, and the sudden arrest – and silencing – of big donor Sam Bankman-Fried, Democrats seem to have put a lid on unfavorable speech.

Waves of so-called “Twitter Files” released to journalists by owner Elon Musk have proven the social media giant censored and curtailed conservative speech – most prominently President Donald Trump’s, despite key Twitter staff’s concerns there were no grounds to do so.

The alarming revelations have been met with anger from the right but yawns from the left.

“Among the three major networks – ABC News, CBS News, and NBC News – the words ‘Twitter Files’ have been discussed on air a collective total of one time since Dec. 2, the day Elon Musk announced the release of the first batch,” The Federalist reported Tuesday.

“While most Americans are not frequent users of Twitter,” The Federalist writes, “the company’s relationship with government intelligence agencies and its apparent influence on federal elections is undeniably worthy of major network coverage.”

And worthy of the attention of a U.S. senator, as it turns out.

“Twitter deliberately censored a federal candidate for president – the Republican candidate for president, and the sitting president of the United States,” Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told The Heartlander Tuesday. “They did that before the election to try to interfere.  

“And they didn’t censor any Democrats, by the way. We had Democrats out there spreading all kinds of conspiracy theories that the Supreme Court was going to somehow stop the election, or Justice (Amy Coney) Barrett was going to stop people from voting. Nonsense. Twitter didn’t do anything about that. And yet, Donald Trump – who they say didn’t actually violate any of their policies – before the election, they intervened to try and censor him, throttle down his messages. 

“This is just clear evidence of election interference on the part of Big Tech. It’s what I have been saying has been happening for years, and it’s time that finally they came clean about it. And I hope that there’s going to be repercussions.”

That might well include repercussions for making false statements under oath to Congress and federal agencies, Hawley says.

“Twitter lied under oath – I mean, I can’t count the number of times … by telling us, ‘Oh, we never censor, oh, we never throttle down based on political viewpoint.’ That all turns out to be lies. Lies and lies and lies. 

“And they’ve also lied to the Federal Election Commission, so there’s a lot to get at here.

“The affidavits, which are sworn statements that Twitter executives filed with the Federal Election Commission – in which they said that they did not communicate with the Joe Biden campaign about the Hunter Biden laptop, that they did not intervene to stop any presidential candidate’s speech – those were lies, we now know. So they’ve lied under oath to a federal agency that has governance over federal elections. 

“There needs to be a full investigation of the people who lied and, if necessary, prosecution if it’s warranted.”

The same can be said for the case of defunct cryptocurrency firm FTX and its co-founder Bankman-Fried, Hawley says.

“Well, it’s clear that he’s been engaged in a giant fraudulent scheme, and I just want to know what the money trail is,” Hawley says. “I’d like to know how much of this money that he ripped off from his donors and from his customers, his contributors – how much of that was funneled to the Democrat Party, and did Democrats know about it? He’s one of the top contributors to the Democrat Party from this last election cycle. I mean, the guy has got his finger in every aspect of the Democrats’ machine. 

“We need to get to the bottom of this. This is basically a money-laundering operation that benefited the Democrats.

“I think the Democrats, frankly, are scared to death that the details are going to become public.”

If so, they caught a break on Monday when Bankman-Fried was arrested after months of cavorting in the Bahamas – just a day before he was set to testify before the House Financial Services Committee. It’s a twist that even Democrat committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters was lamenting.

Perhaps not as suspiciously as Hawley is, though.

“Well, it is interesting that he was arrested right before he was supposed to testify under oath to a House committee, where he would have been questioned by Republicans,” Hawley told The Heartlander. “His arrest certainly prevents that, which is a shame. 

“You would think as prosecutors, you want the guy to talk, especially under oath. That just gives you more opportunity to gather information and potentially for him to perjure himself. 

“So yeah, pretty interesting that Republicans won’t have the chance to ask him questions under oath.”

As for the media’s bizarre disinterest in Twitter’s proven censorship of conservatives, Hawley isn’t surprised.

“They’re in favor of censorship,” he said. “This is the dirty secret – not so secret, I guess – of the corporate media, which is, they’re all for FBI-Big Tech collusion. They’re all for the U.S. deep state working with these platforms to censor conservative points of view. 

“They don’t want real reporting. They want the corporate media line to be reported. The corporate media wants their echo chamber on Twitter, and they don’t want anybody else to have a say. So, they’re all for this. They’re all for censorship. They don’t believe in the First Amendment anymore. They only believe in free speech if it’s free for them. They want everybody else to be silenced. 

“I think this is really exposing the corruption in the corporate media, and I think we’re just going to see more of it.”

Whether the rest of the media care or not, however, Twitter has been caught red-handed manipulating the public debate before the 2020 election.

“They just got power hungry and then drunk on the power they had,” Hawley says of the former Twitter executives involved in the censorship. “They decided, ‘Hey, it’s great to be able to control speech across the planet on this huge platform and to ban a world leader. We love doing this. We love being able to decide which political viewpoints are legitimate and which are not. We love being able to stop conservatives from talking during and before an election.’

“They engaged in it deliberately. They misused and abused their power.”