Josh Hawley gives his U.S. Senate colleagues far too much credit when he excuses them for supposedly not knowing the extent of the Biden administration’s conspiracy to silence domestic dissent.
“I don’t think they realize the extent, the breadth, of the effort to shut down speech that is being directed by the government,” Hawley told The Heartlander Thursday.
With all due respect to the Missouri senator’s tactfulness, conservatives have long known they’re being censored on social media. Just before the 2020 election Twitter locked an entire newspaper – the New York Post – out of its account for its investigative reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop, reportage that long ago was proven accurate. Meta CEO and Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted colluding with the FBI to silence the story.
Have the other U.S. senators been living under a rock, and just how big is said boulder?
No, the truth of the matter is senators, members of Congress and most in the media simply don’t care that conservatives and stories casting an unflattering light on liberals are being routinely and possibly unconstitutionally censored.
The U.S. Supreme Court may ultimately decide the legality of it, after the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Texas law prohibiting social media companies from censoring posts for their political views.
Or maybe senators missed that little bit of news?
They must also have missed the fact that a lawsuit by outgoing Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, along with the Louisiana AG, has already unearthed collusion by the Biden administration and social media companies to censor speech the administration doesn’t like. Emails obtained in the suit “detail months of apparent coordination between federal administration officials and social media giants …”
As Schmitt’s news release put it, his lawsuit has found “a vast ‘Censorship Enterprise’ across a multitude of federal agencies. In response to Missouri and Louisiana’s interrogatories, defendants identified 45 federal officials at DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, and the Office of the Surgeon General (all of which are contained in either DHS or HHS) that communicate with social media platforms about ‘misinformation’ and censorship.”
Or maybe senators missed a startling report from The Intercept that concluded the Biden administration, even after disbanding its ominous Disinformation Governance Board, “is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech.” The report is based on what the outlet says is “years of internal (Department of Homeland Security) memos, emails, and documents – obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents.”
There’s plenty more evidence besides all that – including the fact that YouTube de-platformed a St. Louis radio station earlier this year for merely talking about a poll in which 50% of Americans said cheating altered the 2020 presidential election.
Yet, aside from Josh Hawley, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and a precious few others, all we get from Congress is crickets.
Nor does the vast swath of the media seem to care. Of course, it’s the conservative ox being gored, right?
“You know, I think for the media’s part, they love it,” Hawley told me. “The liberal media absolutely loves it, because they want conservatives to be censored.”
Fact is, despite the censorship of conservatives being an open secret, it wouldn’t be much of a topic in political or media circles were it not for the doggedness of Missouri’s sitting senator and outward-bound attorney general – who will join Hawley in the U.S. Senate come January.
Schmitt will be joining a sadly exclusive club: the scandalously small group of D.C. officials who think government censorship of Americans’ speech is Orwellian, un-American and totalitarian. In other words, as frightening as it gets.
