Censorship
March 31, 2024 — Lloyd Billingsley
“When Front Page Magazine applied to join Google’s AdSense advertising program we were turned down,” notes Daniel Greenfield of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. “Since Google, like other Big Tech monopolies, has censored and deplatformed us in the past, we weren’t too shocked. But this time, Google told us why we had been banned.” The ban was due to this writer’s “Remember the San Bernardino Fourteen,” from December 3, 2021.
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March 29, 2024 — Scott Johnson
RealClearPolitics has posted the video (below) of Dave Rubin’s panel session earlier this month with the winners of the first RealClearPolitics Samizdat Prize — Twitter Files reporter Matt Taibbi, Great Barrington Declaration co-author Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and New York Post reporter and Laptop From Hell author Miranda Devine. RCP has also posted transcribed excerpts along with the video here. It’s hard to keep up with the news of the day,
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March 20, 2024 — Scott Johnson
I found the oral argument of the case now styled Murthy v. Missouri this past Monday to be utterly demoralizing. As soon as the oral argument concluded I rashly hazarded my assessment that it portends a victory for the massive censorship-industrial complex represented by the Biden administration. My assessment was a hot take based on the tenor of the argument. The argument seemed to me to reflect a fantasy world.
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March 13, 2024 — Scott Johnson
The great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya hosts the Illusion of Consensus podcast. I have embedded his most recent episode below via X. In this episode he speaks with Martin Kulldorff. Please check it out in its native habitat here and help Dr. Bhattacharya extend his reach to other platforms. Dr. Bhattacharya’s introduction to the podcast notes that “in this critical conversation we discuss a number of hot topics, most crucially Martin’s
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March 12, 2024 — Scott Johnson
According to his Martin Kulldorff bio, Ph.D., Dr.h.c., is an epidemiologist, a biostatistician, and a founding fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom. He was a Professor of Medicine at Harvard University for thirteen years. Dr. Kulldorff’s research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. In October 2020,
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December 10, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi appeared as a witness to testify at the recent congressional hearing in which Rep. Dan Goldman made a fool of himself again. Taibbi chronicled the doings in his Racket News column “Dan Goldman, Democrats, Make a Clown Show of Censorship Hearing,” behind the Racket News paywall. However, Taibbi has posted a narrated version of the column in the video below. I thought some readers would find this of
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December 1, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Lately Democrats have fallen into the habit of labeling all facts they would rather not talk about as “conspiracy theories.” They must think it works. Yesterday, Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger testified before Jim Jordan’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. Matt recorded the experience, which he describes as “surreal,” at Racket News. Representative Dan Goldman is the Democrats’ attack dog on the subcommittee. Goldman hasn’t given
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September 25, 2023 — John Hinderaker
This Real Clear Opinion Research survey has disquieting news about Americans’ tolerance of censorship. Carl Cannon comments on the results, including the partisan breakdown. Suffice it to say that not many Democrats are going to the wall for free speech these days. But I want to comment on just one aspect of that survey: It is remarkable that the number of people who think the government should censor “hateful posts
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August 18, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Zach Weissmueller takes a deep dive into Missouri v. Biden with (plaintiff) the great Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and attorney John Vecchione in the Reason podcast (video below). Reason provides background for the podcast here. We have covered the lawsuit and the underlying issues of the epidemic and social media censorship repeatedly on this site. The historical review captured in the video is enraging and the related clips included light it
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August 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker
We now know that the federal government, led by the FBI, has engaged in a prolonged program of censorship that focused on social media. It began, as far as we know, during the Trump administration, and at that time was directed largely against the President. It has flourished during the Biden administration, in which the FBI and other agencies have acted as enforcers, suppressing dissent from the Biden administration’s line,
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July 29, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Columbia Law School Professor Philip Hamburger and his New Civil Liberties Alliance colleague Jenin Younes write in their column “The Biden Administration’s Assault on Free Speech” in today’s Wall Street Journal: [T]he nation needs to come to terms with the reality and scale of the assault on free speech. Our government has established a vast system of censorship. By keeping it largely secret, it has been able to exert unconstitutional
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July 25, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Former New York Post editor Emma-Jo Morris testified last week to the House Weaponization of Government Committee chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan. The committee has posted the text of her statement here. I have posted video below. Morris was the deputy politics editor leading national coverage at the Post, where she also reported the Hunter Biden “laptop from hell” series. Her work for the Post is collected here. She has
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July 16, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi has made a valuable contribution to the documentation of the government’s suppression of heterodox and nonconforming speech on Twitter. He is an honest and dogged journalist. I have therefore sought to draw attention to his work in face of such denials and evasions as those to which FBI Director Christopher Wray testified under oath on July 12 before an occasionally showboating congressional committee last week. Taibbi wrote in
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July 13, 2023 — Scott Johnson
FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the House Ways and Means Committee yesterday. Republican representatives did not distinguish themselves in their ability to wring the truth from Wray in their allotted five minutes. Indeed, they were more or less pitiful. Had they been allotted more time, however, they would still have found themselves up against a hard case. Wray is incorrigible. We know that the FBI was instrumental to the
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July 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
Matt Taibbi posted “Take that, Internet censors!” last week to comment for his paid subscribers on Judge Doughty’s ruling in Missouri v. Biden. As we have reported, Judge Doughty’s ruling preliminarily enjoins the federal government’s censorship regime and is on appeal to the Fifth Circuit as of yesterday. Big Brother is not happy. Taibbi has now made his “Take that” post available in video and podcast form with narration by
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July 11, 2023 — Scott Johnson
In “Walk away, Joe,” I tried to provide legal background on likely next steps in Missouri v. Biden — the most important free speech case to come down the pike since I don’t know when. Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty has entered a preliminary injunction limiting the communications of the federal censorship regime — President Biden and designated officials/agencies — with social media companies. Judge Doughty’s preliminary injunction
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July 7, 2023 — Scott Johnson
President Biden is not going to walk away from the extensive censorship regime he has implemented in the executive branch. The censorship was preliminarily enjoined on Independence Day by Chief Judge Terry Doughty of the Western District of Louisiana in Missouri v. Biden. Judge Doughty’s injunction order is posted online here. It is supported by Judge Doughty’s 155-page memorandum here. I commented briefly on the injunction in “Enjoining Mr. Joe”
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