A week ago, you couldn't get the left to shut up about Jimmy Kimmel. More accurately, you couldn't get them to stop declaring that his being kicked off the air (albeit temporarily) was a massive violation of the First Amendment. They declared that this was proof that conservatives don't actually care about free speech, and that President Trump was, indeed, the dictator they all claimed he was.
Meanwhile, conservatives were more than happy to remind them just how anti-free speech the left was when it came to the right. The Twitter files revealed massive government pressure to silence conservatives. Mark Zuckerberg apologized for Facebook's caving to the government when they brought their demands for censorship of the right. They also seem to forget that they banned Donald Trump from Twitter entirely.
And now YouTube stepped up to reveal they, too, were banning conservatives at the behest of the Biden administration.
As reported by my colleague Mike Miller, Google is walking back bans of many people, be they regular citizens or elected officials like Rand Paul, after Republicans led an investigation to uncover just how deep the Biden administration's censorship attempts went. Google, for its part, admitted to the following:
- The Biden Administration pressured Google to censor Americans and remove content that did not violate YouTube's policies.
- The Biden Administration censorship pressure was "unacceptable and wrong."
- Public debate should never come at the expense of relying "authorities."
- The company will never use third-party "fact-checkers."
- Europe's censorship laws target American companies and threaten American speech, including the removal of "lawful content."
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So let's break this down.
The Biden administration had an active hand in getting conservatives silenced on one of, if not the largest, video platforms on the internet.
Jimmy Kimmel got canceled because he said awful things about a man who was murdered in cold blood, planned to double down on it, and had ratings so awful that it's a wonder he wasn't canceled before Stephen Colbert. Oh, and Trump had absolutely nothing to do with his firing.
Now that we have these two points established, I want to explore how the left is reacting to the admission from Google that the Biden administration was pushing for the censorship of conservatives on YouTube.
Or, I would, if there were any.
I don't have to tell you that the left never actually cared about free speech. They don't even really care about their speech in the long run. If they did, they would've reacted to the Twitter files and the Google admission with outrage, because if it's conservatives today, it could be them tomorrow.
But that's not how the left thinks. They think in terms of opinions that should be allowed and professed, not in terms of who gets to say what. As you've likely seen, they'll shut down members of their own side if they begin to say anything that falls outside the approved bounds of the "experts," "the science," or the body politic.
What's disconcerting about all of this is the fact that with their silence about YouTube, they're effectively sending the message that, given the chance, they'll do this again, and again, and again. Their ideology forbids real free speech, because the ultimate goal of the left isn't a free or even fair society. The ultimate goal is control.
And by control, I don't just mean control of various parts of society, I mean control in a totalitarian sense. Control over your life, your mind, your body, and your identity.
And the first and foremost thing to overcome is your ability to express your identity. Not the shallow identity as the left defines it, but your individual identity. Your unique personality, thoughts, wishes, hopes, dreams, opinions, and needs. If you can't express that, and if they can even punish your expression, then they can begin to truly control you. Moreover, they can control others. Taking your voice does a lot for authoritarians.
It's one of the reasons free speech was the number one focus for the founders. People are not truly free without the ability to speak freely.
So, don't think the left actually has a care in the world about free speech. They don't even care about Kimmel's speech. They care that you care about free speech, and that they can convince you that the people protecting your free speech are attacking it. That way, you'll weaken those people willing to uphold free speech so they can move in and take it away.
The Republican Party's investigations into censorship bore some really great fruit, and the censorship industrial complex took a huge hit. Let's press the advantage and keep it going. Ignore any cries from the left about censorship. It's all fake.
