If you were on RedState over the past weekend, you saw our phenomenal, wall-to-wall coverage of CPAC 2021. (See, WATCH! CPAC 2021 LIVESTREAM for all the links). The big draw, of course, was President Trump’s speech on Sunday, and he did not disappoint. He called out the VichyCons, who would happily sell out the country for a seat at the low end of Nancy Pelosi’s table. He called for the GOP to aggressively implement ballot integrity measures so that we will never again be shamed by the dog’s breakfast of failure that was the 2020 election vote count.

The speech was heavily viewed. CNN reported that 5.8 million people watched the speech on FoxNews, and another 1.5 million watched on Newsmax. What was stunning was the number of streaming viewers:

President Trump’s speech at #CPAC2021 eclipsed 31 million live viewers on social media.

— Jason D. Meister 🇺🇸 (@jason_meister) March 1, 2021

(Meister is a Trump adviser.)

As President Trump was speaking, we were live-streaming it, and we noticed that we had to repeatedly change video links as they became inoperable one after another. My first choice for a live-streaming link was Right Side Broadcasting Network; as President Trump was speaking, they tweeted out this:

President Trump talked about election fraud.

That’s a big no-no on some platforms we stream to.

We try to play by the rules, but we will not censor President Trump.

We’re not going to remove or edit this video.

Just so we’re all clear- if it gets removed, we didn’t do it.

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) February 28, 2021

Now it is becoming more clear what was going on behind the scenes. RSBN was being threatened in real-time. They didn’t back down, and Big Tech lowered the hammer.

NEW: RSBN has been suspended from YouTube for two weeks because of the Trump #CPAC2021 speech, which violated their guidelines on election misinformation.

The video was approaching 4 million views. They have also removed it from their platform.

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) March 4, 2021

This is the statement that YouTube provided to Breitbart:

“We enforce our Community Guidelines consistently, regardless of speaker or political leaning. In accordance with our established presidential election integrity policy, which prohibits content uploaded after the safe harbor deadline claiming widespread fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we removed this video from Right Side Broadcasting Network,” said a YouTube spokeswoman.

“Content featuring footage from CPAC 2021 that does not violate our policies or contains sufficient educational, documentary, scientific and artistic context is allowed.”

According to RSBN, YouTube would have allowed the video to remain up had RSBN agreed to become part of the neo-fascist “fact-checking” regime that arbitrarily labels unpopular (with the progressive technocrats who are trying to rule us) opinions as false or, when they can’t argue against those opinions, ban them outright.

Even if we believed that, we wouldn’t sell out like that and say it just to keep a video up.

We try to follow the rules. Don’t air certain things that we normally would—but we won’t censor President Trump or push back against things he says that, quite frankly, we agree with.

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) March 4, 2021

They weren’t content to just suspend RSBN for carrying live feed of a former president speaking at a major political gathering (that used to be called “news”), YouTube, which is owned by Alphabet (or Google), also removed most copies of President Trump’s CPAC speech from that platform. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t quote GatewayPundit, but they did the legwork here, and it is only fair to give them credit.

This is Univision:

Discurso de #DonaldTrump en #CPAC2021 desde #Orlando LIVE https://t.co/1o9Agh0cG2

— Lourdes Ubieta (@lourdesubieta) February 28, 2021

Click the YouTube link.

This is American Enterprise Institute:

What were the odds that the results of the 2024 #CPAC2021 presidential straw poll delivered just before Trump's speech were going to show anyone else as the favorite? https://t.co/eqhdiFxriC

— Kevin R Kosar (@kevinrkosar) February 28, 2021

FoxNews Channel on YouTube:

Watch Trump's speech live on YouTube at 2:40 pm central time. https://t.co/upycse8wdI

— Keith Stewart (@KeithStewartIns) February 28, 2021

ABC News:

#LIVE: Donald Trump makes speech at CPAC | ABC News https://t.co/WqJDqfzTOV via @YouTube

— SPOUKY ONE (@SPOUKYONE) February 28, 2021

What is ominous is the omerta that has descended over this action by YouTube. You’d think that major news organizations would have their hair on fire over YouTube deleting content from their YouTube channels. But crickets. The news organizations obviously are fine with the un-personing of President Trump, and this has the added virtue of damaging one potential competitor and putting a warning shot across the bow of the rest.

This sort of manipulation and interference only shows how much weight these monopolies put on the scale of freedom. It’s never going to end until we all band together to stop it. https://t.co/ZepWvWhPLY

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) March 4, 2021

This is correct, but it does not go far enough. Over and over, Google and Facebook and Twitter, and the other tech oligarchs have shown that their business practices are inimical to a free society and open debate. Right now, discussing transgenderism, other than in the most fawning terms, will get your site booted from Facebook. If you challenge any of the AGW/climate-change mythos, you will suffer the same fate. If you point out the gross irregularities in voting in 2020 and say that they might have affected the election’s outcome, you will be silenced.

Developing new platforms is not a solution because if recent history shows us anything at all, it is that Soviet scholar Robert Conquest was right, “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.”  If the First Amendment is going to be anything more than an odd artifact, these monstrous conglomerates need to be broken up, and we need to ensure that the people who work there who support this totalitarian behavior never work anywhere again as a lesson to whatever corporations rise from the ashes to never, ever behave this way again.

YouTube says you can’t see Trump’s CPAC speech it’s too dangerous.

We got suspended for it.

We’re playing it LIVE right now on @rumblevideo just because we can.https://t.co/WszQaXi1Qj

— RSBN 🇺🇸 (@RSBNetwork) March 5, 2021