An MRC Free Speech America report exposing the Biden administration’s censorship took center stage at a Senate panel, thanks to the testimony of renowned journalist Benjamin Weingarten.
Weingarten, along with The Federalist Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway and legal scholar Jonathan Turley, before the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Tuesday about the network of nonprofits, media outlets, and government departments devoted to suppressing disfavored speech.
In his written testimony and opening remarks, Weingarten cited an MRC report detailing how the Biden administration launched and exploited 57 heinous censorship initiatives.
“It's no accident that the Censorship Industrial Complex emerged after President Trump's first election nor that its primary targets have been anti-establishment voices, sources and the platforms circulating their speech,” said Weingarten, who is a contributor at both The Federalist and RealClearInvestigations.
“The most disturbing aspect of the censorship regime is that the federal government was its primary funder and driver, with the Biden administration enacting 57 censorship initiatives across 90 federal agencies at cost of several hundred million, according to reports.”
The report Weingarten referenced detailed how government agencies colluded with Big Tech companies to censor speech; pushed foreign governments to embrace censorship; funneled taxpayer dollars into pro-censorship groups targeting so-called disinformation; and formed anti-free speech partnerships with companies and foreign entities.
One infamous example was that of former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas tapping Nina Jankowicz, the “Mary Poppins” of misinformation, to run the now-defunct “Disinformation Governance Board,” also known as the Biden Ministry of Truth.
During the hearing, Weingarten denounced the entire censorship cartel, warning the government had “fostered the growth of a network of non-governmental accomplices, using them as cutouts to launder censorship in a conspiracy to skirt the First Amendment.”
Weingarten continued, “Overwhelming evidence indicates the feds have deputized academic institutions, think tanks, NGO’s, fact-checkers, risk-raters, and for-profits as plain-clothes speech police. This vast censorship enterprise is vertically integrated. Its business is controlling content and the flow of information via exerting influence over traditional and social media. Government sits in the C-suite. Non-governmental operators do much of the dirty work.”
Weingarten called out the key players to explain how the controversial machine operated, including the Election Integrity Partnership, Atlantic Council and the Global Disinformation Index (GDI).
Weingarten warned that Donald Trump’s landslide victory and his overturning of Biden’s censorship initiatives did not mean that the censorship cartel was completely defeated.
“Overall the speech police have neither dropped their arms nor recanted. Their casualties have received no restitution. The motives and means to control the digital public square, to monopolize narrative, to monopolize power remain,” Weingarten said. Concluding his remarks, he issued a call to action:
“Dismantle the Censorship Industrial Complex now, or it will dismantle our republic later. Expose the regime to drive merited legal and regulatory action, defund it, starve it of support—direct and indirect. Deter those who would violate needed laws with crippling penalties. Prohibit proxies from receiving any government-granted privilege or benefit and erect a strict firewall between the U.S. government and our body politic. If we allow euphemistic whole-of-society schemes like the Censorship Industrial Complex to persist—whereby state and civil society fuse to legitimize weaponization against wrong thinkers—we will be on the road to a social credit system with American characteristics. We owe our forebears and our children nothing less than to do everything in our power to prevent such a dismal and disastrous fate.”
Conservatives are under attack! Contact your representatives and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on hate speech and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us using CensorTrack’s contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.
