Senate hearing on Censorship Industrial Complex

HEMINGWAY TRANSCRIPT

For freedom of speech to mean anything beyond the theoretical, we must actively practice it. President John F. Kennedy said people should be entrusted to confront ‘unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values.’ He said, "A nation afraid to let its people judge truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation afraid of its people."

Unfortunately the right to free speech has been under worse attack in the last decade than at any other point in our nation's history. The tentacles of the censorship industrial complex are choking out freedom of expression debate and the right to criticize powerful institutions such as corporate media and the government.

Federal and state governments fund and promote censorship and blacklisting technology. They direct big tech companies to censor American speech and debate. Academic institutions such as Stanford and the University of Texas are given large grants not to defend free speech but to conduct research on so-called disinformation for use by the censorship regime.

Nonprofit think tanks such as the Aspen Institute host so-called disinformation seminars to groom journalists to publish pro-censorship propaganda and to suppress important stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop bombshell.

Nonprofit censorship groups such as the Global Disinformation Index and for-profit censorship businesses such as NewsGuard produce widely used censorship tools and blacklists to favor left-wing media while working to silence media that fight false narratives.

Attacking free speech and debate has become a massive industry, much of it government-funded, and all of it threatening a free society. My publication, The Federalist, and I have been targets of the censorship industrial complex. In June of 2020 a foreign group with the Orwellian name, ‘The Center for Countering Digital Hate,’ engineered an operation to demonetize us, because we published a critique of corporate media coverage of Black Lives Matter riots.

The massive BLM protests were the most expensive of any civil disorder in US history at $2 billion or more in insurance claims. Many in the media falsely described the arson, looting and killings as peaceful— or who can forget ‘mostly peaceful.’

In April 2023 a House subcommittee released a report documenting how Stanford colluded with two governmental entities to pressure social media companies into censoring true information, jokes, satire, political reporting and analysis, all of which they claimed was disinformation.

One post flagged for deletion was Senator Tom Tillis thanking his supporters for propelling him to victory which they said was inappropriately premature. My colleague Shawn Davis and I were victims of this censorship scheme as was the Federalist. One of the censored items was a story about a TV appearance in which I said of the media “They lie, they lie, they lie, and then they lie.”

Gallup reported in February that my view is held by 70% of Americans who say they don't trust corporate media to report news accurately fairly or fully. Blacklists and censorship tools such as those provided by NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index routinely rate left-wing news outlets that are no threat to the permanent bureaucracy higher than those that challenge prevailing orthodoxies.

Companies use their lists to boycott some publications and reward others with advertising. The Washington Post and New York Times routinely receive the highest marks. Those publications won Pulitzers for their role in the Russia collusion hoax. And we have some participants in that hoax here on this subcommittee.

My publication, The Federalist, exposed that hoax through dogged reporting and investigation as we did with the media's vicious lies against Justice Brett Kavanaugh. We exposed much of the censorship industrial complex, too, even suing the State Department after discovering its role in promoting and marketing censorship tools that are being used against us even as we sit here today.

Facing this censorship has been difficult. It would have been easy to fold. But that's exactly what censors want— to make it impossible to report the truth about their lies. They know our voice is so powerful and influential that they can't accomplish their goals unless they shut us down. They will not succeed.

We will never stop. The more they try to shut us down, the harder we're going to work to stay open. Because it's not about us. It's about whether we will have a civilization where people are allowed to say and think things tyrants don't want us to.

Thank you.