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Ever since comedian Jimmy Kimmel’s brief suspension from his ABC late night show occurred last week, Democrats have been rending their garments and wailing at the skies that freedom of speech in America is dead. But where were they when Google was quashing free speech on orders from the BIden administration during COVID?
On Tuesday, Alphabet, the parent company of Google and YouTube, sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee that not only exposed the massive effort by Joe Biden’s administration to make them censor conservative voices, but also promised to offer those creators reinstatement on their platforms.
GOOGLE TO REINSTATE BANNED YOUTUBE ACCOUNTS CENSORED FOR POLITICAL SPEECH
It’s too little, too late, but it’s better than nothing.
This happy news means that conservative figures such as current FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, Trump ally Steve Bannon, and podcasters like Tim Pool will all be able to apply to use YouTube again. While they never should have been banned to begin with, the first step in Google fixing its problems is admitting it has one.
According to the letter, first obtained by Fox News Digital, the Biden administration “conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content…that did not violate its policies.”
The letter goes on to add, “Biden Administration officials continued to press the Company to remove non-violative user-generated content.”
It is an extraordinary admission that builds upon a mountain of evidence that COVID contrarians, who mostly turned out to be right, by the way, were severely censored by big tech, at the insistence of Biden’s executive branch.
So, how is it possible then, that CNN’s Jake Tapper could appear on another late night show this week, and call the Kimmel suspension, “the most direct infringement on free speech by the government that I’ve seen in my lifetime,” when Biden was bullying every social media and video platform in America just 4 years ago?
For Tapper and his ilk, the brief punishment given to Kimmel for blatantly lying to his audience by claiming Charlie Kirk’s assassin was MAGA, outweighs dozens if not hundreds of conservative voices being silenced at the behest of a Democrat president.
What is even more amazing about all this is that in the case of Kimmel and ABC, the Federal Communications Commission has a legitimate role to play in regulating the publicly owned airwaves, Biden had no authority to bully social media companies.
Lack of authority did not stop Biden, though. First, through the release of the Twitter files after Elon Musk bought that platform and renamed it X, and now with the admissions from Google, we can clearly see that censorship over COVID, at the behest of the state, was vast and widespread.
This didn’t just harm conservative or COVID contrarian creators by silencing them and cutting off their ability to make money from their content, it harmed every American who was denied the ability to consume that content.
As I outline in my book, “Charade, The COVID Lies That Crushed A Nation,” in the first six months of COVID, any quibble with Covidian orthodoxy could get an account banned. Merely questioning the all-powerful Dr. Anthony Fauci could be enough to bring the hammer of censorship down.
Where was Jake Tapper then?
Where were all the liberal journalists and those unsung heroes, Hollywood celebrities, who claim the American experiment is ending because Kimmel missed four shows, when Covid censorship was running roughshod?
Now Kimmel is back on ABC, which strongly suggests that FCC Chair Brendan Carr didn’t strong-arm the network, after all, and even though Sinclair and Nexstar continue to preempt the show, they are giving Kimmel a chance to stop insulting conservatives and resume broadcasting on their stations.
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Where was this generosity of spirit and love of free speech when journalists like Alex Berenson and scientists like Dr. Scott Atlas were not only censored for over a year, but also berated and trashed by the same liberals crying over Kimmel’s free speech?
Jake Tapper and Democrats like him should remove the gigantic, censorious plank in their own eye, before criticizing the splinter that is Jimmy Kimmel’s slap-on-the-wrist punishment from ABC.
The left was all but gleeful when their Gatling gun of cancellation was firing on all cylinders during COVID. They didn’t care who was hurt by it, they didn’t care about the First Amendment or democratic principles. They just cheered it on.
So, spare us, Jake Tapper, you had a chance to stand against government censorship when it really mattered during COVID, and you blew it. Maybe, just sit this one out.
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