Give YouTube credit, it sure knows how to disappear ideas it doesn’t like.
I learned this firsthand in an interview I did with Cleta Mitchell. Mitchell was an attorney for former President Donald Trump in the 2020 election. But the video of the interview didn’t last long on YouTube.
Why did YouTube disappear the interview? I can’t tell you, but it is still on Rumble. In an email following the removal of the video, YouTube said, “Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
Nowhere in the interview did I make baseless or untrue claims. I discussed the radicalism I witnessed while working at the Justice Department and the work the Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am the president, does to clean voter rolls across the county.
YouTube and its Silicon Valley counterparts have branded election integrity as conspiratorial and all entirely false claims. Therefore, it is their “public duty” to protect the public. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
This is Big Tech censoring ideas it does not agree with. Election integrity is not misinformation. There are real problems in our election process that need to be addressed. For example, Michigan has nearly 26,000 deceased registrants on the voter rolls. So-called Zuck Bucks are still pouring into election offices in most states — to juice turnout in heavily blue areas.
Unfortunately, Big Tech is silencing more than just election integrity. It is censoring many conservative ideas and people. It even has the power to keep Trump off Facebook and Twitter. This should scare everyone! If it can silence Trump, it can silence ordinary folks like you and me.
America was founded on the right to free speech and the debate of ideas in the public square. The founders debated the Constitution in the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers. Censorship is not American. It is something you’d expect to see from the Chinese Communist Party, Russia, or Iran. Not here in the land of the free.
This censorship, along with the cancel culture of going after people who advance conservative thoughts, is extremely dangerous. The mob mentality of the Left is trying to push any conservative ideas out of public debate.
We need to push back against the attempts to silence our message. Conservative ideas are not misinformation that the public needs to be protected from. We have the same right to share our ideas as the far Left does. The public does not want a “safe space.” It wants an intelligent free discussion of ideas.
Big Tech, stop the censorship.
J. Christian Adams is the president of the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney, and current commissioner on the United States Commission for Civil Rights.
