Democrats keep trying to defend or brush off the government's attempts to censor Americans on social media by claiming that they were just trying to prevent “dangerous misinformation” (defined by them to mean “any opinion that we disagree with”) and that the social media sites were free to say no (maybe so, but when you have a powerful government entity leaning on you to do something, it’s easy to see it as “an offer you can’t refuse.”) Well, now we’re learning that these outrageous attempts to circumvent the First Amendment by outsourcing the censoring to Silicon Valley went even further than we knew.

For instance, it’s now been reported that the Biden White House pressured Facebook to tweak its algorithm to boost stories from liberal outlets like the New York Times and suppress stories from “polarizing” conservative journalists and news outlets. “Polarizing” being another word like “misinformation” that they’ve redefined to mean “anything that challenges our hooey.”

https://ace.mu.nu/archives/405594.php

And Robert Spencer at Front Page magazine writes about a Wall Street Journal report that’s behind a paywall that reveals that the Biden Administration even leaned on Facebook in early 2021 to censor jokes and humorous memes, if the subject was potential vaccine side effects or vaccine hesitancy. Internal emails show that Facebook staffers were concerned about this, and even feared it would backfire by fueling vaccine hesitancy by sparking a conspiracy theory that the government was attempting to silence any criticism or even jokes about the vaccines.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/biden-regime-pressured-facebook-to-ban-jokes/

For the record: if there was an actual secret government effort to pressure Facebook to censor any criticism or jokes, then that’s NOT a “conspiracy theory!” It’s a conspiracy!

I can easily believe this, since we’ve had plenty of run-ins with social media platforms and search engines trying to silence or demonetize us over comments that were clearly jokes. Maybe it’s because they know that tyrants hate jokes because they tell the truth in an entertaining way. For some reason, all this about the tyrannical impulses of President Biden and his flying monkeys reminds me of what was reportedly JFK’s favorite joke. I’ve told it before, but it’s more timely than ever:

Did you hear about the Russian who was arrested for standing outside the Kremlin and yelling, “Khrushchev is an idiot?” He got 30 years in prison. Ten for insulting Khrushchev and 20 for revealing state secrets.”

That’s remarkably applicable to America today, except the idiocy at the top is not a secret.

Seriously though, this is a big reason why we changed things up and moved my newsletter to Substack.