‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’: WashPost Freaks Over GOP Fighting Against Efforts to Quash Free Speech

September 26th, 2023 9:19 AM

Government colluding with Big Tech and leftist academia to target and censor Americans? No problem! The Washington Post argues that the bigger issue is the GOP daring to fight against the left’s Orwellian efforts to combat so-called “misinformation” and “disinformation.”

It took three Post writers to cough up a whiny censorship-advocating story headlined: “Misinformation research is buckling under GOP legal attacks.” The leftist rag complained how “Academics, universities and government agencies are overhauling or ending research programs designed to counter the spread of online misinformation amid a legal campaign from conservative politicians and activists who accuse them of colluding with tech companies to censor right-wing views.”

Of course, nowhere does The Post note how the DHS was caught exploiting a program meant to fight terrorists to finance left-wing efforts at academic institutions caricaturing Republicans, conservatives and Christians who communicate on Big Tech platforms as being comparable to Nazis, as the MRC recently exposed.

Ignore all that, The Post indicated. Readers instead should be outraged over how efforts to halt these quasi-Ministry of Truth operations by House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and other GOPers in Congress and state governments have “cast a pall over programs that study not just political falsehoods but also the quality of medical information online.” Free speech “Dies in Darkness,” it would seem.

The newspaper promoted the admittedly “left-leaning,” Google and Meta-funded Center for Democracy and Technology’s faux outrage “that the disinformation field is facing a dual threat.”

The newspaper railed in its summary of the CDT’s outrage porn about how “[s]ocial media platforms have become less responsive to concerns from researchers about misinformation while the political and regulatory backlash against the scholarship has eroded the relationships between academics, nonprofits and industry.”

Of course, The Post just happened to leave out how the CDT was also financed with at least $736,000 by none other than notorious leftist billionaire George Soros, who has given millions to groups fighting to eradicate online speech that contradicts left-wing talking points he approves of. The Post elevated the group’s propaganda anyway: “‘The more efforts to recast counter-election-disinformation as censorship succeed, the more difficult it will become for governments and others to work with researchers in the field.’” 

The Post pointed to a litany of government, academia and Big Tech collaborative efforts that were being stymied, one of which was the dubious anti-free speech Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) coalition between the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public.

The EIP was exposed in The Twitter Files and works with Big Tech and the government to censor speech before and during elections. Due to possible litigation, The Post mourned that “[t]he coalition of disinformation researchers may shrink and also may stop communicating with X [formerly Twitter] and Facebook about their findings.” How terrible. 

The Post also had a cow over the landmark Missouri v. Biden (2022) case against government colluding with Big Tech to censor Americans.The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals partially upheld a lower court injunction against Government-Big Tech collusion and directly stated that the FBI, the White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “likely” violated the First Amendment.

But the newspaper still proceeded to mindlessly regurgitate how the Biden White House “argue[d] the injunction still contradicts certain First Amendment principles.” The original Missouri v. Biden lawsuit cited original MRC Free Speech America research from its CensorTrack.org database revealing the extent of how far Big Tech went to protect Biden from his critics on their platforms.

Conservatives are under attack. Contact The Washington Post at 202-334-6000 and demand it stop acting as the de facto Ministry of Truth mouthpiece.