Threats Facing Conservative Speech

Floor Speech

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Mr. BIGGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for organizing this.

In years past, I would imagine that this particular issue would draw people from both sides of the aisle to come and protest the marriage of Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Government, to silence dissenting voices in this, what once was the freest Nation in the history of the world.

Censorship is an authoritarian tool used to keep power by suppressing dissent. It is done, in our case, under the myth of keeping Americans safe. Conservatives, though, are playing against a stacked deck. This administration is doing the stacking.

Last year, for instance, the Department of Homeland Security attempted to establish the Orwellian disinformation governance board, ultimately having to walk that back but, in reality, they just gave it another name and they will continue to try to suppress conservative voices.

We learned months later that Facebook implemented a special portal where government officials can request the censorship of specific posts.

Ahead of the 2020 election, unelected, deep state bureaucrats coordinated with major social media companies to ensure that the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop would be suppressed, right before an election.

Users could not even share a link to the New York Post story to read the report for themselves, and Twitter even locked the New York Post's account and others for simply sharing the report.

Facebook spied on individuals' private messages and reported users to the FBI if they questioned the 2020 election.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and others removed a sitting United States President from their platforms. Meanwhile, Twitter allowed Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to tweet horrific messages and tweets, without so much as deleting the tweets.

And we wonder, we wonder, why Americans feel threatened by their own government, and why polling consistently tells us that our governmental institutions are viewed with disrepute by the American people.

The moderators of these platforms have put their thumb on the scale of debate and have targeted conservatives over and over. But censorship does not just occur online, it can occur in the chilling of speech and the removal of debate altogether. We see that on college campuses, where students are fearful of retaliation if they express a conservative viewpoint.

We have seen this administration target concerned parents attending school board meetings to protect their First Amendment activity by likening them to domestic terrorists.

Recently, we have watched as Democrats, instead of promoting free speech, wrote a letter demanding that AT&T, that Alphabet, Hulu, Apple, Comcast, Roku, et cetera, remove three conservative media outlets from their programming. They have taken down OAN, and they have now notified Newsmax they are going to take them down.

We know what happens in nations where you have the Big Government utilizing the power of the marketplace through Big Business, and now the marriage of Big Tech. We know that that leads to something that I call fascism. That is what we see happening in this once and, hopefully, future great Nation today.

The idea, `` . . . that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.''

That statement was originally issued in May of 1953 by the Westchester Conference of the American Library Association.

I am suggesting that we have the courage to allow free speech, free thought, free debate in this great Nation.

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