Threats Facing Conservative Speech

Floor Speech

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Mr. BURLISON. Mr. Speaker, I thank my friend from Colorado (Mr. Buck) for yielding.

I am from Missouri, the Show Me State, and the home of Harry Truman, who said: ``Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.''

This sounds like a nation that we see with China or Russia. Sadly, it is something that could happen in the United States if we are not vigilant here.

The First Amendment is this country's foundation. The diverse and competitive marketplace of ideas is the heartbeat that keeps this Republic alive. People need to be able to debate and to be able to challenge one another.

Yes, free speech means that people have the right to sometimes be wrong. Yet, over the last few years, we in the United States have ceded power as a Federal Government to Big Tech and Big Tech entities. We have executives from San Francisco to New York who have crowned themselves the free speech police for the rest of our Nation.

When Elon Musk purchased Twitter last year, he took a great step in the right direction by allowing an independent journalist to review the company's records, and their findings are now what we call the Twitter files.

It has confirmed what conservatives nationwide already knew what was going on, that Big Tech and Big Government were working together with the left to silence conservative views and voices and to relegate them to being a second-class citizen.

In one instance, the reporter found that Twitter censored the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the middle of the Presidential election. Bari Weiss revealed that Twitter was, indeed, silencing conservative voices and shadow banning individuals. Perhaps what was most disturbing was that the FBI gave Twitter a list of accounts to shut down.

It doesn't stop there. Last year the DHS, our own Federal Government, tried to set up its own disinformation board. We see entities and businesses that the Federal Government has given special privileges to provide over-the-air television, cable television, right-of-way to deliver entertainment to the homes of individuals across America. These companies choose to silence conservative speech by first deplatforming and eliminating One America News Network and now going after Newsmax.

There is a famous quote about what happened during the Holocaust when the Nazis first came for some individuals and people said nothing. Then, eventually, they will come for you.

I say this not as a Republican or a Missourian but as a concerned citizen for a country that has these rights that were here because of the blood that was shed by thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of patriots from the time of the American Revolution until today, who fought and died so that you and I would have free speech. We must fight all the attacks against the First Amendment and uphold the values that make this country so very special.

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