The following remarks were prepared for delivery at a hearing in front of the Senate Commerce Committee titled, “Shut Your App: How Uncle Sam Jawboned Big Tech Into Silencing Americans.”
It begins with censorship. It moves to the destruction of statues and monuments. And it ends with the murder of people.
It begins with censorship. It moves to the destruction of statues and monuments. And it ends with the murder of people.
The drive to silence speech doesn’t end at a podium’s edge or at the four corners of a page. It always advances toward the violent elimination of speakers. That is because the authoritarian impulse to silence speech is driven by a totalitarian desire to seize total power by any means necessary, up to and including the murder of one’s political opponents.
This dynamic was made clear on a Tuesday afternoon in Utah last month when my friend Charlie Kirk was assassinated in broad daylight by a left-wing transgender ideologue who was enraged by Charlie’s clear understanding that God created us male and female. That boys cannot become girls, and girls cannot become boys. Charlie was murdered by this left-wing assassin, who had been radicalized by demonic transgender ideology, because he was one of the most bold and effective speakers in the country opposed to this evil ideology.
Rather than see a nation unite against terroristic violence designed to permanently silence speech, we saw the opposite. We witnessed people praising the murder of Charlie. We witnessed people thanking his assassin. We even witnessed members of the United States Congress all but say Charlie deserved it.
This isn’t the only recent example. The Democrat candidate for attorney general in Virginia was revealed last week to have called for the murder of one of his political opponents. Even worse, he also said he wanted his opponent to witness the murder of his own children. Why? To make him feel pain for having different political opinions. How many here today condemned that insanity, or publicly recognized that someone with such a broken moral compass is simply unqualified to be a state’s top law enforcement officer?
We have heard the tired cliché that riots are the language of the unheard. But the reality is that violence is the language of the unhinged. And far too many people in this room are fluent in it.
My name is Sean Davis, and I am the CEO and Co-Founder of The Federalist, a conservative digital media company that focuses on politics, culture, and religion. I am also a victim of illegal and unconstitutional censorship.
My company, my colleagues, and I have been the targets of a coordinated and global multi-year censorship campaign. In 2020, a foreign-government connected outfit in the U.K. colluded with Google to demonetize The Federalist. Our crime? We published an article in the summer of 2020 entitled “The Media Are Lying To You About Everything, Including The Riots.”
Later that year, in the midst of a close and heated presidential election campaign, government-funded efforts in the U.S. repeatedly censored Mollie Hemingway, The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief and a New York Times best-selling author, and me because of our election reporting and commentary. I was censored for posting a screenshot of and a link to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision requiring mail-in ballots received after Election Day and lacking a postmark to be counted as valid votes. Mollie was censored for posting a link to an article The Federalist published. The headline of that article? “America Won’t Trust Elections Until The Voter Fraud Is Investigated.”
The censorship didn’t stop there. We were also targeted for bankruptcy and destruction by the U.S. State Department and its Global Engagement Center, or GEC.
Despite the fact that GEC was explicitly prohibited by both the U.S. Constitution via the First Amendment and its authorizing statute from targeting domestic speech, it nonetheless sought to drive us out of business by funding, developing, and distributing technologies and tools to reduce our reach, by bullying advertisers into blacklisting us and many other conservative outlets, and by coercing Big Tech companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google to throttle access to our content.
In essence, our own government secretly and without any due process charged us with thoughtcrimes, convicted us, and sentenced The Federalist to death. The censorship efforts our government funded are still being wielded against us today.
I am here today to testify about the unconstitutional and illegal censorship of my company and my colleagues. But I am also here to help you understand the real-world consequences, in flesh and blood, of the drive to silence your political opposition. It doesn’t stop at the page’s end.
The effort to censor and silence political opposition is not the final step in the effort to usher in tyranny and authoritarianism.
It begins with censorship. It moves to the destruction of statues and monuments. And it ends with the murder of people.
And it has to stop.