Biden Challengers Will Have To Beat Censorship Regime in 2024 by Ben Weingarten
When anti-establishment Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently sat for an interview with ABC News, only for the outlet to cut out his criticisms of the COVID-19 vaccine, it illustrated a little-discussed but overwhelming obstacle any challenger to President Joe Biden will face in 2024.
Those who wish to unseat the incumbent commander-in-chief already face a formidable opponent in the Democratic Party and its myriad partners, including a national security apparatus currently targeting Biden’s chief opponent in this election, and that ran interference for Biden in the last one. To win in 2024, Republicans will have to compete under a lax voting system largely of the Democrats‘ own making, and which they manipulated and exploited to near perfection in 2020.
But Biden’s challengers will also be facing a hostile and censorious information regime that transcends Biden and the Democratic Party, under which dissent from Ruling Class orthodoxy will likely be given no hearing, and dissenters given few platforms—on grounds of protecting “health” and “public safety.” Biden’s opponents left and right may raise compelling points on any number of critical and contentious issues, but will Americans be permitted to see or hear them?
RFK Jr.’s ABC News interview exemplifies a “soft” version of how this regime will operate.
Anchor Linsey Davis, who interviewed the iconoclastic lawyer, justified ABC News’ suppression of his full remarks with a statement that might as well have been written and delivered by Dr. Anthony Fauci himself—never mind that public health authorities such as he were arguably the most prolific and powerful propagators of mis-, dis-, and mal-information (MDM) regarding virtually every aspect of COVID-19, and that they cajoled social media platforms into censoring many dissenting views as MDM that later became settled science.
Kennedy “made false claims about the COVID-19 vaccines,” Davis said. “Data shows that the COVID-19 vaccine has prevented millions of hospitalizations and deaths from the disease.” Therefore, ABC News “used our editorial judgment in not including extended portions” of the relevant exchange.
One must wonder, did any public official past or present communicate with ABC News about the RFK Jr. interview and influence the decision to truncate it? I asked that question of a publicity flack for the “ABC News Live” program on which the interview took place; I had not received a response as of publication time.
Of course, no public official need have called any shot because such corporate media entities are simply mouthpieces of our ruling regime. They propagate the regime’s favored narratives and suppress the disfavored ones—namely, those that conflict with the regime’s power and prerogatives.
The same goes for Big Tech. As has been revealed in gory detail, America has been laboring for several years now under a mass public-private censorship regime whereby federal agencies, often government-linked third-party organizations, and social media and other communications platforms have coordinated and colluded to silence unauthorized views on a raft of issues.
Elon Musk may have removed Twitter in whole or in part from this regime—which explains in part the furious backlash he has faced—but the regime persists. No implicated federal agency or public official has yet paid any sort of price for engaging in a conspiracy against the First Amendment—and the very kind of election interference the censors used to justify imposing such a regime in the first place.
The most illuminating sources of information on these efforts, including the Louisiana and Missouri v. Biden et al. case and the Twitter Files, are backwards-looking. One imagines that this mass public-private censorship regime would have only grown more pervasive, sophisticated, and stealthy since the 2020 election and its Biden-era expansion during the Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
In part due to the efforts of traditional and social media to stifle dissident voices, many have been relegated to alternative platforms such as Substack and Rumble. The concentration of such contrarians in a small number of spaces, however, creates a risk. To the extent Americans increasingly seek out dissident views in the run-up to the 2024 election, will authorities seek to crush the few digital domains on which dissident voices freely proliferate?
The censorship regime has of course also separately ratcheted up in the form of the chilling, shock-and-awe efforts of law enforcement to pursue—and in some instances, prosecute—other Wrongthinkers on often unprecedented grounds. These include everyone from former President Donald Trump to parents critical of their public schools to pious Catholics to Twitter trolls alike.
When the authorities treat dissent as terroristic and criminalize it, we are likely to get less of it.
Recent events further augur poorly for anyone except the ruling regime’s choice for the presidency.
The Democratic Party has declared it will be holding no presidential primary debates.
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