If you live in Arkansas, the White House thinks you’re dumb

They genuinely thought Americans were too stupid to notice.

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Hannah Cox
Hannah Cox

We’re back with a second installment of the Facebook Files, and it only gets worse if you can imagine that.

Congressman Jim Jordan just released even more emails showcasing the Biden White House’s campaign to make Facebook censor speech on its platform and they’re as cringeworthy as it gets.

According to Jordan (and the corresponding emails he and his committee have obtained), Rob Flaherty, President Biden’s then-Director of Digital Strategy, was also heavily involved with the censorship attempts. In an email to Facebook he said, “We have to explain to President, Ron, people, why there is misinfo on the internet.”

He also pushed for information on what the platform was doing to reduce traffic to right-wing news sites and personalities, specifically targeting the New York Post, the Daily Wire, and Fox News’ Tomi Lahren. He also encouraged them to kick people off Facebook altogether.

 

These actions are unconstitutional and nefarious on their face. But you won’t believe what they actually put in writing as a defense of their actions.

President Biden’s head of strategic communications and public engagement for the COVID-19 response, Courtney Rowe wrote, “equally important, how do we work with you all to push back on it. If someone in rural Arkansas sees something on FB, it’s the truth.”

So, there you have it. The Biden White House felt it had to censor Americans and remove posts that they didn’t believe (or want) to be true because otherwise, dumb Americans in poor states like Arkansas would believe it.

And Facebook complied. In this email, an employee discusses their content moderation policies writing, “We remove content that can lead to imminent physical harm. For content that doesn’t meet that threshold, we instituted borderline demotions. For example, someone sharing negative side effect posts. Similarly, posts questioning whether you should get a vaccine under a mandate, whether it’s government overreach. We demote those.”

He went on to write, “That’s not false information, but it leads to a vaccine negative environment. When it comes to looking at COVID misinformation, it’s a different approach. What we normally do is just remove or leave it to fact checkers.”

If this wasn’t all so sinister it would be frankly hilarious. They genuinely thought Americans were too stupid to notice their posts discussing top and pressing issues like vaccines and the origins of the pandemic being shadow banned or removed?

They thought they could just have a “fact-checker” call someone a conspiracy theorist and everyone would believe them? That people wouldn’t notice all the censorship was going against a certain group of people, that the actual facts on their side of these issues weren’t fluff, and that there was a concerted effort to shut them up?

I guess they underestimated people in Arkansas. And Alabama. And Kentucky. And South Carolina, and all the other places where everyday Americans were able to use their two eyes and their brains to take in all of the information out there and realize the official narrative was off. They were able to put the pieces together the experts somehow missed. And they were able to rally and overthrow the government’s censorship campaign and expose them once and for all as the enemies of the Constitution that they are.

It’s actually a very fitting ending for the bad guys here, which again I must point out are the government actors—not the private company employees trying to keep their business afloat amidst immense government threats. Congress is finally considering penalties for these attacks on our fundamental rights, and Americans increasingly do not trust the government, the fact-checkers, or their silly experts.

You don’t get consensus through censorship. Good ideas don’t require force. And false information will be revealed as such overtime if you just wait for all the information to come in.

The Biden White House inadvertently did more to create vaccine hesitancy than anything else here, which without getting too into the weeds, could actually harm people in the long term. It should be a cautionary tale for leaders in the future. If you truly think something is a public health threat, give people all the information upfront, instill trust in them, answer their concerns. When you try to force mandates and then shut people up who push back, you deserve what you get.

That’s the true result of censorship. You become the boy that cried wolf and no one trusts you no matter what you say.

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Hannah Cox
Hannah Coxhttp://based-politics.com
Hannah Cox is a libertarian-conservative writer and co-founder of BASEDPolitics. She's also the host of the BASEDPolitics podcast and an experienced political activist.
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