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As the USA continues to march toward fascism, one of the many freedoms typical to a free society, freedom of speech, is a necessary casualty. Tyrants cannot tolerate truth or challenges to the falsehoods and exaggerated stories needed to keep the center of the population fearful and enraged.
Traditional Censorship
Fascists and their minions use a variety of strategies to prevent dissenting speech from disturbing their house of cards. Give them credit for being as smart as anti-fascists and so they will not simply use outright government censorship. We will have see the outright variety on occasion when necessary or, more commonly, when minions make a mistake and break cover.
- On 19 February, 2025, Alabama Judge Crystal Wise Martin granted the City of Clarksdale an order requiring the Clarksdale Press Register to remove an editorial that criticized the city and asked hard questions about the spending of tax money.1
- In 2023 the Marion Police Department raided a newspaper journalists home and office to disrupt and prevent the newspaper from publishing a story about the background of a newly hired police chief.2
- The deceitful and unproven declaration by government that TikTok – a social media app where kids share videos of themselves farting, doing pet tricks, and performing crazy stunts – was a national security threat was both an act of censorship of a speech platform that wasn’t yet under the control of one of the fascist oligarchs and a brazen form of corruption as they are presently trying to force it to be sold to an oligarch using tactics typical of a mafia.
- In 2025 the Musk-Trump-Vance administration banned research that used the words “women”, “diversity”, “transgender”, “equality”, “hate speech”, “non binary”, “LGBT”, or pregnant.
- In 2025 the Musk-Trump-Vance administration banned books on climate change, diversity, and equality.
- In 2025, the Musk-Trump-Vance administration banned the Associate Press from news gathering activities in the White House for saying “Gulf of Mexico” when referencing the Gulf of Mexico.
killing protestor laws
Social Media Censorship
Social media is now the new public square. Few media have more exchanges of public discourse than Facebook, Twitter/X, BlueSky, and other such platforms. Not only discussions among citizens, but information from our elected officials and governments services are promulgated via social media. When social media oligarchs use their wealth and influence to suppress speech that criticizes the activities and positions of the oligarchs’ empires or those of their allies or public officials that they’re aligned with, democracy loses as certainly as if the dissenter were muted or hauled away from the public square.
Social media companies certainly have a legitimate goal of removing unlawful or dangerous speech, but that’s not the speech we’re talking about here.
- In 2025, Twitter/X censors comedian Bill Barr after he criticizes Musk for Musk’s televised Nazi salute on Jan 20, 2025. This is certainly qualifies as a legitimate news item of public interest. 3
- Twitter/X censors posts using certain words, like transgender, and other words that refer to genders other than male and female. These topics are also very relevant to current events and necessary for a healthy public debate.
corporate media (WaPo, catch-and-kill)
References
- https://apnews.com/article/mississippi-newspaper-judge-editorial-removed-c0290c731da4e24799c0a62724f5da08 ↩︎
- https://apnews.com/article/marion-county-record-kansas-newspaper-raid-f1e49c4e542ddb3cf19c9ca02a0a21fb ↩︎
- https://www.newsweek.com/bill-burr-launches-scathing-attack-elon-musk-x-account-flagged-2036975 ↩︎
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