Commentary: The Gift of C-SPAN in an Era of Partisan Media

Al Gore on C-SPAN

Forty-five years ago today, future vice president Albert Gore Jr. stood in the well of the House of Representatives to discuss an innovative development in television programming. There was nothing remarkable about that in itself: Al Gore had been a newspaperman before becoming a Tennessee congressman and had a genuine interest in both new technology and mass communication.

Except that there was something momentous about Gore’s speech that day. It was the first time that remarks delivered on the House floor by a member of Congress were televised. It was an event long envisioned by a 38-year-old Indiana-born, Purdue-educated, U.S. Navy veteran who had worked as a White House and Capitol Hill aide before returning to journalism. His name was Brian Lamb. As the Washington bureau chief of the trade publication Cablevision, Lamb had dreamed of creating a nonprofit cable network that would focus exclusively on public affairs, particularly Congress. It was called C-SPAN, and on March 19, 1979, that dream became reality.

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Commentary: Why the ‘Language Watch?’

"Gun Violence" Language Watch video

Who is in charge of the language? Not us conservatives, that’s for sure. We are flotsam flowing with the waters formulated by the liberal establishment and culture. We are using their language constructs. No longer.

We are creating a series of short videos, about one minute each, plucking a phrase from those polluted waters and explaining why it is polluted, propagandistic, and not worthy of use in a society that more than ever needs a common language not loaded with political narratives. We are calling the series “Language Watch.”

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Security State Sees Internet Free Speech as ‘Massive Crisis’

An internet free speech expert said in a recent interview that freedom of speech online combined with massive audiences for independent journalists and news sources created a “massive crisis” for America’s security state. 

“So initially, even these dissident voices within the U.S., even though they may have been loud in moments, they never reached 30 million followers,” Founder and Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO) Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview. “They never reached the one billion impressions per year type thing. As an uncensored mature ecosystem allowed citizen journalists and independent voices to be able to outcompete legacy news media, this induced a massive crisis both in our military and in our State Department and intelligence services.” 

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RussiaGate Hoax Paved Way for Security State’s Domestic Censorship During 2020 Election, Internet Free Speech Expert Says

Mike Benz

According to an expert in internet free speech, the RussiaGate hoax perpetrated against former President Donald J. Trump’s 2016 election campaign was the beginning of the security state’s inward focus on domestic censorship online.

Mike Benz, the founder and executive director of the Foundation for Freedom Online (FFO), told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week that since the mid-20th century, there was an unwritten rule that security state apparatuses like the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were not to be used domestically against the American people, but that the security state knew how powerful its apparatus could be if turned inward.

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Revealed: U.S. Military is Working to Censor ‘Right-Wing Populist Groups’

Military Cyber Warfare

According to an online free speech expert, the U.S. military is directly working to censor “right-wing populist groups” on the internet.

“An industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the British Ministry of Defense and Brussels into an organized political warfare outlet,” Mike Benz told Tucker Carlson in an interview last week. “Essentially, infrastructure that was created [and] initially stationed in Germany and in central and eastern Europe to create psychological buffer zones – basically the ability to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who were rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis.”

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Mike Benz Details How the Foreign Policy Establishment is Actively Fighting Populism in the U.S.

Mike Benz, former Trump state department official and current Executive Director of the Foundation for Freedom Online, joined Monday’s edition of Steve Bannon’s War Room where he explained why the foreign policy establishment is the main driver of censorship in the U.S.

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Report: Amazon Censored Books on COVID Vaccine After Pressure from Biden White House

Vaccine Shot

New internal emails from Amazon reveal that the tech giant ultimately censored books discussing the topic of Chinese Coronavirus vaccines after being pressured to do so by the Biden Administration.

As reported by the New York Post, the emails and other documents were released by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Monday in a series of posts on X, which Jordan referred to as “The Amazon Files.” The communications were obtained by a subpoena from the House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, which was established with the purpose of exposing abuse of federal powers to target political opponents, including collusion between the government and private sector entities such as Big Tech.

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Ohio U.S. Rep Jim Jordan Debuts ‘Amazon Files’ Showcasing Federal Censorship Efforts Against Books

Rep. Jim Jordan

The House Judiciary Committee and the Weaponization subpanel on Monday revealed internal documents secured via the subpoena of Amazon, highlighting the Biden administration’s efforts to address “propaganda” and “misinformation” in books the online retailer sold.

Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan outlined the effort in an X thread reminiscent of the “Twitter Files” reports that addressed federal involvement with that platform.

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Commentary: Logically.AI of Britain and the Expanding Global Reach of Censorship

Computer Keyboard

Brian Murphy, a former FBI agent who once led the intelligence wing of the Department of Homeland Security, reflected last summer on the failures of the Disinformation Governance Board – the panel formed to actively police misinformation. The board, which was proposed in April 2022 after he left DHS, was quickly shelved by the Biden administration in a few short months in the face of criticism that it would be an Orwellian state-sponsored “Ministry of Truth.”

In a July podcast, Murphy said the threat of state-sponsored disinformation meant the executive branch has an “ethical responsibility” to rein in the social media companies. American citizens, he said, must give up “some of your freedoms that you need and deserve so that you get security back.”

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