OPINION:
It will come as a surprise to MSNBC viewers, but a huge violation of First Amendment rights was uncovered this week, and it didn’t involve Jimmy Kimmel in any way.
You’ve probably heard that Mr. Kimmel, the late-night talk show host on ABC television, was removed from his job and then reinstated within a week after a glaring lie he told about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. He repeated the far left’s malicious falsehood that the “MAGA gang” knew the murderer was “one of them,” causing his network to face a revolt from affiliate stations, which resulted in the brief suspension.
Democrats and their media allies declared that because Republicans applauded the comedian’s timeout from his $16 million per year gig, it represented the greatest governmental affront to constitutional speech protections that anyone has ever witnessed.
Of course, they’re wrong.
Although President Trump and the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission made their views known, it was the pressure from the local stations that caused Mr. Kimmel trouble. The situation hasn’t fully come to rest, as many of the stations are still bent out of shape about it and refused to air the episode when he returned to the show this week.
So, the Jimmy Kimmel drama was not a First Amendment violation, but what we’ve learned YouTube did with the Biden administration most certainly was.
Thanks to subpoenas and an investigation from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Ohio Republican, Google admitted Tuesday that its property, YouTube, suspended and banned conservative accounts over the course of years, specifically because of pressure from the Biden administration. In a letter released by the committee, Google admitted to “terminating channels” for violations involving “elections integrity content” until 2023 and for COVID-19 content through 2024.
“The Administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation,” the letter read. It said that the Biden White House pressed the company to remove content that did not even violate YouTube’s standards.
This is a pristine example of government trampling on the free speech rights of private citizens. However, none of the people silenced on YouTube hosted a network show based in Hollywood, so they didn’t get hailed as free speech martyrs like St. Jimmy of Late Night.
That’s outrageous, and Mr. Jordan and his committee have done the nation a service by forcing the admissions. Still, the story goes further than that.
YouTube was booting conservatives off the platform well before Mr. Biden became president.
Throughout 2020, during the first Trump term, Big Tech firms were furiously deleting content and users and were proud of it.
A YouTube spokesman even bragged to Reuters that from February to October that year, they had removed more than 200,000 videos because they contained unapproved opinions about COVID-19.
Rumble CEO Chris Pavlovski, who founded the free speech rival to YouTube, knows a lot about what happened then. His platform, a client of my public affairs firm, became the destination for conservative content creators kicked off YouTube. He knows exactly when a flood of them came on board.
“The bannings happened in October of 2020,” Mr. Pavlovski said on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” show this week. “It means that Google interfered in the 2020 elections. They banned many conservative voices on their platform prior to the election on November 3, 2020.”
Mr. Bannon, who was once Mr. Trump’s chief strategist and still holds a significant place in that universe, made an even finer point about it.
“They banned us and started suppressing us for the Laptop from Hell,” Mr. Bannon said. “To shut down any kind of mention of the ‘laptop from hell,’ and now we know it’s 100% true, which is what we said at the time.”
It’s a historical fact that most media, YouTube included, aggressively blocked discussion of Hunter Biden’s laptop, the contents of which implicated his father in the corrupt Biden family access-selling scheme. The New York Post broke that story on Oct. 14, 2020, and the YouTube bans began.
Today, YouTube swears it will do better and invites the banned users to return, but it still hasn’t admitted what it did in 2020. Admitting what it did under Mr. Biden was simply a nod to the current political times, and if one day the wind shifts, there’s no reason to believe it won’t revert to censorship.
So, conservatives should have a conversation with themselves if they have been offered a chance to return to YouTube, which has already canceled them for their opinions.
Sure, you can go back, but why would you? They already told you they hate you.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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