For those who follow my podcast, you might remember that, a couple of years ago, YouTube demonetized my channel. They were under pressure from various propaganda outlets affiliated with the Democrat Party, and they caved. The financial consequences were significant. We’re talking about six figures in losses, every month. If we didn’t have paying subscribers at The Daily Wire, if we were a much smaller media company with fewer resources, it would’ve been catastrophic.
It was clear what YouTube wanted in return. They wanted me to pledge to use the so-called “preferred pronouns” of people who identify as transgender — men like Lia Thomas and Dylan Mulvaney. In other words, they wanted me to affirm a lie that contradicts my faith, my politics, and also common sense and basic biology. And in general, they wanted me to refrain from offering any kind of meaningful critique of gender ideology. In YouTube’s eyes, this was the only way to be “advertiser friendly.” Of course, I refused to go along with this. So we ended up pulling the podcast from YouTube entirely for an entire year — and we just ate the financial losses, which were extremely significant.
Eventually, several months later, YouTube relented. They agreed to allow this show to make money again, without requiring me to affirm the trans lie, so we put my show back on the platform. As far as I know, YouTube never offered any kind of explanation for their change of heart. Nor did they offer an apology. It’s possible that Google (which owns YouTube) realized that they had overstepped, after we brought attention to their censorship on Twitter, which was now a relatively free and open platform. Once Elon Musk purchased Twitter, it became much easier for conservatives to highlight Big Tech’s attempts to silence conservative discourse on other platforms.
Previously, when YouTube banned pretty much every other conservative in the country, Twitter was their ally. In many cases, they’d ban the same conservatives, at the same time, so they couldn’t complain anywhere. You’ll remember that YouTube banned both Alex Jones and Donald Trump around the same time that Twitter did. Twitter also suspended Dan Bongino around the same time that YouTube permanently removed him from the platform, for saying that masks don’t stop the spread of COVID — which happens to be true. And there are many other names we could list, from Steve Bannon to Rand Paul to Sebastian Gorka, who suffered a similar fate. And that’s not even getting into the many individual videos that were censored, including episodes from Tim Pool’s show and interviews with RFK Jr, as well as thousands of smaller accounts that were impacted.
In every single case, YouTube targeted conservatives. This was a coordinated effort by Big Tech, and the Biden administration, to silence their political opposition. They began with Alex Jones — who they labeled a fringe character, an exception to the rule — and then they proceeded to come for virtually every conservative with a large platform. And while Google would occasionally walk back their censorship, as they did with my channel, they stopped short of issuing any kind of mea culpa for what they had done. They certainly didn’t implicate the Biden administration, or blame Democrats for their censorship — as other Big Tech companies, like Meta, have already done.
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Yesterday, that changed. After being investigated by Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee for several years, in particular by Jim Jordan (R-OH), Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube) admitted that they were repeatedly pressured by the Biden administration to remove conservatives from the platform. This is being hailed as a major victory in some circles, but it’s not. It’s not remotely close to a victory, and no one should be celebrating it.
Here, for example, is the document written by Google’s lawyers and sent to the House Judiciary committee the other day. This is the “big reveal.”
Credit: House Judiciary Committee.
It reads, “Senior Biden Administration officials, including White House officials, conducted repeated and sustained outreach to Alphabet and pressed the Company regarding certain user-generated content related to the COVID-19 pandemic that did not violate its policies.”
The letter goes on to describe the Biden administration’s effort as “unacceptable and wrong.”
Well, that’s nice of them to admit now. Why didn’t they say so at the time? Why didn’t they immediately disclose every single effort by the Biden administration to deplatform a conservative? And why did Google comply with these demands?
Google never answers any of these questions. But we all know the answer.
This is footage, originally obtained by Breitbart, from an internal Google meeting shortly after Trump won the 2016 presidential election. This isn’t a group of random staffers. The founder of the company is leading this meeting. Watch:
Google suppressing searches about Trump shouldn’t shock anyone.
Remember when their executives cried and melted down after he won in 2016? pic.twitter.com/q2vdqnUBLv
— Tim Young (@TimRunsHisMouth) July 28, 2024
Credit: @TimRunsHisMouth/Breitbart News/Google.com/X.com
These are the people who, for the next nine years, would wage a coordinated and wide-ranging campaign of censorship against conservatives. Their goal was to prevent Donald Trump, or anyone like him, from ever winning another election.
One of their first targets was The Federalist, which YouTube threatened to demonetize, on the theory that the website hosted a comments section with certain content that advertisers didn’t approve of. Yes, they held the entire website responsible for a handful of random comments. Of course, this is a standard that could be used against any website that has a comments section. Every single one of them has a small number of deranged comments. But Google chose to enforce this “rule” against conservative websites, and conservative websites alone. It wasn’t just The Federalist. Google also suppressed Breitbart in search results, making it nearly impossible to find. Breitbart’s search visibility declined by roughly 99% in Google results. The Daily Caller also suffered massive declines.
Google is now attempting to minimize this scandal, by telling Jim Jordan and House Republicans that they’re really sorry about everything that happened.
Here’s another part of the letter from Google.
Credit: House Judiciary Committee.
It reads: “Reflecting the Company’s commitment to free expression, YouTube will provide an opportunity for all creators to rejoin the platform if the company terminated their channels for repeated violations of COVID-19 and election integrity policies that are no longer in effect.”
Of course, this offer of amnesty comes about five years too late. Dan Bongino is working for the FBI right now. Presumably he’s not going to take YouTube up on their offer. RFK is also working for the federal government. And of course, Joe Biden has been defeated. Google’s censorship campaign has failed. This is the equivalent of an NFL team admitting that they cheated in the Super Bowl, six months after they lost the game, and then promising that they won’t cheat anymore.
That’s not good enough. There need to be actual sanctions here. YouTube conspired with the federal government to suppress the First Amendment rights of American citizens. That’s what happened here. As a private actor, YouTube can do whatever it wants. But when it works with the federal government, it becomes a co-conspirator in a broader effort to destroy the civil liberties of Americans. And that’s a crime — as we’ve been told again, and again, and again.
They prosecuted Douglas Mackey for making a meme that supposedly made it harder for Americans to vote. That was a lie; the meme simply mocked Hillary Clinton and her voters. But all the same, they set the precedent. It’s completely fair game for conservatives to begin criminally prosecuting Left-wing organizations that actually set out to undermine the constitutional rights of millions of Americans. We shouldn’t accept this letter as a substitute for justice.
But there is one more part of the letter from Google’s legal team that’s worth talking about.
Credit: House Judiciary Committee.
Google is basically saying that their policies have changed — on everything from COVID to “election fraud” and “glitches” in voting machines. You see, it used to be that, under no circumstances could you discuss any of these topics from a conservative perspective. But now, you can say whatever you want about COVID, or election fraud. In the span of just a few years, Google has done a complete 180 on the policies it used to ban a huge number of influential conservatives from the platform. They were ruthless in applying these policies, even though, as they now admit, there was never any legitimate reason to apply them at all.
There is no way around it: This is the most widespread and devastating campaign against free speech in modern times. It was criminal. It was unconstitutional. And as it was going on, we didn’t hear a word from any of the pundits on cable news who are now bloviating about the plight of Jimmy Kimmel. All of the people who are calling Jimmy Kimmel a free speech martyr were completely silent as Google was systematically censoring conservatives. In fact, they were cheering Google’s censorship. And now they’re supposedly horrified by the fact that the FCC commissioner, on a podcast, suggested that an aging, irrelevant late-night host might have broken the broadcast rules by lying about the murder of Charlie Kirk. That’s their red line.
Here’s Jake Tapper for example.
Jake Tapper and Seth Meyers applaud Kimmel’s return with Tapper saying, “it was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime” and “, I don’t know why Disney and Bob Iger ultimately made the right decision and stood for… pic.twitter.com/O6lfpMj7ec
— Alex Christy (@alexchristy17) September 23, 2025
Credit: @alexchristy17/MRC/NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers/X.com
“It was pretty much the most direct infringement by the government on free speech that I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
Forget about the government working with Big Tech to silence thousands of conservatives, including the president of the United States.
Forget about the pro-lifers who were jailed for praying, or the January 6 protesters who were hunted down and thrown in solitary for walking around the Capitol Building.
According to Jake Tapper, none of those crackdowns can possibly compare to Jimmy Kimmel’s paid suspension for a couple of days. And then he goes on to make excuses for Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and his own show, when they’re all inevitably canceled. It can’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that no one watches them. It has to be the Trump administration’s fault.
Even if you disagree with what the FCC commissioner said — and even if you think his comments were an unforced error — this is a totally indefensible position for an allegedly serious news anchor to maintain. At most, Brendan Carr is guilty of getting too loose with his language. There’s no evidence he actually exerted any pressure on ABC. He didn’t launch any kind of investigation — although he’d be within his rights to, as we discussed last week. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that Kimmel’s affiliates are tired of his act. They don’t think it’s good for business when he lies about Charlie Kirk’s murder. So they cut him loose — for a couple of days — to save face. And now he’s back on the air, refusing to apologize, playing the victim, and so on. There is no universe in which this situation is comparable to the censorship of thousands of conservatives, up to and including the president.
And there’s another way you can tell that none of these people really mean what they say. On the Left, there’s no outrage whatsoever about the fact that the new Apple show, called “The Savant,” is now being pulled in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder. Leftists aren’t complaining about censorship (or self-censorship) in this case. They’re not clamoring to see a single episode.
They’re not warning about the “chilling effect” of the Trump administration’s rhetoric in the wake of Charlie’s assassination, or anything like that. That’s because the show, very clearly, was yet another propaganda effort by Big Tech to portray angry white conservatives as a serious domestic terror threat. It was a bog-standard attempt to villainize men like Charlie Kirk, in other words. And now that Charlie’s dead, there’s no point in airing the show, because it would backfire. Here’s part of the trailer, to give you an idea:
The girlboss suburban female investigator is not hunting down trans terrorists. She’s not going after Antifa. She’s not targeting any of the people who actually commit acts of domestic terrorism in this country. Instead, she’s going after white conservatives. And since Apple pulled the show, it’s reasonable to conclude there was a Charlie Kirk-type figure in the plot. It’s yet more agitprop to bolster the same exact narrative that got Charlie killed, which is the narrative that conservative white men are Nazis. You know it. The Left knows it. That’s why they pulled the show. It makes them look even worse than they already do. It would be a massive tactical blunder for Apple to go ahead with this show, especially right now.
The reason Leftists like Jake Tapper aren’t upset with Apple right now is that, fundamentally, they don’t actually oppose censorship or self-censorship on any principled basis. They don’t value free expression, whether it’s on a college campus, or in the entertainment industry, or YouTube, or anywhere else. They only support freedom of speech when it benefits them politically — when they can use it as a rallying cry to demonize conservatives. That’s the only time they care about freedom of speech — which is to say, they don’t actually care about freedom of speech at all. That goes for Google, it goes for Jimmy Kimmel, it goes for Jake Tapper. It goes for all of them.
That’s why, unless prosecutions and lawsuits are coming, no conservative should ever talk about this new “policy change” from Google ever again. It’s meaningless. It’s an effort to buy time until they can censor more conservatives if and when the Left retakes control of the federal government. Any Republican who says otherwise — or who champions this new policy as some kind of victory — is hopelessly naive, at best. Put simply, the people who cried when Trump became president cannot be trusted to hold any power over the vital Internet and communications infrastructure in this country. One letter doesn’t change that. Reinstating a few accounts doesn’t change that. The only deterrent these people understand is actual consequences — particularly in the form of prosecutions and lawsuits.
The other day, Donald Trump posted a public note to Pam Bondi, urging her to accomplish something while in office. This would be a good place to start. Take these executives to court. Deal a fatal blow to their censorship regime. You have their admission, in writing. Now, before any more conservatives disappear in the next few years, it’s time to use it.
