Article in The Contrarian by Nina Jankowicz, 1/23/25

Headline:  “Making Censorship Real Again”

Subhead:  “The Trump administration is capitalizing on a false conspiracy of censorship to usher in the real kind”

“On Inauguration Day, amidst a flurry of executive orders adorned with loopy Sharpie signatures, Donald Trump restored free speech in America. Or so he claimed.

“If you hadn’t noticed free speech had been abolished, don’t beat yourself up. Like several other executive actions, the order that aspires to ‘end federal censorship’ is based on a conspiracy theory. Despite its flimsy pretext, it could usher in an era of real censorship the likes of which the United States has never seen.

Fox News mainstreamed the narrative that conservatives were being unfairly censored by social media companies in the wake of Trump’s 2020 election loss. The lies gained steam across right-wing media and on the same social media sites apparently doing all this censoring—and by 2022, with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, the conspiracy-minded inmates were running the asylum.

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/making-censorship-real-again