On May 8, the Biden administration’s attempt to dismiss a lawsuit by Texas and two media outlets, The Daily Wire and The Federalist, accusing the U.S. Department of State of aiding in the censorship of conservative voices, was unsuccessful. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle in Tyler, Texas, ruled that the State Department actively engaged in promoting censorship tools and technologies to social media platforms, encouraging these companies to “de-platform” the two news sites.
It’s alarming enough that these conservative outlets were potentially censored by a federal agency in a country that prides itself on the freedom of speech as guaranteed by the Constitution. It’s even more concerning that the government attempted to silence the affected parties, inhibiting their ability to speak out and seek justice.
As an immigrant who fled Soviet Russia, I am deeply troubled by the rise of speech suppression in America, my adopted homeland. The Biden administration’s authoritarian tactics remind me of my experiences with censorship in the United States.
Last month, my Facebook account was restricted after I shared an article I wrote for Fox News titled “Ignore FBI director’s urgent warning about terrorist threats at our own peril,” in which I discussed potential threats to the U.S. homeland in 2024 based on my experience as an intelligence analyst.
Facebook justified the restriction by claiming I violated their “Community Standards,” stating the content shared “went against our rules on dangerous individuals and organizations.”
“You could lose your page forever,” read the warning, “if you get a few more Community Standards violations.”
My analysis was based on the 2024 Worldwide Threat Assessment issued by the Intelligence Community and echoed recent warnings by FBI Director Christopher Wray about “the potential for a coordinated attack here in the homeland.” In his congressional testimonies, Wray repeatedly emphasized the FBI’s concerns about terrorist threats having reached a “whole other level.” He warned about “dangerous individuals” crossing the southern border and the possibility of an attack “akin to the ISIS-K attack” in Russia at a concert.
These policies are not only absurd but also dangerous. Does Facebook prefer keeping Americans unaware and unprepared for these threats?
This isn’t my first experience with censorship. In 2021, my former employer, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), redacted 31 pages of my book, Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America. In it, I predicted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, criticized the intelligence community’s lack of proper expertise on Russia and Putin, and revealed Putin’s goal to destabilize America. I also disclosed that DIA was purging honest Russia analysts in the run-up to the 2016 election as President Obama’s top intelligence officials were pushing the nonexistent “Russia-Trump collusion.”
Both DIA and CIA weaponized the pre-publication review process against me, which is mandatory for any intelligence officer wishing to publish a book.
Much like its Russian counterpart, the U.S. government, with Big Tech’s help, is involved in shaping the American people’s perception of reality. Remember the 51 ex-intelligence officials who claimed the Hunter Biden laptop story was Russian disinformation? Or how spy agencies withheld critical information about Covid origins, as revealed by an oversight investigation led by Rep. Brad Wenstrup.
Big Tech suppressed valid information about the Covid vaccine and silenced prominent epidemiologists, including Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Marty Makary, Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Scott Atlas, and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, whose expert opinions on Covid, government-mandated lockdowns, and the vaccine contradicted the official narrative.
Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor of medicine, tweeted an article on natural immunity, but that tweet was marked as a “trends blacklist.” Some of these distinguished doctors from America’s top medical schools were threatened with losing their medical licenses. The censorship officials, such as Twitter’s former chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, had no medical training.
Journalist Matt Taibbi describes what he found in “The Twitter Files”:
We did find within days a whole galaxy of things that said, “Flagged by FBI,” “Flagged by DHS,” “Flagged by HHS,” “Flagged By Treasury.” We realized there was this huge operation that spanned the entire federal government to pressure not just Twitter, but two dozen at least internet companies to suppress different kinds of information.
The erosion of free speech in America is reminiscent of Soviet Russia. There, people were afraid to speak the truth as it was a matter of survival. Threatened with expulsion from school, loss of employment, or imprisonment, you begin to self-censor. Self-censorship is the highest form of censorship, indicating the government’s total control over you. You become a subject of the state, no longer an individual.
Today, many conservatives feel uncomfortable sharing their views openly, fearing cancellation, shadow-banning, or exclusion from “polite society.” This emergence of wrongthink reflects deviation from government and elite-approved opinions. In Russia, there was “correct” and “incorrect” thinking.
Speech control leads to groupthink and eventually thought control. Thought control is a characteristic of a totalitarian society. Without free thought, arriving at the truth is impossible. Once the truth becomes unattainable, society’s survival is at risk. My birthplace, the USSR, no longer exists.
