Democrats Play Dumb About Censorship Because It Benefits Them

Federalist Editor-In-Chief Mollie Hemingway schooled a Democrat Senator on Tuesday when he tried to play dumb in a Senate hearing about the censorship-industrial complex and its partisan targeting of publications like The Federalist.

Not long into the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on The Constitution’s hearing about the vast network of organizations seeking to silence conservative and dissenting voices, Ranking Member Peter Welch of Vermont asked Hemingway to elaborate on her opinion that there was “coercive power that was used to infringe on the work that you do.”

“Yes, because the censorship-industrial complex — it involves government funding at the federal and state level, working with NGOs, whether they’re for-profit or nonprofit,” Hemingway noted.

In an attempt to feign ignorance about the effects of government-sponsored silencing, which have been widely reported and ruled on over the last five years, Welch asked Mollie to define the “industrial-censorship complex” because it “is an abstract term.”

“It doesn’t mean a lot to me. It conveys a lot of meaning, obviously, to many people here, but it has to get down to something very concrete, as to what the government did,” Welch said. “If it’s an NGO, your view, I think the chairman’s view too, is that that NGO is hand in glove with the government.”

Hemingway began to explain how the federal government has financially partnered with shadowy nongovernmental organizations to do its censorship dirty work, such as “flag items” so that “for-profit Big Tech companies will then remove the content.”

Welch interrupted Hemingway to insist that the Democrat Party did not have enough wits or gumption to orchestrate such a widespread speech control campaign.

“You give us way too much credit for being that organized to be able to put this whole massive enterprise together,” Welch insisted. “I don’t know how it works.”

“In part, because you can rely on the censorship-industrial complex to do the work for you,” Hemingway retorted.

Welch quickly ended the exchange by yielding back his time.

In her opening statement to the subcommittee, Hemingway noted that she and The Federalist have both “been targets of the censorship-industrial complex.” This infringement, Hemingway continued, became exceptionally obvious in 2020 when the foreign dark money group The Center For Countering Digital Hate tried to orchestrate the demonetization of The Federalist “because we published a critique of corporate media coverage of Black Lives Matter riots.”