You're in the freedom hot. This is the Buck Sexton Show podcast. Get more from Buck by following him on social media at Buck Sexton on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Welcome friends. Great to have you here with me on the Buck Sexton show. I am very concerned as you know about this trend of censorship that's happening all across social media.

Because you have to remember they're not going to be judicious in the application of this. They're not going to say, okay, only the really bad people on the right and there are certainly some only those people are going to be punished. No, there's going to be mass purges not only of individuals, but also of ideas.

In some cases ideas that are really central policy debates, we should have seen this coming because it wasn't the election. You have to remember it wasn't the election that was the original reason for online censorship.

It was COVID-19 lockdowns and mask effectiveness. That's a different thing isn't it than just saying anything outright about masks. If you even question the effectiveness of them, something that in the beginning of 2020, as you've no doubt heard me talk about many times, Dr. Fauci suggested there was essentially no effectiveness. That was what Fauci said they can pretend he didn't, but now if we even question it.

You are deplatformed, you're attacked, you are banned, you're censored. And we have been led to believe through four years that the real threat of authoritarianism and the heart of authoritarianism is the concept of you must obey.

It is not about your consent. You must obey. And there are there are threats. There is eventually the threat of force attached to this. But even in the earlier stages, it's obey or you can't speak out without fear of being censored by platforms obey or maybe you can't even conduct your business anymore. You'll be boycotted obey or you won't be able to use banking services.

You'll be kicked out of essential parts of day to day life until you submit. You must submit or else. We've been told for four years that the big threat of this came from Donald Trump in the right when all along. And there's really no serious disagreement about this all along.

There has been a complete opposition to this president from the media from Silicon Valley and from much of corporate America. Look at what happened during the BLM riots and protest. There were lawful BLM protest to be sure, but there were also a lot of riots, a lot of destruction of property, a lot of assaults on police.

Corporate America was almost uniformly supportive of those protests.

Corporate America was sending the money and where there was no condemnation of political violence or riots.

Social media allows you to say things like racist cops murdered this person. And then when we find out more facts and we know that it's not actually not a murder and it was not motivated by racism based on anything that we know.

There's no fact check run on that. There's no additional context that's put out there. So we know that there is a capricious application of the terms of service, whether it's about COVID lockdowns or BLM and political violence.

They're playing games, folks. They're not applying these standards. Honestly, in fact, they're weaponizing the standards against one side.

Where does the greatest concern of authoritarianism come from? Look, show me a regime around the world, either today or in history that was truly an authoritarian state and ask yourself this question.

Was the press, such as it was, in complete opposition to the ruling party or totally doing the bidding of the ruling party?

And you'll come to a very straightforward conclusion. Now there may be some opposition papers here and there a little bit. There may be, but do you ever have the entirety of the corporate establishment?

And and the information establishment and the intellectual class, so to speak, completely united against a truly authoritarian regime. No, because you couldn't have.

You couldn't have such a governing, a governing system. You couldn't have somebody in total control with so many powerful forces arrayed against them.

I bring this up because my concern now is that we're heading toward what is supposed to be a benevolent authoritarianism of the left and the Democrat party.

But we'll end up just being the authoritarianism. That's what we're actually going to get. They think it's for our own good. We have to sense our bad ideas. Gotta keep you safe so you can't question lockdowns or masks. Gotta get rid of political violence, but we're only going to do it from the right. And by the way, I support the elimination of political violence.

But I do think it should be supported in all kinds of politics and from all sides of of the aisle and from American political conversation and discourse.

...