Long before the left began censoring and manipulating social media in hopes of controlling the flow of information online that reaches the eyes and ears of millions of Americans, they tried to do the same thing on television and radio, and as usual, their plan did the exact opposite of what its name implied. The Fairness Doctrine was a policy put in place in 1948 by the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, that mandated the government monitor the broadcast news outlets in order to, as they claimed, make sure that they were being fair by presenting both sides of political issues.

So one viewpoint didn’t supposedly dominate the media. The, or well-named regulations, certainly weren’t fair and were clearly a violation of the First Amendment rights of the TV and radio station owners because the government isn’t supposed to be telling people what they can and cannot say. And despite being something one would expect to find only in a state-controlled news media, the Fairness Doctrine was a law in the United States until it was repealed in 1987, almost 40 years after it was put in place. But that didn’t mean Democrats wouldn’t try to resurrect it again since conservative AM talk radio had become such a powerful force in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Rush Limbaugh dominating the industry once he was syndicated in 1988.

When it was repealed, though, even Democrat Supreme Court Justice William Douglas admitted that it was a clear violation of the First Amendment and said the government has no business dictating what kind of content television stations, radio stations, and newspapers put out. And he also noted that the demands of those enforcing the Fairness Doctrine would fluctuate with whatever political party was in power. But despite the obvious or wellian nature of such a program, and it clearly violating the First Amendment, 20 years later, in 2007, Democrat politicians pushed for it to be reinstated in order to combat talk radio and Fox News.

Democrat Senator Dick Durbin from Illinois led the charge and was soon backed up by a long list of other liberals, including then Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Chuck Schumer, and a bunch of others. Even former President Bill Clinton threw his support behind the saying it should be reinstated in order to counteract right wing talk shows, meaning Rush Limbaugh and AM talk radio in general. Before Barack Obama appointed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, she was a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School, where she wrote an argument in favor of reinstating it, saying that the First Amendment would often permit, indeed, requires the reallocation of speech opportunities, adding that the realm of public expression may have too much of some kinds of speech, meaning conservative talk radio, and too little of others, because back then, LGBTQism was confined to The Jerry Springer Show and RuPaul’s Drag Race.

And she said some speakers may drown out or dominate their opposition, so the government needed to correct these imbalances, she said. Well, they couldn’t get the government to do it. Obviously, the social impact agencies, the lobbyist organizations hired to persuade Hollywood Studios successfully convinced them to saturate the airwaves with LGBTQism and other cultural Marxist propaganda, and now you can barely avoid it. Cass Sunstein, who Barack Obama appointed to run the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, as the information czar, of course, supported reinstating it as well, saying the government should control the broadcast media to ensure diversity of views, and that would help free expression.

It would help! Cass Sunstein is also the man who proposed using an army of government-funded online trolls to flood the comment sections on blogs, even before the advent of social media, in order to guide conversations and shill for certain topics or attack the content that was posted. These days, Operation Earnest Voice does this on social media, a little-known government program you’re not going to hear about on Fox News, which is special software that allows operatives to run multiple sock puppet accounts or bot accounts on the big tech platforms, posing as ordinary Americans in order to direct or deflect the conversation in whatever direction the agenda entails.

The Left continuously tries to shut down the debate. The most mild, logical, level-headed criticism of their agenda is labeled racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, xenophobic, et cetera, et cetera. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to have a reasonable discussion about many issues without them throwing a temper tantrum and just screaming that your arguments are hate speech. But thankfully, Elon over at Twitter, and even YouTube, surprisingly, loosened the rules for posts about the COVID lab leak and even questioning the 2020 election. But as the 2024 election approaches, we’ll likely see censorship ramp up again, and a whole new variety of topics get added to the list of banable offenses.

So buckle up. If my YouTube channel just disappears one day, then find me on Rumble. I have a channel over there, Rumble.com slash Mark Dice, with about 200,000 subscribers. But I really post over there for reasons I won’t get into now. Maybe if CEO Chris Pavlosky would return my tax for DMs, I would consider it. But I don’t know. I can’t even get a response from anyone over there, but that’s a whole other story. I do use Locals, however, which is owned by Rumble, but run by different people and technically a different company.

And if you like my serious monologues like this, then you should definitely join my Locals community, which is basically like a private members-only Facebook page. It’s $5 a month. It helps support my work. And you can get all the clips and blog posts and my hot takes on a variety of issues that I don’t bother posting. On Facebook, because once certain keywords are detected by the algorithm, they dump those posts down the memory hole and nobody sees them. And as my Locals members can’t attest, the posts are, how shall I say, many of them not suitable for YouTube.

So if you’re interested, click the link in the description below and head on over there and check it out. [tr:trw].

See more of Mark Dice on their Public Channel and the MPN Mark Dice channel.