Steve Deace vs. Big Tech censorship — the battle everyone should be following



One of the keys to success in digital content creation is mastering search engine optimization — a powerful strategy that boosts a creator’s visibility. SEO involves using targeted keywords in video titles, descriptions, and tags, along with engaging thumbnails and captions, to help search engines like Google and YouTube rank content higher in search results, driving more viewers to discover it.

Here’s how it works: A YouTuber films a cooking video demonstrating a pasta recipe. To reach a wider audience, she applies SEO by crafting a keyword-rich title and description with phrases like “easy dinner ideas” and “quick pasta dish” and adding relevant tags to her video. If she does this well, she increases her video’s chances of ranking higher in YouTube search results, attracting more viewers in a competitive digital landscape.

But what happens when Big Tech shadow cabals in collaboration with federal entities decide to erect virtual barriers that prevent certain topics from appearing on search result pages — regardless of how adeptly the creator used SEO and other content-optimizing digital tools?

BlazeTV host Steve Deace has been living out the reality of that question for years.

Topics — especially “controversial” ones — YouTube, Apple iTunes, and Google have deemed problematic are quietly buried under an avalanche of other content. This censorship has been happening for years, so conservative content creators got smarter and found loopholes around the algorithms by avoiding key words and phrases they knew would be flagged and squashed.

However, Big Tech companies are now “transcribing everything that's said on podcasts,” meaning creators cannot avoid the consequences of discussing forbidden topics.

“So let's pretend we spend an entire entire show just debunking the demonic ideology of transgenderism, but we market it in a way that it says nothing about trans in order to try to get around the algorithm. Well, now that they're transcribing that for us, we can't get around that,” says producer Aaron McIntire.

Creators can appeal YouTube’s decision to demonetize their show, but success is rare. “There's basically no recourse whatsoever,” says Aaron.

“I would venture a guess we are the largest show in America with by far the most anemic YouTube traffic,” says Steve. “They're making it so we can't connect with our audiences, and if we can't connect with you, we can't hit the numbers we want to get the monetization we need to keep even doing this at all.”

Steve has been battling Big Tech censorship behind the scenes for years now. Recently, however, his fight experienced a new development when he contacted First Liberty — “the leading constitutional conservative political advocacy organization in the country” — which determined that Steve, indeed, had grounds to file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.

To hear where Steve is at in the process of fighting Big Tech censorship, watch the episode above.

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Congress has the power to crush Big Tech’s app monopoly



Global policymakers and consumers are weary of Big Tech monopolies. While excessive consolidation of power leads to privacy violations, price gouging, and stifling innovation, it poses a unique threat to free speech.

Trump administration antitrust enforcers understood that threat. As Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater observed, when a handful of companies control the flow of information, “someone can be disappeared from the internet quite easily.”

Digital free speech shouldn’t depend on the shifting preferences of Apple executives or Google policy teams.

Conservatives increasingly see Big Tech’s ability to distort and manipulate public discourse as a downstream effect of its market dominance. In the case of the mobile internet, it takes only two companies — Apple and Google — to control the smartphone experience of nearly every American.

Congress is beginning to respond. Two recently introduced bills would take on Apple and Google’s app store choke points directly. The Open App Markets Act, co-sponsored by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), and the App Store Freedom Act, sponsored by Rep. Kat Cammack (R-Fla.), aim to empower users by giving them the option to download apps from sources outside of Apple and Google’s proprietary platforms, including alternative marketplaces.

Why do these technical details matter for speech? Because Apple and Google’s gatekeeper power has already been abused to silence dissent.

In 2021, Parler — a social media app popular on the right — was removed from Apple and Google’s app stores for allegedly having “inadequate” content moderation policies. The timing followed reports that the platform was used to coordinate the January 6 Capitol riot. Virtually overnight, Parler went from one of the fastest growing apps in the world to a ghost town. Internet consumers move quickly, and the app’s months in Big Tech’s doghouse became a death sentence. Parler never recovered.

Parler wasn’t an isolated case. Years earlier, Google banned Gab, another free speech-oriented platform, while Apple never allowed it to launch in the first place. Google also initially refused to approve President Trump’s Truth Social due to concerns over its moderation policies. And abroad, Apple has bowed to authoritarian regimes — removing apps used by dissidents in China and Russia at the request of those governments.

RELATED: Upgrade to a dumbphone

http://www.fotogestoeber.de via iStock/Getty Images

The problem runs deeper than censorship. Apple and Google have used their dominance to dictate the design and speech choices of developers. App makers are often forbidden from communicating key information to users — such as the availability of cheaper subscription pricing outside of Apple and Google’s walled gardens.

The scope of their power is staggering. Roughly 91% of Americans own a smartphone. More than 99% of those devices run on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android operating systems. And 88% of the time spent on those phones is inside apps — not on web browsers.

Without real guardrails, that bottleneck becomes a single point of failure. It’s a choke point ready to be exploited by governments, activist groups, or corporations that want to control speech.

Some openly defend the current system precisely because it allows Apple and Google to keep disfavored apps off the market. Even before Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X), Apple and Google pressured the company to increase moderation. After Musk’s takeover, activist organizations lobbied Apple and Google to ban X altogether if Musk didn’t reinstate stricter content rules.

An open app ecosystem benefits everyone. Conservatives celebrating Big Tech’s apparent political shifts should remember how easily those loyalties change. Liberals worried about “tech bro” influence should support guardrails that limit partisan manipulation — regardless of who holds power.

Digital free speech shouldn’t depend on the shifting preferences of Apple executives or Google policy teams. Congress must act to restore balance and ensure pluralism. The Open App Markets Act and the App Store Freedom Act offer real, durable solutions. They deserve bipartisan support.

Censorship Is Democrats’ Only Means Of Political Survival

Obama's embrace of censorship speaks to the desperation of a party that can't survive without uniform control of the information space.

David French And The Never-Trump Faction Don’t Care About Free Speech At All

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Propaganda Press Upset Trump Could Shut Down CISA’s Election Censorship

The Trump administration has launched a review of every Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) role related to election security and so-called mis- and disinformation after CISA began censoring speech. CISA, originally established in 2018 to address cybersecurity threats, quickly transformed into a government-run censorship operation, particularly during the 2020 election. In response, the propaganda press […]

Exclusive: Republicans huddle with FCC chair in closed-door meeting to dismantle DEI, liberal media machine



House Republicans met with FCC Chair Brendan Carr and Republican Study Committee Chair Rep. August Pfluger (Texas) on Wednesday to discuss the evolving media landscape under President Donald Trump's administration.

During the closed-door meeting that Blaze News was given exclusive access to, both Pfluger and Carr addressed concerns about the liberal bias in publicly funded platforms like NPR, as well as the importance of empowering local media.

Carr, who has been an FCC commissioner since 2017, homed in on the importance of free speech and the First Amendment and also of applying existing regulations evenly rather than to advance a political agenda.

'The RSC is committed to working alongside Chairman Carr to dismantle the censorship cartel, strengthen America's digital infrastructure through free-market principles, and restore free-speech rights for everyday Americans.'

"For too long in this government, particularly the last couple of years, your last name dictated how the government treated you," Carr said. "If your last name was Soros, the commission bent over backwards and gave you a special, unprecedented commission-level shortcut to buy 200 radio stations. If your last name was Musk, then you lost $800 million contracts that you lawfully got."

"Everybody now is going to get a fair shake going forward," Carr added.

In the meeting, Carr laid out a four-step plan to reduce media bias and restore the FCC's core principles, which include reining in Big Tech censorship, reinvigorating trust in national and local media, putting forward both economic and permitting reforms, and bolstering aspects of our national security.

With the support of Pfluger and RSC members, Carr is confident that he can accomplish these directives.

"We thank Chairman Carr for his bold leadership in confronting malign influences like George Soros that corrupt our media and silence conservative voices, and the committee fully supports his efforts to restore truth to our public disclosure while expanding broadband access to rural communities," Pfluger said.

"The RSC is committed to working alongside Chairman Carr to dismantle the censorship cartel, strengthen America's digital infrastructure through free-market principles, and restore free-speech rights for everyday Americans," Pfluger added.

Carr also spoke about some of the reforms he has already enacted. Prior to his becoming chair, Carr noted, DEI was the second-most highly prioritized core value of the FCC. Since then, Trump has issued an executive order uprooting DEI from all federal entities, and the FCC has followed suit.

"We've ended the FCC promotion of DEI," Carr said. "You would be outraged if you realized how much promoting DEI had been embedded in FCC work. ... We were spending millions and millions of dollars promoting DEI. Meanwhile, what fell by the wayside was the FCC's actual core work — and doing it competently — of connecting Americans."

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Trump’s victory exposes the deep state’s worst fears



Something extraordinary happened in the 2024 election. Conservatives, independents, and even former Democrats rose up and delivered a historic rebuke to the far left. The electoral map didn’t show a mere victory for Donald Trump — it was a political bloodbath. Moreover, for the first time in decades, Republicans are poised to take control of nearly every level of government.

This election was an unmistakable message from voters: America is sick, and we demand a cure.

Institutions meant to safeguard our liberties have become vectors for corruption, collusion, and control.

But before we can tackle the disease, we must diagnose it. What, exactly, is the mandate voters handed to Trump and the GOP? What is the problem that we demand they fix?

The answer is as clear as it is uncomfortable: The United States as we knew it no longer exists. Our freedoms — our sovereignty — have been systematically eroded by forces intent on transforming America into something unrecognizable.

Two of Donald Trump’s first promises as president-elect spoke directly to this. He vowed to eliminate the deep state and end censorship. The fact that these issues even need to be addressed shows how far we’ve strayed.

These proposed changes from the Trump administration are promising, but Trump cannot do this alone. The corruption afflicting this country is systemic. It’s a cancer that has spread through every organ of the body politic, from unelected bureaucrats in Washington to powerful corporations and media conglomerates. This rot has metastasized, just as it did in Europe under Fabian socialism and cultural Marxism. It must be excised.

But how did we get here? The left didn’t stumble into control of our institutions by accident. Its dominance over the media, universities, and culture was the result of a decades-long operation to manufacture consent.

The strategy is laid out plainly in a book by leftist thinker Noam Chomsky: “Manufacturing Consent.” Chomsky wasn’t wrong in his analysis — he was just dead wrong in his prescription. Over the decades, the left co-opted his blueprint to manipulate public opinion, consolidate power, and push its progressive agenda.

The proof is in the state of America today. Look at how the media has been consolidated. In the 1980s, 90% of American media was controlled by over 50 companies. Today, six massive conglomerates control the vast majority of what we read, watch, and hear.

They control the flow of information, shaping narratives to keep the public in the dark. They decide what is “normal” and what is “fringe.” They’ve convinced generations of Americans to accept obvious falsehoods as truth.

This media-industrial complex works hand in glove with the government and elite institutions. It has labeled anyone who questions its authority as a “conspiracy theorist” or “extremist,” all while cozying up to Big Tech and using censorship as a tool to silence dissent.

Donald Trump has promised to sign an executive order on day one banning federal agencies from colluding to censor Americans. He plans to fire bureaucrats who’ve participated in these unconstitutional practices and roll back the protections that allow tech giants to act as unaccountable gatekeepers.

But this is only the beginning.

The cancer runs deeper than just Big Tech or biased news outlets. It extends to the very systems meant to serve and protect us. Government agencies like HHS, NIH, and FDA now prioritize profits for Big Pharma and Big Food over the health of Americans. The military-industrial complex wages endless wars without congressional approval — in our name but without our consent. Institutions meant to safeguard our liberties have become vectors for corruption, collusion, and control.

Every organ of our national body has been infected. And the first step in curing this disease is restoring the free flow of information — our eyes and ears.

Without independent media, without honest debate, the cancer will keep coming back. That’s why I call on this incoming administration to prioritize breaking up media monopolies, ending corporate-government partnerships, and empowering alternative platforms.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. We must act now or risk losing the republic altogether. The American people have made their mandate clear: We demand accountability, transparency, and freedom.

It’s time to clean house.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s political enemies still want to ruin him. Is AI his way out?



“I don’t know if we know what’s exactly going to work really well yet, but some things are really promising,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the company’s latest earnings call. “I have high confidence that over the next several years, this will be one of the important trends and one of the important applications.”

Yes, he’s talking about content churned out by computers. Yes, the feedback is already pretty bad.

And as legacy media organizations — like establishment institutions across the board — continue to lose trust and loyalty, millions will default to AI content without even actively choosing against the dwindling supply of human journalists trying to keep them in line.

“I think we’re going to add a whole new category of content which is AI-generated or AI-summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” he insisted. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time.”

Very exciting — but for whom? The kind of outlets likely to blame Zuck for Trump didn’t skip a beat. “The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves,” reported 404 Media. “Mark Zuckerberg Pledges to Fill Facebook With Even More AI Slop,” Futurism blared. One Bloomberg columnist went with “Mark Zuckerberg Wants to Feed You More AI Slop.” You get the picture.

And if you’ve followed the disturbing trends of older Facebook users thinking the outlandish AI-made images they’re engaging with are real photographs, you might be inclined to agree.

But as is so often the case in cyberspace, all is not as it seems.

Start with Zuckerberg. The long-embattled tech titan may have spent most of the Biden years in the doghouse with conservatives bummed out by his willingness to drop big “Zuckerbucks” on the 2020 election.

But Zuck found himself in survival mode after Democrats resolved to punish him for Facebook’s friendly treatment of Trump in the run-up to 2016. In the blink of an eye, the Frances Haugen “whistleblower” op was concocted and deployed, the platform all but iced political news content, Zuck hard-pivoted into the metaverse, and, yes, the Zuckerbucks began to flow. And behind the scenes, Zuck rebuilt and bided his time.

Now, thanks to some canny PR, he’s rebranded as a libertarian and made the leap to the AI era. This, it’s apparent, is how Zuck reasons he’ll at last break free of the partisan net woven for him by a vindictive regime and its big-media collaborators.

After all, predictable slop of a different kind flooded the social media zone under the state-sponsored outlets that took over Twitter before Elon came along. It seems like the only content fire hose powerful enough to outblast the censor-sanitized media apparatus is cranked out by computers, not human beings typing away as if they may as well be computers themselves.

That seems to be Zuck’s wager, anyway. If millions still pine for the naive old days of social media when real friends hung out online, maybe the future of social media looks more like using AI content for reference and real life for socialization. At a time when people are starved for authorities they can trust, many will probably prefer AIs to human indoctrinators.

And as legacy media organizations — like establishment institutions across the board — continue to lose trust and loyalty, millions will default to AI content without even actively choosing against the dwindling supply of human journalists trying to keep them in line.

The probable downside is already plain enough — the same one Americans experienced for generations back when cable was king and the internet was something that squealed at you from a tabletop box plugged into your phone line. Four hundred channels and nothing on …

Ultimately, it won’t be easy to trust AI content unless you trust the people behind the AI. Right now, on one side of the politics of social media, you’ve got the left selling themselves as a borg or blob, a collective consciousness of enlightened elites. On the other, you’ve got a handful of famous tech lords selling themselves as can-do visionaries who might not have all the answers but at least can get us out of the current rut.

Those aren’t the choices you’d want when trying to select a source of spiritual wisdom, but as they stand at the close of 2024, it’s easy to see how the momentum of public sentiment could point away from the crew that’s ruled our headspace for the past four years — and toward the tech titans who aren’t trying to take down Trump.

How tech beat woke and elected Trump



As an orange sun rises over a deeply reddened nation, the woke left isn’t out, but it most certainly is down.

And while millions of Americans played a part, responsibility for the death of the woke regime rests in a small set of hands.

Neither conservatism, libertarianism, nor any other -ism killed the woke vibe.

Tech did.

As the woke regime intended to permanently transform America and the American people by spiritually commanding and controlling tech, this fact bears close examination.

If we’re going to move as fast as we need to to make America great again, that means looking, like all the other digital powers in the world must look, toward our deepest spiritual foundations. That’s still Christianity.

Looking for revenge, the left will be tempted to turn on tech instead of trying to take it back over. This is a deadly mistake: Neither our tools nor those who know how to make them are Americans’ enemy.

But some on the right will now be tempted to build a civil religion to the god of tech. This too is a fatal error. Our tools and tool-makers must not become worshiped idols.

Finding the harmonious middle way begins with a look at just how tech beat woke.

Consider one illuminating post-election post from venture capitalist Katherine Boyle. “Silicon Valley doesn’t trust experts,” she says, “because the game changes too fast to weight experience over other factors. In accelerating realignments, ‘the gold standard’ experts and OGs often don’t have an advantage.”

Grasp this, and the events of the past five years snap into focus.

Back when the most powerful technology was the TV, the organized left seized the commanding heights of the culture with an intellectual revolution.

It was easy to do. The academic old guard, which all but worshiped the technology of old books, couldn’t beat back the postmodern swarm that proclaimed the death of the world the printing press made. And the people, who had long since stopped kneeling at the altar of the book, were now, as David Bowie sang, “hooked to the silver screen,” seeing in televisual tech proof that other peoples’ fantasies were more true than their own reality.

Then digital seized the commanding heights of technology — disenchanting the cult of the book as well as the cult of the video.

That sea of change didn’t just put the established experts on the back foot. Instead of simply forcing them to play catch-up, it transformed the psychological and social environment that they thought they had mastered.

Suddenly, the value of intellectual expertise itself began to plummet. The awesome sweep and scope of digital returned humanity to the ultimate questions about who we are and why.

Questions that demanded a return to our deepest memories about the ultimate answers and from whence they came.

Even the heights of expert intellectual experience couldn’t speak to these matters with authority people could trust. Suddenly, people thirsted for expert spiritual experience — not the fun and fantastic simulation thereof that poured forth in gross excess from the likes of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Walt Disney.

The civilizational game had changed.

Yet the ruling left wasn’t stupid. Already at the elite level, those on the left had had the chance to react first, and their gambit to shift the ground of the legitimacy of their power from intellectual to spiritual authority unfolded swiftly. Enter “wokeness,” which rebranded intellectual authorities as spiritual ones.

This grand switch-up responded to the thirst for spiritual authority unleashed by digital tech by enforcing a new vision where the smartest didn’t deserve to rule because of their mental merit but because of their purity of heart. The priestly caste of the woke church had a good four years to execute on this crash program.

But instead of soaring, on election night, it crashed. And while the nationwide groundswell of support for Trump obviously played a huge role, the decisive factor was the decision of a handful of technologists led by Elon Musk to bet everything they had against the woke regime. Without them, it’s all too easy to see how Trump and his supporters wouldn’t have been able to defeat the entrenched Borg using Kamala Harris as its latest skin suit.

That’s true going forward, too. The regime still has many lawfare options to derail Trump before the Inauguration, and the main obstacle to their success is Musk’s willingness to spend on flooding the zone with maximally aggressive legal defenses of the popular majority that swept Trump back to power.

That’s why so many on the right — especially given how many notional conservatives have proven so wimpy and ineffectual over the past four-plus years — will be so tempted to make tech their god-emperor in all but name (and perhaps in name, too!).

Yet that, as the neckbeards like to say, ain’t it, chief. An innovation-forward culture may feel like a huge acceleration today, but it’s actually a return to the moral norm of Americans being and feeling comfortable, competent, and confident taking charge of their tools and toolmaking. Long ago, Alexis de Tocqueville taught that the key to Americans ranging so freely and fruitfully across the frontier of human endeavor was the firm anchor of their hearts in humble devotion to God: the fixed, secure point that enabled us to survive and thrive in a world where all was in motion. That’s us today — except now more than ever, we need to restore that fixed point.

That requires spiritual authorities Americans both recognize and can trust — not false priests of an HR-hoe goddess or of some inscrutable cyber deity.

If we’re going to move as fast as we need to to make America great again, that means looking, like all the other digital powers in the world must look, toward our deepest spiritual foundations. That’s still Christianity — not for the sake of establishing an unconstitutional theocracy, but for ensuring our country keeps its head among our its achievements by doing the humble work of the heart.

Game on.

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