Threats Facing Conservative Speech

Floor Speech

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Ms. HAGEMAN. Mr. Speaker, in today's America, conservatives are constantly under attack. Attempts to silence us take many forms and are perpetuated by numerous people, agencies, and corporations.

Conservatives are more often audited by the IRS, and conservative organizations are more often denied tax-exempt status than are liberals. This is an indisputable fact and has been happening at least since the Obama administration. This is, in part, the reason why voting to stop the hiring of 87,000 new IRS agents was so critical.

Conservatives are more often investigated and harassed by the Department of Justice than are liberals. The DOJ has even gone so far as to seize the cell phone of a sitting Congressman. It has raided residents of conservatives, while ignoring liberals whose actions are far worse. It has aggressively advocated for holding right-leaning Americans in jail without due process.

How many liberals have been banned or shadow-banned on Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other social and digital media sites. Scores of conservatives have been so banned, including our former President.

How many times do we see the so-called ``fact checks'' on the social media posts of conservatives while never seeing them on the posts of liberals. These ``fact checks'' have covered such topics as COVID, climate change, gun rights, crime, and actions of protestors. The fact checks are dubious at best and downright dishonest at worst.

Financial platforms such as PayPal, Venmo, and GoFundMe routinely refuse service to or censor conservatives. In the past year alone, GoFundMe has taken down fund-raisers for Kyle Rittenhouse, conservative students at Arizona State University, and from the freedom trucker convoy after having raised $9 million.

Finally, just this last week, we saw that YouTube and Facebook have censored Project Veritas in some of the most important investigative research that we have seen come out of a media company.

While all of this sounds like an impossibility to overcome, we must fight to end this bias. Through my assignments to the Judiciary Committee and the Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, we will do exactly that.

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