ORLANDO, Fla. (Legal Newsline) - If Republicans want to be known as the free speech party, they must stop trying to ban books, according to Alex Berenson, author of the Unreported Truths newsletter.
“If you like free speech and you stand for free speech, you have to stand for free speech even if you don't like what's being said, which the left has completely forgotten more and more, day-by-day and week-by-week,” he said. “Censorship never works. It always fails.”
Berenson made the comments in a speech Thursday at the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
“Don't stand for censorship,” he said. “Censorship is unAmerican. It's unconstitutional, it's wrong and besides the left is way ahead on it. Let the left have it right now. It's really amazing to me in the last five years how far the left has gone on censorship.”
On Feb. 7, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a National Advisory Terrorism bulletin defining terrorist threats as misinformation or disinformation on the internet.
“These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence,” the bulletin states.
Based on the definition of a threat actor, Berenson told the audience of conservatives that he fits the description.
“I'm a terrorist by that definition and that means the government is entitled to do lots of things to me,” he said. “And by the way, this definition could easily be applied to the plenty of people on the left who spoke out in favor of the Black Lives Matter protest. This is dangerous to both sides. It's dangerous to the United States and the Department of Homeland Security should walk away from it. Journalists should be asking about it but they don't want to because they are so involved in squelching.”
Prior to launching his newsletter on Substack - an alternative platform for voices that have been canceled on Twitter and Facebook, among other things - Berenson was a New York Times reporter. Since then, he has become a critic of the mainstream media.
“The people who I used to work with at the New York Times never said a word about it and I find it stunning and so disappointing,” he said.
Berenson is the author of Pandemia: How Coronavirus hysteria took over our government, rights, and lives.
He was banned permanently from posting on Twitter, according to media reports, because he allegedly violated COVID-19 misinformation rules.
“I hope next year when I'm back here, you'll be able to see what I have to say on Twitter and I hope we'll all be able to debate our response to COVID and Ukraine and everything else on Twitter and Facebook,” Berenson added. ‘These platforms should live up to their ideals. They should live up to our country's ideals and they should be open platforms.”