Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is using her full political power to rip down and ban–permanently–a video from the internet purely on the grounds that it makes her look bad.
First, please watch the video in question:
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2020
This video was created by my production team at Turning Point USA in response to Pelosi tearing up President Donald Trump's State of the Union speech. The video was produced by interposing quotable lines from the president's speech with footage of Pelosi tearing up the speech.
That's it.
Real clips of real things that happened. The video included no deep fake technology, no motion graphics, no footage or audio from other events.
Yet, Pelosi has demanded that this factual video be removed from the internet after President Trump retweeted it. She dispatched members of her caucus to call the video "doctored," "misinformation" and "selectively edited." The compliant establishment media have taken Pelosi's talking points and repeated them in headlines.
Business Insider called it "doctored," Mashable referred to it as "deceptively edited," and The Washington Post said the video highlighted "gray area in the debate over disinformation."
Thankfully, no platform has given in to the totalitarian request to rip down the video simply on the grounds that it makes a member of the ruling-class look bad.
The irony here is that if social networks were to comply with Pelosi's authoritarianism, they would be ushering in the death of media as we know it.
Taking footage of things that happened, and placing that footage together in a timeline is quite literally how you create all nightly news packages, sports highlight reels, documentaries and instant replays.
The precedent set here would be horrifying.
Would you call a Super Bowl highlight reel "doctored," because the footage of the big play did not show every play before and after in chronological sequence?
Is a news segment "misinformation" when a reporter clips a small part of a politician's speech and runs it?
No, that is absurd.
This is called a "package" and it is as old as the news media itself.
Journalists writing these headlines should wake up and realize they're writing the eulogy for the entire media profession. If our video is "doctored" and "manipulated," then literally every minute of every entertainment, sports and political media has been doctored and manipulated as well. To comply with Pelosi's demands would mean every journalist is now out of a job, replaced by computers and algorithms like some Orwellian dystopia.
Pelosi's true motivation here has nothing to do with truth. It's far more sinister and it deserves to be called out. The reason she is using her formidable powers to get this video deleted from the internet is because it makes her look bad, plain and simple. Pelosi is the one engaging in deception, not our video team. Put another way, this is congressional cancel culture come to life.
Americans should not be surprised. We've seen this before.
The first act of all tin-pot totalitarians is to remove all unflattering media about them from the airwaves and have it replaced by soulless propaganda. Then comes full state media control. Then comes the persecution of private "wrong-think." It's a slippery, tragic slope. And like most every bad actor throughout history, the totalitarians project onto their foes what they themselves are doing.
So it is here: Pelosi and her foot soldiers in Congress feign outrage and call President Trump an authoritarian, when in reality it is they who cannot resist the tyrannical impulse to control, censor and silence.
But this is the digital age. Instead of burning books, they're banning videos.
Thankfully, we live in America where we have a right and a duty to hold the powerful accountable. We must protect that.
There is a silver lining to Pelosi's failed censorship play. Since calling for our video to be taken down, views of the video have skyrocketed. Our video of Pelosi's disrespectful behavior at the State of the Union now has over 20 million views across platforms and growing by the minute.
The total national viewership of the actual State of the Union was 37 million.
Perhaps the media isn't dead after all.
Benny Johnson is the Chief Creative Officer for Turning Point USA, the nation's largest conservative student movement present on over 2,000 college and high school campuses across the country.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
