We’re constantly told we live in an age overwhelmed by misinformation. But in today’s America, the greater threat to democracy, truth, and public trust isn’t falsehood—it’s the growing power of institutions to define, suppress, and algorithmically erase dissent when it threatens their preferred narratives.
In 2023 and 2024, if you posted a meme on Facebook implying that President Joe Biden might be struggling cognitively—a concern shared quietly by voters across the spectrum—you could have been flagged for “misinformation.” Your post might be suppressed in the feed, slapped with a fact-check, or demonetized based on the prevailing claims of media outlets or government-linked sources. Whether the content was satire or commentary didn’t matter. If it challenged the narrative, it was suppressed.
On Twitter, prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, users who questioned the origins of COVID-19 were banned, throttled, or suspended. Even those who asked whether the virus might have originated in a lab in Wuhan—an idea now considered plausible by both the FBI and Department of Energy—were labeled conspiracy theorists. Not because they were wrong, but because they were too early.
On YouTube, licensed physicians were deplatformed for publicly opposing CDC guidance on lockdowns, school closures, or vaccine mandates. Many of them would be vindicated later. But when it mattered, they were silenced.
Likewise, ChatGPT would not allow users in 2024 to generate even mild satire about Biden’s cognitive decline. Such content was labeled “unsafe” or “disrespectful,” even when rooted in observable behavior and widely circulating public concern. Meanwhile, similar jabs at Republicans—Trump, McConnell, DeSantis—were broadly tolerated under the banner of political humor. That’s not neutrality. That’s ideological preference masked as policy.
The irony reaches its peak with the release of Original Sin by CNN’s Jake Tapper. The book is described not as fiction or satire, but as “an unflinching and explosive reckoning with one of the most fateful decisions in American political history: Joe Biden’s run for reelection despite evidence of his serious decline—amid desperate efforts to hide the extent of that deterioration.” It promises “the full, unsettling truth.”
But that truth—now marketable and safe enough to publish in hardcover—was exactly what so many Americans were punished for speaking aloud just one year ago. Tapper, who himself spent years amplifying media narratives that painted dissenters as conspiracy theorists or partisan hacks, is now offering the very exposé those critics tried to share in real time.
From COVID to presidential fitness to education policy, the pattern is the same: First, label dissent as “dangerous.” Second, suppress it. Third, when the cost of denial becomes too high, quietly revise the narrative. But by then, the damage—to trust, to discourse, and to democratic accountability—is already done.
Let’s be clear: the most dangerous force in a free society isn’t bad speech—it’s the belief that elites have the moral authority to control what the rest of us can say, question, or share.
“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” That phrase, now ridiculed by the professional class, holds the gritty wisdom of a free people. Words aren’t violence. Disagreement isn’t hate. And satire isn’t misinformation.
Yes, free speech means people will be wrong sometimes. They’ll speculate. They’ll offend. But the answer to that isn’t a digital muzzle. The answer is more speech—more argument, more accountability, more truth.
If Facebook, YouTube, and OpenAI want to be part of America’s democratic future—not its institutional rot—they must start trusting Americans again. To think. To question. To speak.
Because truth doesn’t flow from the top. It rises through freedom.
And when even Jake Tapper—once a gatekeeper of approved narratives—begins publishing the “unsettling truth” he once helped bury, we are left with a question bigger than politics:
When do the institutions that silenced the truth become responsible for the damage caused by their silence?
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