Conservative author Ben Shapiro declared that the Biden Administration’s plans to “militarize private institutions” is “extremely dangerous” and that they should “scare the hell out of everyone right, left, and center.”
Shapiro was responding to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki’s Thursday statement to reporters that, “There are also proposed changes that we have made to social media platforms, including Facebook.” She expounds four proposals made to these platforms and states “we engage with them [Facebook and other social platforms] regularly and they certainly understand what our asks are.”
“Government cannot use state actors or quasi-state actors, private institutions, that are operating under the explicit direction of the government in order to violate your rights,” Shapiro said.
Below is a transcript of the segment:
Ben Shapiro: If, once again, you can label all your political opponents extremists, unworthy of public debate, then you can militarize private institutions to stop them. And this is exactly what the White House basically announced they were doing yesterday. This is an unbelievable thing, it really is and it should scare the hell out of everyone right, left, and center because if the Trump Administration had said “we’ve called up Facebook and we’ve told them we think that they are distributing misinformation and we need them to take down that misinformation, right now, for the good of the republic. And also if they don’t, you know we do have oversight power with regard to Facebook.” And now Democrats have been making these sorts of signals for a while. You’ll recall that Dianne Feinstein called — a senator from California — called Mark Zuckerberg before a Senate committee and she said “if you don’t stop this sort of stuff, we will,” which is a direct and open threat that “we are only going to give you a level of immunity as long as you do what we want,” which does make them a quasi-state actor in the sense that they are now operating at the behest of a government. And government cannot use state actors or quasi-state actors, private institutions, that are operating under the explicit direction of the government in order to violate your rights. The government does not have the power of, for example, unreasonable search and seizure. So if the government hires a private contractor and says “I want you to break into that guy’s house, and look in his house, they are now a government contractor.” Or if they say “unless you break into that guy’s house and ransack his safe, we are probably going to prosecute you.” The government would be the actor in that particular scenario. The government is verging very closely on that when they say things like “we are directly telling Facebook what kind of content we want to come down.” That is extremely, extremely dangerous!
Ashlianna Kreiner is a CNSNews intern and rising senior at Christendom College, pursuing a bachelor’s degree in theology with a literature minor. She has a desire to pursue truth and bring it to others, especially in the political world.