YouTube Punished WJ Over Flynn Interview, Election 'Misinformation,' But These Facts Are on Flynn's Side
The Associated Press and Public Television have decided to dedicate significant time and resources to “investigating” former Trump national security advisor and retired three-star U.S. Army Gen. Michael Flynn.
They’ve identified him as one of those dreaded “Christian nationalists” bent on taking over the country through the ballot box or possibly by force.
The evidence the AP offered for the latter proposition is that Flynn likes to hang out with people who quote violent revolutionaries like Thomas Jefferson.
Given the nature of the allegations made against Flynn, The Western Journal thought it would be helpful to the public discourse to allow him to address them head-on.
So last month, WJ’s managing editor Josh Manning interviewed Flynn, who is a contributor to our outlet, on YouTube Live among other platforms.
YouTube later took the video down, informing WJ that the hour-and-a-half-long wide-ranging interview violated community standards because it included “misinformation.”
“Content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election is not allowed on YouTube,” the message to WJ said.
YouTube also informed WJ that the Flynn interview would be counted as a “strike” against our outlet and “3 strikes in the same 90-day period results in your channel being permanently removed from YouTube,” according to the social media company’s community guidelines.
Further WJ was prevented from uploading videos or conducting live events for several days now.
“By deleting this interview, YouTube is continuing Google, Meta, Twitter (until this week) and Big Tech’s long-term reign of terror against freedom of speech,” Manning said.
“When a US Army general and former national security advisor to the president of the United States can be silenced by our elite masters in Silicon Valley, what hope do everyday people have for ever being able to speak freely using everyday technology?” Manning asked.
“Freedom of speech is dying in America, and the big tech tyrants are gleefully digging its grave,” he concluded.
Ironically, Flynn noted during the interview that there’s been a concerted effort to almost “outlaw anybody that talks about election fraud in 2020.”
YouTube has certainly made it illegal on its platform.
Flynn made some strong statements about the 2020 election being fraudulent, but not stronger than Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made about the 2016 election or Georgia Democratic gubernatorial nominee Stacey Abrams made about her 2018 race against Republican Brian Kemp.
Flynn observed that U.S. elections “are not perfect” and the 2020 election represents “the theft of the highest office in the land.”
Later in the interview, the retired general said, “[D]o I think that Donald Trump won the election? Yes, I do. I absolutely believe he won the election. I absolutely believe that we have proven without without a doubt that that Donald Trump won the election.”
Let’s compare that with Clinton’s and Abrams’ past statements.
“You can run the best campaign, you can even become the nominee, and you can have the election stolen from you,” Clinton said in 2019.
That same year she told “CBS Sunday Morning” host Jane Pauley, “I believe [Trump] knows he’s an illegitimate president.”
“So I know that he knows that this [election] wasn’t on the level,” she continued. “I don’t know that we’ll know everything that happened, but clearly we know a lot and we’re learning more every day and history will probably sort it all out.”
Meanwhile, the GOP chronicled 35 times when Abrams questioned whether Kemp was the rightful winner.
In a March 2019 interview, Abrams said, “We were robbed of an election.”
That same month, she added at a conference in Austin, Texas, that she did not believe using words like “rigged” or “steal” was dangerous because “we can actually back it up.”
The following month at Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention, she flatly stated, “I do have one very affirmative statement to make: We won!”
More recently she tried to explain this statement away saying she meant she won in the sense that many more minorities voted.
The GOP released a video last month filled with 10 minutes of Democrats, like Clinton and Abrams, denying election results.
Here is ten straight minutes of Democrats denying election results.pic.twitter.com/bJRbzEcIO2
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 4, 2022
So my question to YouTube is why the double standard? I sent Google’s press office (YouTube’s parent company) multiple examples, including the “Sunday Morning” clip above, of YouTube keeping news outlets’ interviews up with Clinton and Abrams denying election results.
YouTube may point to Jan. 6 and claim such allegations about 2020 election fraud led to violence. However, the vast majority of protesters on the Capitol grounds that day were not violent.
Did Joe Biden and other Democrats incite violence in the summer of 2020 by calling Trump and the United States itself racist?
While most “social justice” protesters were peaceful, rioters outside of the White House attacked Secret Service personnel and broke through outer security barriers.
The AP reported that Secret Service agents rushed then-President Trump to a bunker under 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
The White House was better defended than the Capitol grounds so no breach ultimately occurred, but many Secret Service agents were injured and property was vandalized.
The Secret Service said in a statement that more than 60 of its personnel were injured and nearly a dozen were taken to the hospital for treatment.
Flashback May 2020: At night, the far-left rioters surrounded the White House and tried tearing apart the protective barrier so they could storm the building. Secret Service and law enforcement were injured by the violent extremists. #CapitolRiot pic.twitter.com/pvxs5pPJzM
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) January 7, 2022
On the opposite coast, in Portland, antifa and anarchist protesters pretty much spent the entire summer trying to burn down the federal courthouse and injuring federal and police officers in the process.
Overall the social justice rioters caused between $1 billion to $2 billion in property damage — the most expensive riots in U.S. history — according to Axios.
Further, at least 25 people died and over 2,000 police officers were injured, yet Biden and the Democrats were able to spout on in YouTube hosted videos about America being systemically racist.
Storming the White House and trying to destroy a federal courthouse certainly represent direct threats to our system of government and government officials.
Then there was Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California prattling on about “damning” evidence he had of Trump colluding with Russia to steal the 2016 election in videos that are still on YouTube.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s team found no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia.
So after all that and an impeachment and so much more, it was reasonable for Republicans to believe the Democrats might take some extraordinary steps to stop Trump from winning a second term in 2020.
The New Republic reported in September of that year that Democrat attorney Marc Elias was engaged in 32 election-related cases in 19 states.
For example in Pennsylvania, the Democratic-controlled state Supreme Court ruled in Elias’ favor, allowing drop boxes to be deployed and ruling that absentee ballots did not require signature verification and could arrive up to three days after the election.
Similar changes happened in Wisconsin and Georgia.
Surprise, surprise, making these kinds of last-minute, unilateral changes by Democrat officials does not inspire confidence in Republicans about the integrity of the election.
An NBC News poll released earlier this month found that two-thirds of Republicans do not believe Biden is the legitimately elected president.
The aforementioned rule changes helped lead to these doubts. Had there not been the changes, there likely would not have been a Jan. 6.
The 2020 election results themselves seem off when taken together.
Republicans experienced a net gain in the House of Representatives of 12 seats in 2020, even as the incumbent president at the top of the ticket lost. That has pretty much never happened, except in 1992 when Ross Perot ran as an independent splitting the conservative vote and allowing Bill Clinton to defeat George H.W. Bush.
Further Trump won in all but one of the 19 bellwether counties around the nation that voted for the winner in every presidential election from 1980 to 2016.
Whether YouTube knows or acknowledges it or not, fraud has occurred many times in U.S. elections and sometimes it’s been determinative in election outcomes.
Did fraud occur in the 2020 presidential election enough to impact the election outcome? Flynn and others think so. Many others do not. I’m not sure, but it should be ok to debate it and take actions like Georgia did to tighten election security.
According to a database assembled by The Heritage Foundation, there have been over 1,100 criminal convictions for voter fraud stemming back to the 1980s.
Reuters reported in 2019 that North Carolina’s election board ordered a new election for a U.S. House seat after corruption was uncovered regarding illegal absentee ballot harvesting.
Former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker in their 2005 conference report on elections found “absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”
Strange things regarding the conduct of the elections, whether fraudulent or not, happened in Wisconsin and Georgia in 2020.
Special Counsel Michael Gableman, appointed by the Wisconsin Assembly, accused the Center for Tech and Civic Life, largely funded by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, of using large sums of money to impact how the election was carried out in Wisconsin’s five largest cities: Milwaukee, Green Bay, Madison, Racine and Kenosha.
In a Fox News interview, Gableman offered the example of Michael Spitzer-Rubenstein, a “lawyer from Brooklyn, New York, who was running the election site on Election Day in the city of Green Bay.”
Then-city clerk Kris Teske did in fact go on leave two weeks before the general election out of frustration with how Spitzer-Rubenstein was usurping her authority, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Democratic Green Bay Mayor Eric Genrich “allowed staff who were not educated on election law to run the election, along with people who weren’t even City of Green Bay employees,” Teske wrote in an email in December 2020.
In Georgia, an independent report contracted by the State Election Board and released in January 2021 identified many abnormalities in Fulton County’s handling of ballots in the 2020 general election.
“There were persistent chain of custody issues throughout the entire absentee ballot processing system,” the report stated.
It added that “the fact that ballots were delivered to State Farm Arena in unsecured mail carts is very concerning. … Protocol for securing ballots exists not only to protect the ballots themselves but also to ensure that no ballot box stuffing occurred.”
Fulton County registration chief Ralph Jones, who was present at State Farm Arena election night, resigned in August 2021 after coming under intense criticism for the county’s handling of the 2020 election.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger had called for his firing, along with Fulton County elections director Rick Barron, the previous month.
Fulton County’s continued failures have gone on long enough with no accountability. Rick Barron and Ralph Jones, Fulton’s registration chief, must be fired and removed from Fulton’s elections leadership immediately. Fulton’s voters and the people of Georgia deserve better.
— GA Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (@GaSecofState) July 15, 2021
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported in September 2021 that then-DeKalb County Elections Director Erica Hamilton was placed on leave without explanation, and she later resigned after facing scrutiny over her handling of the 2020 election.
In Arizona, the attorney general’s office released an interim report in the spring finding fraud did occur in 2020 and uncovering serious issues concerning the handling of over 100,000 mail-in ballots in Maricopa County.
“Our review uncovered multiple violations of ballot transportation procedures,” Attorney General Mark Brnovich wrote Arizona Senate President Karen Fann.
“This included missing audit signatures, missing ballot count fields, missing Election Department receiving signatures, missing courier signatures and missing documentation of security seals and lack of the two required seal numbers,” Brnovich added.
“In other words, it is possible that somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 ballots were transported without proper chain of custody.”
Brnovich also highlighted that Maricopa County has not been forthcoming in turning over all the materials related to the 2020 general election that the AG’s Election Integrity Office has sought despite multiple requests beginning in September 2021 after the Arizona Senate turned over the findings of its audit.
On the contrary side, Brnovich told CBS’ “60 Minutes” in an interview that aired over the weekend that most of the fraud claims his office investigated were ‘horses***.”
Brnovich’s “60 Minutes” interview is on YouTube. It’s had about 1.75 million views.
People can watch and weigh his claims and credibility and should be able to do the same with Flynn.
That’s how the First Amendment is supposed to work: freedom of speech and freedom the press shall not be infringed by the government.
YouTube, the nation’s largest video hosting platform by far, should not be doing it either.
The Western Journal reached out to Google’s press office for comment for this story, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
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