Tulsi Gabbard: ‘They Can’t Silence Me’

Wednesday on FNC’s “The Ingraham Angle,” former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) criticized Big Tech and elements of the so-called military-industrial complex for efforts to suppress speech.

She vowed those elements would not silence her.

“I’ve got to tell you, just before coming on your show today, I found out that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, is also suppressing my voice,” she said. “Normally, on average, videos that I post on Instagram get somewhere between 250,000, 300,000 views, tens of thousands of likes. The video that I posted last night or early this morning got about 10% of that, around 15,000 views and a couple of thousand likes.”

“And it is very clear that there during all they can to suppress my voice, suppress the message that I’m carrying out,” Gabbard continued. “And it just points to yet another example of this larger machine that is very clearly at work that is controlling our marketplace of ideas, and this machine is made up of the power elite. It’s made up of these big social media tech giants. It’s made up of the politicians, the powerful politicians from both parties in Washington, the military-industrial complex, people who feel directly challenged when anyone dares to question their narrative, the message that they want the American people to hear. And so while they can’t silence me, they’re going to do all they can as we are seeing they are doing all they can to try and make it so as few people dare to hear my voice, to hear something that asks questions or that’s different from that mainstream narrative.”

The former Hawaiian lawmaker insisted the ideal of free speech was even more relevant with the threat of two nuclear-armed nations potentially facing off.

“That’s really what’s at risk here is this marketplace of ideas — our freedom of speech is fundamental to who we are as Americans, and those numbers are encouraging to see because I think people realize what is at stake when you pit two nuclear powers against each other, the United States versus Russia, and really what is it all for,” she added. “You and I have had this conversation before. We were told by President Biden that this is something that must be done. Freedom isn’t free. We have to pay the price. But it’s not Joe Biden or Kamala Harris paying the price. It’s everyday Americans all across the country who are struggling every day to make ends meet who are paying the price for the fact that this president is failing to do all that he can to bring about an end to this conflict.”

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