The Left’s Censorship Campaign Is Alive And Well

Some Americans, including many on the right, have been duped in recent years into believing that just because Elon Musk bought X and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg pretended to apologize for suppressing posts from Democrats’ political enemies that free speech on social media and beyond is restored for good. The time of suffering consequences for stating simple truths like men are men and women are women are effectively over, they preach.

On the contrary, the threat posed by the left’s increasingly Marxist methods was not eliminated with the re-election of President Donald Trump in 2025. In fact, the censorship regime reared its ugly head as recently as last week when notoriously biased Wikipedia rulers ganged up to oust the online encyclopedia’s founder Larry Sanger “indefinitely.”

“There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me,” Sanger narrated in late June, when he broke the news of the ban to his X followers.

Sanger’s crime, according to the anonymous administrators who banned him from editing the website, was publicizing his plans for a “WikiProject Intellectual Diversity” in a way that amounted to “off-wiki canvassing.”

The real reason for the expulsion, Sanger claimed, was his years-long history of criticizing the website’s rapid decline into leftist-led bullying.

“To be sure, there are people involved for whom this is true. But the site has manifestly been captured by a small clique of ideologically motivated bullies. They manipulate and intimidate the other participants, and anyone who does not fall in line — like me — is banned. They wield a lot of power in a petty and vicious way. Money clearly does change hands; in some cases, it resembles a shakedown. Considering the size of Wiki-PR and the like, it may be millions of dollars per year,” Sanger suggested in a July 8 opinion editorial in the Washington Examiner.

Sanger and his co-founder pitched Wikipedia to the world as the online encyclopedia that anyone could edit. Twenty-five years later, Sanger’s vision for the site became twisted enough for him to dub it “one of the most effective organs of Establishment propaganda in history.”

As The Federalist previously reported, Wikipedia’s paid edit disclosure policy is effectively unenforceable, doing little to nothing to keep paid propagandists and outside influences from altering articles for political gain and profit.

Despite rising concerns from officials such as U.S. attorney for Washington D.C. Ed Martin and House Republicans James Comer and Nancy Mace that Wikipedia’s operations were questionable under U.S. law, the site is often one of the first results pushed by popular search engines like Google, Amazon’s Alexa, and Apple’s Siri. Not only is Wikipedia often the first line of propaganda internet users’ encounter in their quests for information, it is also used to train artificial intelligence models like Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT.

“To date, every LLM is trained on Wikipedia content, and it is almost always the largest source of training data in their data sets,” the Wikimedia Foundation brags.

For a quarter of a century Wikipedia has undeniably shaped online information in definitive and damaging ways including publishing false and deceiving accounts about everything from the debunked Steele Dossier to Hunter Biden to Neil Tyson’s history of fabricating quotes and distorting stories. Wikipedia has even taken several stabs at erasing The Federalist’s accurate and award-winning journalism.

Even more so concerning, Wikipedia has received allyship from other Democrat lackeys such as corporate media. The New York Times, in particular, repeatedly rushed to defend Wikipedia’s “mob rule” mentality. Weeks after Sanger’s forced exit from editing, NYT published an article, primarily informed by an interview with Wikimedia’s CEO Bernadette Meehan, claiming that “Wikipedia is in peril” and “under threat from MAGA, A.I. and foreign autocrats.”

Sanger warned for years leading up to his ban that Wikipedia as the world knew it was “broken beyond repair.”

“Wikipedia’s ideological and religious bias is real and troubling, particularly in a resource that continues to be treated by many as an unbiased reference work,” he reaffirmed in February 2021.

“An anonymous mob with practically unlimited power on the platform,” Sanger further wrote in his July 8 op-ed, “is only one dimension of Wikipedia’s problems.”

“Wikimedia Foundation directly funds a number of nonprofit organizations that edit articles of keen interest to progressives,” he added.

Perhaps the most alarming part of Sanger’s Wikipedia saga, however, is that the censorship that has come to define the site still appeared to catch him off guard. Sanger told Christopher Rufo in April 2024, the thought that online free speech would soon be under threat didn’t even cross his or Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ minds in 2001.

“We didn’t have to have a special vision of a free and open Internet. That was the Internet. That was just its nature. We thought it was always going to be that way. The thing that excited us about the Internet was that anyone could publish anything, as long as it was legal. And the notion of restrictions on free speech was nowhere to be found,” Sanger recalled.

Sanger added that he “knew that this was not automatic” and “that it could easily change.”

Change it did. Less than two years after Sanger’s sitdown with Rufo, the Wikipedia pioneer declared that his online encylcopedia was “decidedly not a lovely, idealistic project staffed by students, scholars, and retirees who just want to share their knowledge to benefit the world.”

This kind of sneak attack is not unusual. But it does say something about Americans’ preparedness to fight for their First Amendment rights.

The censorship weaponized by Democrats, as we saw in 2020, doesn’t simply disappear when Republicans win elections. It simply gets stealthier until the political tides turn in favor of limiting free speech once again.

Wikipedia’s treatment of its founder is the perfect prophecy for anyone tempted to believe that we’ve won the free speech war for good. If Sanger’s eviction from his own website, which boasted editing by “anyone,” means anything, it’s that the battle for Americans’ right to speak (or type) their minds is still raging. Rally the troops and prepare the arms. The beast that seeks to silence dissenters might seem asleep now, but it will rouse again and it will be hungry.

Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.