The censors at YouTube justified striking down Heartland’s channel because we supposedly uttered “misinformation” about the 2020 Election. We did not. And that is very suspicious timing.
Every Friday at Noon CT, The Heartland Institute hosts a live program we call Climate Change Roundtable. It’s a timely discussion of the latest news on environment and energy policy that differs from the alarmist perspective that echoes throughout the “mainstream” media. On Friday, January 6, 2023, we were excited to have Dr. Judith Curry as our special guest for the program.
Dr. Curry is of the most well-known and popular climate scientists in America — especially because she holds views that differ from the likes of Michael Mann and other alarmists. Dr. Curry is not a “climate denier,” as Mann calls her. She’s an esteemed scientist who has looked at the data, sees a warming world, but not an impending climate catastrophe that is all the fault of human activity. For that, she is vilified by many, and feared by even more — including, apparently, the folks who decide what to ban and when on YouTube.
Heartland live-streams every show on YouTube, Facebook, and Rumble. But the vast majority of our audience — both those who participate in the chat during the live-stream and those who view it later — watch it on YouTube. Like it or not, it’s the most-popular video streaming app in the world. Freedom-oriented sites like Rumble and BitChute have a very long way to go to catch up.
Anyway, just as we were finishing our show-prep for the episode with Dr. Curry, we got a notice in the back end of our YouTube channel that we had earned a “strike” for spreading “election misinformation” in a previous video.
So, with literally just minutes to go before we were live with Dr. Curry and undoubtedly our biggest live audience yet, YouTube shut down our channel and prevented anyone from watching it there.
The previous “offending” video was an episode of Heartland’s In the Tank podcast, episode 293, which was streamed in early May 2021 — 20 months ago. YouTube did not specify what was said that violated the terms of service and the ban on “election misinformation.” And it also did not notice for nearly two years that a live-stream that almost no one has looked at since May 2021 (and would be nearly impossible to find in a general search on YouTube) was in violation of the terms of service … until just before a live-stream with a non-alarmist climate scientist was about to begin.
It is hard to believe this was just a coincidence — that the algorithm just happened to get around to catching this supposed violation by us — and it’s just our awful luck that it happened mere minutes before we were going live with Dr. Curry.
A better explanation is this: The the name “Judith Curry” was noticed by someone at YouTube — or maybe Michael Mann, who is sensitive to such things, especially regarding Dr. Curry, and he reported the stream to YouTube — and then a human being at YouTube decided that a live-stream from a “climate realist” scientist not be allowed to happen. So, the pretext of Heartland supposedly spreading “election misinformation” was invented, the strike issued, the stream stopped, and high fives all around for a job well done by the the leftist censors at Alphabet/Google/YouTube.
But, as the character of “Mr. Universe” said in the movie Serenity: “You can’t stop the signal, Mal.” And we weren’t stopped, either. You can still view our program with Dr. Curry. We don’t just broadcast live to YouTube, but also simultaneously to Rumble and Facebook. I’ve embedded the Rumble version of the program below. [NOTE: When you click the player below, if it says “blocked by an extension” and/or “loading,” just give it a minute. It might look “broken” for a bit, and then play. If you can’t watch it below at all, watch it on Rumble.]
Heartland is now banned from uploading any videos or live-streaming from our channel for a week — presumably until Friday, January 13 at around noon CT. We will report back if our appeal is heard and what YouTube says.
Oh, and as for Heartland violating YouTube’s terms of service by spreading “election misinformation” on that long-ago live-stream? Why don’t you watch and judge for yourself. While the YouTube video has been sent to the Great Digital Beyond somewhere, the Rumble version still exists. Don’t worry if you’re pressed for time. You don’t have to watch for very long. We talk about it at the top of the show and then move on to another topic after about 15 minutes.
We didn’t talk about the results of the 2020 election, nor expressed any skepticism of the results. Why? Because a year earlier we discussed the infamous Time Magazine article titled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” That story reported, in the most-positive way possible, on how the 2020 election was “fortified” by hundreds of millions of secret dollars by Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg and other big Democrat donors. Merely reading on the podcast what Time Magazine reported — essential if you’re going to talk about it — was enough to get a previous video banned, as absurd as that seems.
In this latest supposed “misinformation” live-stream podcast from May 2021 that YouTube just now noticed, we had to explain why Donald Trump was banned permanently from Facebook. Even if questioning the results of the election is an offense worthy of being banned, we did not do that. We talked about whether banning people for expressing views that are not crimes are worthy of having your ability to speak on a social media ended.
To help us battle Big Tech censorship, subscribe to Heartland’s YouTube channel, as well as our Stopping Socialism TV channel where we live-stream our In the Tank podcast every Thursday at noon CT. We are also post regular videos on Rumble, BitChute, and Facebook — so click those links to follow us there. And if you want to make sure to never miss our audio content, subscribe to the Heartland Daily Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
PS: I realize that today is Jan. 6. I know it’s like 9/11 and Pearl Harbor Day times 100 to the unhinged left and their “mainstream” media. So maybe they cranked up the algorithm to flag any and all vids on the platform that they might have missed over the last year or two and make sure those were flagged and removed on this “special” day. But I haven’t seen any other complaints on social media about others getting the treatment Heartland got from YouTube today.
And, again: We did not question the outcome of the 2020 Election on the “offending” podcast. We said that if Trump should be banned for what he says about the 2020 election, then it should be fair game to ban Hillary Clinton for questioning the 2016 Election and Stacey Abrams saying her election for governor of Georgia was stolen. That’s it. We did not violate YouTube’s rule.
Jim Lakely is the Vice President and Director of Communications of The Heartland Institute.
