So much for starting out 2022 in the spirit of unity.

The nation’s leading newspaper used the fresh beginning of New Year’s Day to once again insist that Donald Trump and his supporters are an existential threat to our beloved, yet very fractured, republic.

Despite the fact that the average American cares far more about inflation and supply chain disruptions than they do last year’s protest at the Capitol, it seems the photo of red-state rabble-rousers sitting in Pelosi’s office has traumatized the brain trust at the New York Times into a permanent psychosis.

In “Every Day is January 6 Now,” the Times’ editorial board writes: “Our political life seems more or less normal these days, as the president pardons turkeys and Congress quarrels over spending bills. But peel back a layer, and things are far from normal. Jan. 6 is not in the past; it is every day.”

It’s hyperbolic nonsense, of course, designed for the express purpose of political advantage. The United States Capitol has been attacked multiple times before, and one of those attacks was leftist in origin, and therefore escaped the notice of the Times’ hawk-eyed editors.

This is not at all surprising considering that those same editors have repeatedly turned a blind eye to the true threat to our republic: the mass censorship of conservatives by increasingly powerful, and increasingly radical, tech companies. 

While every day may not be January 6, every year is now 1984.

I’m referring, of course, to George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece in which the State censors a powerless populace into a state of apathetic obedience. While our information overlords reside in Silicon Valley instead of Washington, D.C., the end result is the same.

After all, it was almost exactly one year ago that Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump. Just days later, Amazon would pull the plug on conservative social network Parler’s servers (so much for building our own Twitter, as the left has implored us to do for years).

The previous year, of course, saw massive election interference by Big Tech, nearly all of which harmed Republicans and, by extension, assisted Democrats. 

Among the greatest hits were the flagging of Trump’s tweets warning about the potential fraud from mail-in ballots and the infamous burying of the Hunter Biden laptop fiasco by both Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which suspended the New York Post for breaking the story. 

Both the mail-in ballot warning and the laptop story proved to be valid, of course, but much like 1984, when truth becomes a threat to political power, it must be purged.

And now, merely days into 2022, Twitter has permanently suspended Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, and YouTube has removed podcast host Joe Rogan’s interviews with COVID contrarians Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCullough (the former was also suspended from Twitter last week).

The supposed logic behind the bans is COVID-19 misinformation, a metric that if applied fairly would also lead to the de-platforming of Dr. Fauci and nearly every other bureaucrat and mainstream media analyst.

But much like the virus itself, Silicon Valley’s “misinformation” policies only affect one side of the aisle. 

Ironically, it’s this selective enforcement, and resulting persecution, that likely led to the events of January 6. The press openly lauded the role of Big Tech in “fortifying” the election, and everyday Americans, whose beliefs are firmly rooted in the American ideals of fair competition and individual freedom, are sick and tired of being treated as lepers by an elitist class that despises the pillars of this country’s founding.

A 2020 Pew survey found that approximately three-quarters of Americans (and 90 percent of Republicans) believe that social media selectively censors political posts. Given the events of the last two years, it’s safe to assume these numbers have only skyrocketed, pointing to a virtual consensus that the powers that be want their political enemies, and their business interests, silenced.

Yet such transgressions are of little import to the concerned patriots at the Times, or apparently any influential institution outside of flyover America.

And therein lies the problem.

A newspaper cannot proclaim to defend the values of a free society while it neglects, and even participates in, the silencing and discrimination of half the country. And it certainly cannot pretend to deal in truth while cheering the banishment of its political opponents from the marketplace of ideas.

Well, it can, but it can’t demand to be taken seriously. 

While January 6 was far from unprecedented, the current mass censorship of political opinion is.

As Greene herself posted on the social networking app Gettr:

When Maxine Waters can go to the streets and threaten violence on Twitter, Kamala and Ilhan can bail out rioters on Twitter, and Chief spokesman for terrorist IRGC can tweet mourning Soleimani but I get suspended for tweeting VAERS [Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System] statistics, Twitter is an enemy to America and can’t handle the truth. . . 

Like her or not, she’s right. For Big Tech has proven its partisan allegiances time and time again.