Why Am I Practicing Self-Censorship in the US? Plus How I Got My First Impression of Donald Trump

Hello, everyone, welcome to “Inconvenient Truths”. I am your host Jennifer Zeng.

Today I will talk about two issues: how and why I feel that the situation of free speech in the US could be worse than in Communist China, how and when I gained my first impression and made my first judgement on Donald Trump, and why I choose to speak out now. 

Before I go to my first topic, please make sure you subscribe to my channel, and are still subscribed.

I Am Practicing Self-Censorship in the US Now

Several days ago, an investigative reporter from the Epoch Times interviewed me about the censorship I experienced on social media platforms, and after replying to her questions via email, I suddenly realized that I am practicing self-censorship in the US now, and this is something that I didn't even do in the CCP's labor camp! Can you believe that? I could hardly believe it myself. 

But does this mean that the situation of free speech in the US is worse than in Communist China? I will tell you what I experienced, and I will let you draw your own conclusion. 

So, here are my real stories: 

I set up a Facebook page called Jennifer Zeng's blog there years ago. I worked very hard on it, and accumulated over 284K followers. However, on August 2, an account called “Fb portal” suddenly “claimed ownership of the Page”, then, on August 7, this account changed myself and all other 4 editors to an “analyst”. After that, none of us, including myself can post anything on this page, and it thus became dead for me.  I complained many, many times, but Facebook never responded.

So I was forced to set up another page called “Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng” , and so far have only about 2000 followers. By the way, if you are on Facebook, please follow me there.

So, this is the situation with Facebook. When someone was trying to share my article about the censorship I experienced, Facebook didn't allow her to share. 

As for my Twitter account, I had over 156,000 followers about two months ago, but the number keeps dropping ever since, and I've been losing 100-1000 followers every day. Many people told me they got unfollowed without their knowledge. Some say they can't see what I post even though they are following me.

My experience with YouTube is not much better.  Early this year, during the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic, my entire channel was once demonetized. Although YouTube reversed this decision later on, thanks to a lot of media exposure, almost all my videos were given a yellow flag, which means “limited for ads”.  I felt very pained about this as YouTube, as well as Facebook and Twitter, suppressed the true information about the pandemic at a very critical time when it was still possible to stop or slow it. They did so because WHO asked them to do so on behalf of the CCP.

Now, although I am not given yellow flags,  I am still being suppressed, and my subscriptions are dropping. People told me that they got unsubscribed, or they are not receiving notifications. They had to search hard to find my programs.

Also, since I started talking about the US election, the views suddenly dropped sharply. I seriously don't doubt these videos are being suppressed. Some viewers told me they even couldn’t like my videos, nor could they share them on Facebook.

And, after seeing that many of my friend's accounts, or accounts that I know of, had been suspended or deleted by Twitter, YouTube and Facebook, I started practicing self-censorship for fear of being censored. For example, in a recent show about the US election, I dared not use the phrase “voter fraud”, but only vaguely said “problems in the voting system”, etc. I was afraid that the phrase “voter fraud” would be caught by YouTube’s AI system, so I had been avoiding that phrase throughout the entire show. And I am still doing it now.

Then I realized that I didn't even do this in CCP’s China. 

In 1999,  when the CCP launched an all-out suppression of Falun Gong, I still had the courage to write letters to the CCP leaders with my real name and address. In 2000, I planned to go to Tiananmen Square to display a Falun Gong banner (I ended up not going because I was arrested beforehand). At that time, I was willing to risk my life to defend what I believed to be the truth. 

After I was arrested for the 4th time, I was sent to Beijing Female Labor Camp, which is as evil as a devil’s den. When the vicious police asked me to criticize Falun Gong, I always wrote about how wonderful Falun Gong is, and how it only benefits the nation and the people in an open and upright manner. I didn’t have fear then, as I didn’t care what they would do to me. I was already in a bad enough situation, so I didn’t care.

I never imagined that after 20 years, when I am in the United States, where freedom of speech is supposed to be ensured, I am actually practicing self-censorship-something I even did not do in the CCP’s labor camp. While I had no fear in the labor camp, I do have fear now: I was afraid if my accounts get deleted or suppressed, I will lose the channels I have to spread the truth. Although there are alternative platforms, accumulating followers needs  a lot of time and effort. I don’t want to lose my current accounts, which I have worked very hard to develop.

This is the reality of America now. Isn’t it sad?

【Video of the Day】”We Make It Impossible for the US to Survive”

Next, let’s move to our second topic. But before that, let’s watch a one-minute video first:

I am not sure what your thoughts are after watching this video. For me, the first words that came to my mind were: “So evil!” 

It was so evil, because he laughed over people’s deaths. 4000 Chinese people’s deaths were nothing in his eyes as the virus has killed far more Americans. 

It was so evil, as he believed that the virus is “in the best interest of North Korea and China”, and is “in the worst interest of Europe and America”. And he laughed and was so happy about the fact that China’s economy was the only one in the entire world doing well because of the virus, and that China can catch up with the US ahead of time, and that “we are making it impossible for the US to survive”, or “we are pushing the US out of existence”.

Can America Withstand the CCP if Biden Wins?

However, the purpose of me showing everyone this video here is not to discuss how evil a CCP’s scholar can be, but to illustrate an idea of how ill the US system already is.

After translating this video, I did some research about the person who made such an evil speech publicly. I was shocked to find that he actually gained his M. A and Ph. D degrees in the US, and is a permanent US resident who lives in the Greater New York area!

And let me tell you that he is not the only one. There are a lot of people from CCP’s China like him, who claim that “to be anti-America is only my job, to stay in America is my life”, or “my choice of way of living”.

So, there are a lot of people like him, who get paid to do or speak about things that damage the US, but are still allowed to stay in the US and enjoy all the great things that the US has to offer.

And, what makes me more uneasy is, although this US election is far from over, Trump’s legal team is still pursuing lawsuits regarding the integrity of the election, the lamestream media have already started to create an impression that the US-China relations will be improved and back to “normal” after Biden takes power.

Like I said in my last show, although the CCP has been purposely keeping a very low-profile position regarding the US election results, the CCP’s overseas mouthpiece Global Times couldn’t wait any longer to jump out to say that “New US officials could bring back rational approach to relations with China”.

“Rational approach”, in the CCP’s eyes, is to continue the “engaging China” policy of Obama and other presidents before him, to allow the CCP to take endless advantage of the US and the world.

How could the politicians who pursued the “engaging China” policy be so stupid as to allow the CCP to do so much damage to western society? Why should we leave our doors wide open to people like this evil professor of the CCP? I really don’t understand why we hadn’t done anything about this before the Trump administration started to talk about banning CCP members from migrating to the US.

What worries me, and many other Chinese Americans is, if Biden really wins, can America still have the ability to withstand the CCP?

My First Impression and Judgment On Donald Trump

I came to the US in 2011. In 2015, when Donald Trump first came out and announced that he would run for president, I found I knew very little, or virtually nothing about him. However, from the reactions of people around me, as well as from the media, I gained a vague impression that he was just a playboy from the entertainment industry,  he just wanted to have some fun, or gain some more fame, he didn’t really want to be the president, and that nobody would take him seriously. So I didn’t pay much attention to him either. 

Then, in April 2016, he came to Los Angeles to do a rally, and made a roughly 40-minute speech. So far, at that stage, I only heard about people’s comments and reports about him, plus some 10-second soundbites of him in some of the news reports, but I never heard directly from himself. On that day, there had been hours of live streaming of the protests against him outside his rally, but no reports about what he actually said. 

So I watched his speech online. That was the first time I heard him talking directly. I watched 12 minutes of his speech, then I shut it down. 

I shut it down, not because I didn’t want to listen anymore, but because I felt I didn’t need to listen more to know who he was, and what he stood for. And you know what? I found myself agreeing to every sentence he said in that 12 minutes.

I remember his main points were: 1. America first, 2. We need to build a wall.

For me, these were just common sense, and so correct. Why couldn’t an American presidential candidate put America’s interests first? Why, as a sovereign nation, can’t America build a wall to defend its sovereignty, just like every family would put a lock on its door, right?

From then on, I really didn’t understand why the media and so many people were so mad about Trump. Sure, he did say that a lot of bad people had come to the US through illegal channels, but he never said that immigrants, or Mexicans, were rapists. The media just distorted his speech as much as they liked so that they could label him as a “racist”, or “fascist”, or any other bad names.

I see with my own eyes how far this political correctness has gone; and now, with the battle surrounding this most critical election, this political correctness is developing into something more crazy, more corrupt, and even criminal. 

Actually, these thoughts have been hovering around in my mind for quite some time. Perhaps it is a very bad time to say them out loud now, as so many people believe that there is no way that Trump can win this election, and there are quite a few people who supported Trump before backing off from their previous positions.

But, I am not one of them. I do things based on what I believe to be right, not based on calculations about who is going to win, and who is going to lose. In some sense, I have gotten accustomed to going against the tide, as that’s what I have been doing in the past 21 years, when the CCP uses all its forces to crack down on innocent, harmless, and powerless people like me.

And, I still have faith and hope in my heart. At the darkest moment, I still believe that truth and justice will prevail. 

OK, that’s all for today. Actually, I feel quite relieved for having spoken what’s on my mind. Thank you for watching. Please do subscribe to my channel, help me spread my messages, and check out my other videos.

Thank you. See you soon!

11/25/2020

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