There is something deeply ironic about watching people spend years railing against censorship, Big Tech, ideological gatekeeping, and the suppression of unpopular opinions—only to build their own little corner of the internet and immediately start doing the same thing.
That brings me to a Facebook group called Conservative Pulse of New Mexico.
I understand that Facebook groups are privately administered spaces. I understand that administrators have the legal ability to establish rules, approve posts, reject posts, remove members, and decide what kind of community they want to operate.
Nobody is disputing that.
The question I’m interested in is much more fundamental:
What principles do you actually believe in when nobody is forcing you to practice them?
Because freedom of speech is incredibly easy to defend when the person speaking agrees with you.
The test comes when they don’t.
And somewhere along the way, too many political communities—left, right, and everything in between—seem to have forgotten that.
Republicans Have Made Opposition to Censorship Part of Their Own Platform
This isn’t some obscure philosophical argument I’m imposing on Republicans from outside the movement.
The Republican Party itself has made opposition to censorship part of its national platform.
The 2024 Republican platform contains an entire section titled “Republicans Will Dismantle Censorship & Protect Free Speech.” It pledges to protect lawful speech and specifically declares that Republicans will “protect Free Speech online.” (GOP)
That is a pretty unequivocal statement of principle.
And to be clear, there is an important constitutional distinction here. The First Amendment restricts government action. A private Facebook administrator deleting my post is not violating my First Amendment rights in the constitutional sense.
That distinction matters.
But constitutional authority and personal principle are two completely different questions.
You can have the legal right to censor somebody and still be intellectually inconsistent for doing it while simultaneously presenting yourself as a champion of open debate.
You can legally create an echo chamber.
You can legally refuse to associate with people.
You can legally decide that your Facebook group exists exclusively for opinions approved by its administrators.
But then own it.
Don’t spend the rest of the week complaining that liberals, corporations, universities, media outlets, or social-media platforms suppress viewpoints they don’t like while operating your own political community under the exact same intellectual philosophy:
Speech is wonderful—as long as we approve of it first.
That isn’t a particularly impressive defense of free expression.
Here’s What Happened
I recently submitted an article to Conservative Pulse of New Mexico dealing with political accountability.
It wasn’t some drive-by meme.
It wasn’t profanity.
It wasn’t spam.
It wasn’t a personal threat.
It was an argument supported by facts, sources, and data.
And plenty of people inside the group were doing exactly what adults participating in a political discussion should do: debating it.
Some agreed.
Some disagreed.
Some challenged portions of the argument.
That is precisely what political discourse is supposed to look like.
Then, according to what I observed in the group, the administrators removed the post.
And that is where this becomes interesting to me.
Not because losing a Facebook post is some great personal tragedy. Trust me, I’ll survive.
It is interesting because it reveals something about the political culture we have created.
If an argument is wrong, defeat the argument.
If my evidence is bad, show me better evidence.
If my interpretation is flawed, explain why.
If I missed context, provide it.
If you think my conclusions are ridiculous, make your case and allow everyone reading the discussion to decide whose argument withstands scrutiny.
That is debate.
Deleting the argument solves none of those problems.
It merely makes the argument disappear from your audience.
And those are not remotely the same thing.
The Admin-Approval Problem
I’ve never particularly liked political groups that require administrator approval before ordinary posts can even appear.
There are legitimate reasons for moderation, obviously. Spam exists. Scams exist. Threats exist. Bots exist. Pornography exists. Completely irrelevant material exists.
Moderation itself is not censorship in some inherently sinister sense.
But there is an enormous difference between moderating conduct and moderating viewpoints.
Once administrators begin deciding which legitimate political opinions their members are permitted to encounter, they stop merely maintaining the community and start curating its reality.
Think about that.
An administrator sees the information before you do.
The administrator decides whether you should see it.
The administrator decides whether the argument deserves consideration.
The administrator decides whether the evidence enters the conversation.
The administrator can then remove something after members begin discussing it.
Eventually, members aren’t seeing the political conversation happening around them.
They are seeing the political conversation someone else has selected for them.
That should bother people regardless of ideology.
“Freedom of Association” Doesn’t Answer the Intellectual Question
The defense I frequently hear when this happens is some variation of:
“Freedom of association.”
Sure.
It absolutely is.
Nobody should be compelled by government to operate a Facebook group according to my preferences. Nobody should be forced to publish my writing. Nobody owes me an audience.
But invoking freedom of association answers the question of whether you may exclude someone.
It doesn’t answer the question of why you are afraid to engage his argument.
Those are separate questions.
And this situation becomes particularly strange when the person supposedly outside your acceptable political boundaries probably agrees with you on 75 or 80 percent of public policy.
Lower taxes?
Absolutely.
Limited government?
Yep.
Individual liberty?
Absolutely.
School choice?
I’m there.
Occupational freedom?
Yep.
Criminal-justice reform rooted in accountability and constitutional rights?
Absolutely.
Privacy?
Definitely.
Government transparency?
Of course.
Free speech?
Without hesitation.
Constitutional limits on government?
That has been central to my political philosophy for years.
I’ve spent roughly a decade working full-time in public policy, grassroots advocacy, digital organizing, and Republican politics. I’ve helped elect Republicans. I’ve worked on conservative policy. I’ve organized coalitions with people spanning the political spectrum because I learned a long time ago that accomplishing something meaningful sometimes requires sitting across the table from people with whom you strongly disagree.
I helped build exactly that kind of coalition in New Mexico when we worked to end qualified immunity at the state level.
That experience taught me something invaluable:
Agreement is easy. Coalition building requires maturity.
If I can work with people who disagree with me on half the political universe to accomplish something we both believe is right, surely conservatives can survive reading an article written by somebody who agrees with them most of the time.
Or Is 80 Percent Agreement No Longer Enough?
This is one of the strangest developments in American politics.
Apparently, agreeing with someone on most issues isn’t enough anymore.
Now you must agree on the correct issues.
And increasingly, foreign policy appears to be one of those loyalty tests.
I am deeply skeptical of nation-building.
I oppose endless regime-change politics.
I don’t believe American taxpayers should be expected to finance every foreign conflict indefinitely.
And I don’t believe loyalty to another government—any government—should take precedence over American interests, constitutional principles, human dignity, or our obligation to examine evidence honestly.
Apparently, expressing those positions can suddenly make decades of agreement on domestic policy irrelevant in certain conservative spaces.
That’s fascinating.
Because if your coalition is only open to people who agree with you on virtually everything, you don’t have a coalition.
You have a club.
And clubs built around ideological purity inevitably become echo chambers.
Gaza Is Exactly Why Difficult Conversations Matter
One of the issues generating enormous disagreement within the American right is Israel and Gaza.
And this is precisely where factual precision matters.
The 1948 Genocide Convention does not define genocide simply as large numbers of civilian deaths. It requires specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, combined with one or more enumerated acts—including killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately imposing destructive conditions of life, preventing births, or forcibly transferring children. (United Nations)
That distinction matters because genocide is a specific legal allegation, not merely a synonym for an especially horrific war.
But the evidence can no longer honestly be dismissed with, “There is no evidence.”
In September 2025, the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded after its investigation that Israeli authorities and security forces had committed four of the five underlying genocidal acts identified in Article II of the Genocide Convention. The Commission also concluded that the required specific intent existed and therefore found Israel responsible for genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. (United Nations)
Israel emphatically rejects that conclusion, argues that the Commission is biased and methodologically flawed, says its military objective is defeating Hamas rather than destroying Palestinians as a group, and maintains that it operates within international law. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
Meanwhile, the International Court of Justice genocide case remains legally distinct from the Commission’s findings; the ICJ’s earlier orders imposed provisional measures but were not a final merits judgment that Israel had committed genocide. (United Nations)
Those distinctions matter.
That is what intellectually serious discussion looks like.
Present the allegation.
Present the legal definition.
Present the evidence.
Present the institutional findings.
Present the opposing argument.
Then let people examine it.
What I refuse to accept is the proposition that conservatives somehow demonstrate strength by preventing fellow conservatives from encountering arguments that challenge the prevailing narrative.
If the case supporting Israel’s conduct is persuasive, make it.
If the UN Commission’s methodology is defective, demonstrate the defects.
If somebody believes the evidence fails to establish genocidal intent, explain why.
That’s debate.
That’s how adults handle consequential questions.
Deleting criticism doesn’t establish that the criticism was wrong.
Anonymous Power Doesn’t Impress Me Either
The administrators I encountered in Conservative Pulse of New Mexico operated under the Facebook display names Wildman Anthony and Justamy JunkYardDog.
I cannot independently establish from public information who is behind those accounts, so I won’t pretend otherwise.
But there is an irony in anonymous or pseudonymous administrators controlling which political arguments other people are permitted to encounter while those of us making the arguments attach our actual names, reputations, and professional histories to what we say.
I put my name on my arguments.
People know where I stand.
They are free to disagree with me publicly.
They can challenge my sources.
They can scrutinize my record.
They can tell me I’m wrong.
And occasionally they will prove that I am wrong.
Good.
That’s how this is supposed to work.
I would rather discover that I’m wrong through an uncomfortable conversation than remain comfortably wrong because everyone around me was afraid to challenge me.
Echo Chambers Eventually Make Movements Weaker
This is the larger lesson.
Echo chambers feel strong because everybody inside them sounds confident.
In reality, they often produce intellectually fragile political movements.
When nobody challenges your assumptions, weak arguments survive.
When dissent disappears, leaders stop being accountable.
When inconvenient information gets filtered out, people mistake consensus for truth.
When everybody repeats the same talking points, nobody notices when those talking points stop persuading anyone outside the room.
Then Election Day arrives, legislation fails, coalitions collapse, independents walk away, younger voters tune out, and everyone inside the bubble wonders what happened.
Healthy political movements should welcome scrutiny precisely because scrutiny strengthens arguments.
I spent years doing grassroots organizing. One of the most important things I learned was that you don’t persuade people by hiding from disagreement.
You persuade them by understanding their objections.
Sometimes they change your mind.
Sometimes you change theirs.
Sometimes neither happens.
But at least everybody leaves understanding the argument better than when they entered.
That is infinitely more valuable than collecting 10,000 people in a Facebook group who spend every day reassuring one another that they already have everything figured out.
Principles Matter Most When They’re Inconvenient
I believe deeply in human dignity.
I believe conscience matters.
I believe government should be limited.
I believe power deserves skepticism.
I believe war should be an extraordinary last resort rather than another instrument of routine foreign policy.
I believe Americans should be extraordinarily suspicious whenever politicians begin selling us another regime-change adventure.
And I believe free expression is indispensable to a free society.
None of those principles mean much if I abandon them the moment applying them becomes politically inconvenient.
That’s the problem with tribal politics.
Principles gradually become conditional.
Free speech—for my side.
Accountability—for their politicians.
Limited government—when the other party controls it.
Human rights—for the people we like.
Skepticism of government—except when government tells us something we desperately want to believe.
Eventually the principle disappears entirely and all that remains is the tribe.
I have no interest in politics like that anymore.
You Don’t Have to Agree With Me
That’s really the point.
You don’t have to agree with me about Gaza.
You don’t have to agree with me about Israel.
You don’t have to agree with me about foreign aid, regime change, criminal justice, taxes, privacy, foreign policy, or anything else.
You are perfectly free to conclude that my argument is completely wrong.
But bring evidence.
Bring facts.
Bring sources.
Bring history.
Bring constitutional arguments.
Bring moral arguments.
Bring your best case.
I’ll bring mine.
Then let the argument stand or fall on its merits.
What I find far less compelling is someone pounding the table about censorship while simultaneously making inconvenient arguments disappear from the political spaces they control.
And this is why people should understand what they are actually looking at when they join heavily moderated political groups online.
You may not be seeing the complete conversation.
You may be seeing the conversation that survived moderation.
You may not be encountering every relevant fact.
You may be encountering the facts administrators decided fit the community they wanted to create.
That doesn’t automatically mean those administrators are malicious, and it certainly doesn’t mean every moderation decision is illegitimate.
It means readers should remain skeptical.
Who decides what I’m seeing?
What am I not seeing?
Are opposing arguments allowed?
Can members challenge the prevailing narrative without being removed?
Are factual disagreements answered—or deleted?
Those questions are worth asking in conservative groups, progressive groups, libertarian groups, Republican groups, Democratic groups, and every other political community.
Because censorship doesn’t suddenly become intellectually healthy when our team controls the delete button.
If Your Ideas Are Strong, Let Them Compete
That is ultimately where I land with Conservative Pulse of New Mexico.
They are free to run their Facebook group however they choose.
And everyone else is free to evaluate what those moderation decisions say about the kind of political conversation taking place there.
For me, the standard is pretty simple.
If your argument is stronger than mine, you shouldn’t need an administrator button to defeat me.
Use your evidence.
Use your reasoning.
Use your experience.
Make the better argument.
Maybe you’ll change my mind.
I’ve changed my mind before.
I’ll change it again when the facts demand it.
But deleting an argument isn’t defeating it.
Preventing people from reading something isn’t rebutting it.
Calling exclusion “freedom of association” doesn’t transform intellectual gatekeeping into intellectual courage.
And surrounding ourselves exclusively with people who already agree with us isn’t how we preserve liberty.
It’s how we gradually forget why liberty requires disagreement in the first place.
A political movement confident in its principles should not fear scrutiny.
A conservative movement that genuinely believes in free expression should be capable of tolerating disagreement within its own ranks.
And people who spend their days warning America about censorship should be particularly careful about becoming the very gatekeepers they claim to oppose.
Because principles aren’t proven when they’re easy.
They’re proven when applying them costs you something.
And free speech means very little if the only speech we’re willing to tolerate is our own.
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