Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum. Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control.

Former Liberty Conservative contributor James Allsup was involved in the Charlottesville, VA “Unite the Right” rally-turned-riot that served as the catalyst for this drive for Orwellian censorship. Although the article itself contained no offensive content (it was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis), just the fact that it was authored by a man deemed to be an “unperson” by the corporate elite was enough for Google to target it for censorship.

The entirety of Google’s letter addressed to us is as follows. Notice how the descriptors for what violates the terms of service are deliberately vague and open for interpretation, giving Google an excuse to target any website or individual they so choose for any reason:

“Additionally, please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites that you own. To reduce the likelihood of future warnings from us, we suggest that you review all your sites for compliance,” the letter says.

This is not the first time we have been censored. In the past, Facebook banned users from sharing content immediately after they posted our controversial article criticizing a “libertarian” Washington D.C. thinktank official who denigrated Ron Paul. This is, however, the first time we have been directly threatened that we would be cut off if we refused to censor our content. An incredibly dangerous precedent is obviously being set here, and if you think that it won’t impact you directly at some point, think again.

Due to financial constraints, we had to comply with Google’s strong-arming tactics for the time being. An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive. We look forward to the day where rival ad platforms who respect the intellectual freedom of their customers can outcompete Google, but those days have not arrived yet. These tech companies have us all by the short hairs, and post-Charlottesville, they are all working in unison to enforce the Orwellian nightmare. Nobody is safe.

All conservatives and libertarians must realize that the Orwellian nightmare enforced by private hands is just as harmful to human freedom as if the dystopia was enforced by the hands of government commissars. The results will be the same, as freedom of expression will be sacrificed to the God of political correctness. After they destroy free speech, the rest of our rights won’t be far behind. A world where digital lynch mobs can ruin people’s entire lives–harming their reputations, making it impossible to feed their families, and potentially subjecting them to retaliatory violence–for merely expressing an honest opinion would amount to a dark age for liberty.

Mainstream conservative provocateurs such as Lauren Southern, Paul Joseph Watson, and Milo Yiannopoulos have been targeted as well. This situation is much bigger than just a few fringe political figures being humiliated. If they can censor us and target people like Allsup to be digitally scrubbed from the internet, it will happen to you next. A world where Big Brother is judge, jury and executioner is right on the horizon, and that does not bode well for anyone except a small handful of oligarchs and elites. We all must band together, eschewing mindless partisanship, to defeat the burgeoning Orwellian surveillance state before our rights are lost forever.