(LifeSiteNews) — Conservative political commentator and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon hosted LifeSiteNews co-founder John-Henry Westen on his “War Room” show Tuesday to discuss the “pretty explosive story” of YouTube’s recent moves to ban the John-Henry Westen show channel as well as Westen’s own personal YouTube channel.
Introducing Westen as the “co-founder and editor-in-chief of one of the best sites in all the internet for news, LifeSiteNews,” Bannon asked him to weigh in on YouTube’s moves to delete Westen’s YouTube channels over Holy Week.
LifeSiteNews previously reported that Google-owned YouTube deleted the John-Henry Westen Show YouTube channel over Easter weekend, just weeks after the launch of LifeSite’s own video platform. The Big Tech platform also scrubbed John-Henry’s own personal account, blocking him from posting, editing, or even watching other videos on the site. In a Wednesday statement, a YouTube spokesperson told LifeSiteNews that the Big Tech company “terminated the channels in question for violating our terms of service, which prohibit operating a YouTube channel following a previous termination.”
READ: YouTube bans John-Henry Westen after alleged violation of ‘hate speech policy’
Westen explained the situation to Bannon, noting that before the deletion of the John-Henry Westen Show account the channel had received its second strike for allegedly running afoul of the platform’s policy on “hate speech” for a movie review in which Westen voiced Catholic moral teaching on issues pertaining to homosexuality within the context of the Oscar-winning film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
Subsequently, after an apparent mistake on the part of YouTube in temporarily lifting its 2021 permanent ban on the LifeSiteNews YouTube channel, the LSN team began moving over popular videos from the newly unbanned channel to the John-Henry Westen Show account. The movement violated YouTube’s rules regarding reposting videos from banned accounts, ultimately triggering a permanent ban of the channels.
Westen pointed out that the 2021 ban was for so-called “medical misinformation” in videos discussing vaccines and the COVID-19 response, but that its strike against the movie review was for supposed violation of its “hate speech policy” that prohibits “content promoting violence or hatred against individuals or groups” on the basis of a range of “attributes” including age, “gender identity and expression,” race, religion, “sex/gender” and “sexual orientation.”
“LifeSite’s take on that whole issue has been consistent for 25 years,” Westen told Bannon. “As many of you probably know, we’re Catholics, and the stance on those issues has always been the same: It’s to love the sinner. Hate the sin, love the sinner. So there’s no hatred, [and] God forbid, there’s no violence whatsoever.”
READ: YouTube censors conservatives for ‘hate speech’ but allows left-wing calls for violence
“LifeSiteNews is obviously one of the thought leaders and one of the biggest and most powerful platform[s] … in the discussions and topics in news information, analysis, [and] commentary on the family and life.”
Bannon asked whether YouTube even took “a call from you guys” regarding the ban, arguing that the move to scrub the accounts on Holy Thursday was especially “up in your grill.”
“What then is to be done?” Bannon asked. “How do we turn this around, because we gotta fight back, right? We have to fight back.”
He mentioned Mark Houck, the pro-life Catholic father of seven who was raided and arrested by the FBI and charged with federal crimes over a minor incident in front of an abortion clinic, suggesting that the targeting of a pro-life Catholic like Houck is part of a broader trend.
“If you don’t fight back, the Mark Houcks of the world are going to be the rule, not the exception,” Bannon said. “They’re going to come for everybody that prays the rosary outside an abortion clinic.”
He asked Westen what his “recommendation” is for “what action this audience needs to take” to help LifeSite and “set things right.”
Westen encouraged viewers to pray and fast, and also to go directly to LifeSiteNews’ own video platform where LifeSite content can be published, viewed, and shared without Big Tech censorship.
“That platform we built just before this cancellation,” Westen said. “It was like an Easter miracle that we had just got this done when they canceled it. So praise God for that.”
He also urged people to contact their political representatives to let them know that “this kind of targeting of individuals and any conservative voice by Big Tech is totally unacceptable.”
“They need to stand up for freedom in America, because if we don’t do that right now, we’re going to turn into totalitarian China, and we’re already more than halfway there, thanks to the Biden administration and his ilk,” Westen said.
Bannon ended his segment with Westen by recommending that viewers head to LifeSiteNews, arguing “we’re not going to let Google, we’re not going to let these tech oligarchs that are now all over artificial intelligence, we’re not going to let them win.”