In the competition of ideas, you can't win the game if you're not on the playing field.

That's why Silicon Valley bigwigs' stubborn refusal to put business above their own personal partisan biases doesn't just rankle. It reeks. Equal access to social media is not just about sharing food pics, pet videos, makeup tutorials and travelogues. It's about ensuring the ability to disseminate and distribute political speech on the world's biggest platforms.

Although I started in the metro newspaper industry in 1992, my years as an independent conservative blogger and internet entrepreneur have been the most journalistically enriching. I launched my first website in 1999, my namesake blog in 2004, my first group blog and video content platform HotAir.com and my YouTube channel in 2006 (where I broadcast reports from Iraq), my Twitter account in 2008, my second group website Twitchy.com in 2012, and my documentary-style web series, "Michelle Malkin Investigates," for CRTV.com in 2016.

I don't just preach the First Amendment. I practice it for a living.

Early adopter status was important for us non-leftists who saw the disruptive influence and narrative-setting opportunities that new media and social media offered. I was ridiculed by mainstream media colleagues for wasting time on the internet, derided as "just a blogger" (which I proudly turned into a hashtag), and mocked for starting a Twitter aggregation business long before corporate media outlets copied the idea.

Over the years, I've joined other independent conservative social media users in exposing coordinated "flag-spamming" campaigns against right-wing personalities and causes. Pro-life, pro-border security and anti-jihadist journalists and activists have all been selectively gagged on Google/YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. I've worked with a few good-faith employees at these companies who tried to treat conservatives fairly. But in the unhinged era of the anti-Trump resistance, intermittent purges, "accidental" suspensions and suspicious deletions of conservative content have spiked to a level of systemic censorship.

Twelve years after its founding, Twitter has abandoned its corporate motto of "Defend and respect the user's voice." Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, set to testify before Congress in two weeks, admitted his company's left-wing bias and dismissed revelations from his own engineers, who confided to undercover Project Veritas journalists that they were creating algorithms to "ban a way of talking," "down rank" users based on politics and employ "machine learning" to create special triggers and keywords — "the majority of [which] are for Republicans."

In April, the brilliant anti-leftist street artist Sabo disappeared from Twitter without warning or explanation.

My friend and CRTV.com colleague Gavin McInnes was silenced on Twitter recently for absolutely no good reason and remains suspended.