“They’re private companies; they can do whatever they want.” This sentiment has often been expressed by libertarians addressing complaints about Big Tech censorship. But here’s the question: Is GoogTwitFace really private now — in spirit? Or have the tech companies become de facto arms of the state?
I’ve warned in the past that the “Democrat establishment has been doing an end run around the First Amendment, using Big Tech as a proxy to stifle dissenting views.” Now this is being echoed by Newsweek opinion editor Josh Hammer, who tells us that by way of colluding with GoogTwitFace to censor regime opponents, the Biden administration has collapsed “the ‘public’-‘private’ distinction.”
Do note that this is a hallmark of actual fascism: Keeping business in private hands, but ensuring that government has a controlling hand in it.
Big Tech’s capacity to manipulate the power called knowledge is staggering. Robert Epstein, a liberal and the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, has warned that the tech oligarchs now have the ability to shift up to 15 million votes in an election, enough to choose who our leaders will be. And here’s what’s truly chilling:
With the now proven big government/Big Tech collusion, where the Deep State and Biden officials tell GoogTwitFace what to censor, it essentially means our leaders can choose our leaders.
Who, again, is a “threat” to “democracy”?
Hammer reported on the story September 2, writing that on “Thursday, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, who is also the Show Me State’s candidate for U.S. Senate this November, unveiled some very interesting documents that his office, along with the office of Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry, [has] received since the two states jointly filed a potentially pathbreaking lawsuit in May. Their lawsuit alleges that various high-ranking Biden administration officials have been colluding, in censorious [sic] fashion, with the purportedly ‘private’ oligarchs of Big Tech. The straightforward aim of this collusion is the suppression of the dissident ‘wrongthink’ — viz., conservative speech — that threatens the Biden Regime’s tenuous grasp on power.”
The documents Schmitt and Landry acquired via legal action demonstrate that the Biden administration and its Deep State enablers have been shameless about eliminating the public-private distinction. They’ve been successful, too. “Mark Zuckerberg’s podcast confession heard ’round the world with popular host Joe Rogan,” Hammer explains, makes clear “the extent to which Big Tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter no longer qualify as meaningfully ‘private’ and have instead simply become appendages of the state.”
“According to Schmitt, the Biden Department of Justice has, since Missouri and Louisiana’s lawsuit was filed, identified 45 federal officials who have ‘interacted with social media companies on misinformation,” Hammer continues. “What’s more, Meta (Facebook’s parent company) pinpointed 32 additional Biden functionaries with whom it communicated, and YouTube (a Google product) identified 11 such flunkies with whom it communicated.”
Schmitt states that the evidence uncovered reveals “a vast censorship enterprise” in which “Biden administration actors and agencies as wide-ranging as the surgeon general, the Department of the Treasury, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were all in communication with some combination of Google, Facebook, and Twitter,” Hammer relates.
Again, this kind of melding of big government and big business is Fascism 101.
The censorship is so extreme that even Covid policy critic Alex Berenson was banned from Twitter. This should give even the leftists cheering such censorship pause (but it won’t). Realize that Berenson is no “right-winger,” but a former New York Times journalist who has delivered sober, dispassionate coronavirus pandemic analyses. Yet his erstwhile status as part of the establishment didn’t save him from its wrath after he defied it by telling the Truth in one area. The same fate befell liberal Covid critic Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The lesson for leftists here is as simple as it will be unheeded:
- The regime you pine after and people you empower will not deliver the utopia of your dreams.
- They will deliver you into a gulag, metaphorically if not literally, upon your complaining about this disappointment.
Berenson is back on Twitter after settling a lawsuit he filed against the company. But the damage sometimes cannot be undone. How many people were hurt or died because Berenson’s cautionary counsel was denied them?
Then there’s the GoogTwitFace censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story. Since 16 percent of Biden supporters said they’d have reconsidered their vote had they known the full story, and since Biden’s victory margin was narrow in key states, Hammer points out that Big Tech won the presidency for Biden. Please remember here that this is precisely what Robert Epstein warned they were capable of.
Hammer thus writes that these technology platforms are now “direct appendages of the state, and they must be constitutionally treated and regulated as such.” Writing at The Wall Street Journal last month, Roivant Sciences CEO Vivek Ramaswamy and constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld added detail, writing that the Biden administration’s use of Big Tech as a censorship proxy violates what the Supreme Court called in Norwood v. Harrison (1973) “an ‘axiomatic’ principle: The government ‘may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.’”
Ramaswamy and Rubenfeld have also said that GoogTwitFace “should be treated as state actors under existing legal doctrines.”
Whatever the “remedy,” the reality is that whether one calls our country (correctly) a constitutional republic or, as the undemocratic like to put it, a “democracy,” that’s not how it’s currently functioning. Rather, it’s now a land of the pseudo-elites, by the pseudo-elites, and for the pseudo-elites — and the fascist Big Brother/Big Tech Axis is making darn sure this doesn’t change.
