Watch what you say, and don’t dare hold opinions offending the Machiavellian minions. For the consequence may be that you can’t send email, transfer money, sell a book, rent an apartment, or make a decent living.
Welcome to the Chinese “social-credit system” American style: a corporatocracy, a model in which big government and big business work hand-in-glove exercising monopolistic control over the mouths and minds of Americans. This dark and developing reality is otherwise known as “something on Joe Biden’s bucket list.”
Commentator Tucker Carlson sounded the alarm about this Tuesday, addressing the just-concluded Capitol Hill Big Tech hearings. While most Americans were focusing on the still-contested election or the upcoming holidays, insofar as they’ll be “allowed” to celebrate them, Carlson mentioned that some interesting facts came to light during the questioning of the Silicon Valley CEOs.
While the hearings began as a humdrum affair, things heated up when Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about an internal company tool called “Centra.”
While Zuckerberg claimed ignorance of the tool’s existence, a Facebook spokesman later confirmed its reality to Fox News, saying that it’s used “to centralize and aid investigations into complex subjects like coordinated inauthentic behavior.”
If that sounds confusing, “coordinated inauthentic behavior” is “otherwise known as astroturfing. That’s the process of creating fake grassroots political movements, sometimes by foreign governments,” explained Carlson on his Fox News show. “It’s something the left claims to be very concerned about.”
“In other words, Centra is yet another long term consequence of the Russia hoax,” the host continued. “So Adam Schiff gets hysterical, but Vladimir Putin and then Facebook gets [sic] to spy on you without your knowledge and then sell the data they gather.”
Yet it gets even better (read: worse). Hawley also asked Zuckerberg about a Facebook program called “Tasks.” The senator’s whistleblowers stated that “Tasks allows Facebook’s censorship teams to quote, ‘Communicate with their counterparts at Twitter and Google and then enter those companies suggestions for censorship onto the task platform so that Facebook can then follow up with them and effectively coordinate their censorship efforts,’” Carlson also related.
“Got that? They’re all in it together. The tech companies amount to a censorship cartel.”
Zuckerberg, mind you, characterized such efforts as “pretty normal.”
“And so, yes, it is all real,” Carlson stated. “Silicon Valley acts as one.”
What were they saying about “coordinated inauthentic behavior” or, to use a word insanely popular for a time among Democrats, “collusion”?
The Democrats want more of it, however. Also during the hearings, Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.) said to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, “You do … have policies against deep fakes or manipulated media against COVID-19 misinformation, against things that violate civic integrity, but you don’t have a standalone climate change misinformation policy. Why not?”
“Helping to disseminate climate denialism, in my view, further facilitates and accelerates one of the greatest existential threats to our world,” the senator continued. But should “his view” become everyone’s?
“Chris Coons is a lawyer who spent the last 20 years in government,” pointed out Carlson. “Everything he knows about climate he learned from an issue of The Atlantic magazine he picked up at the airport newsstand. Chris Coons is a non-expert if there ever was one” (video below).
So the “billionaire party,” as Carlson put it, “got what it wanted” in (perhaps) getting Biden elected. “So why can’t they take the boot off our neck?” the commentator asks. “No chance. They are just getting started.”
Carlson then illustrated how Big Tech has been ratcheting up during the past two weeks what I’ve long called a “pacification effort.”
For example, the email delivery service MailChimp announced that it will stop providing email service to the Northern Virginia Tea Party because of the latter’s “potential misinformation”: “The Tea Party had attempted to notify its members about a recount rally by e-mail,” related Carlson. So “MailChimp banned them along with other conservative organizations.”
“PayPal and Airbnb have done the same thing,” the host later explained. “They’ve taken out accounts belonging to conservatives because they don’t like the message. But the message they are sending is really simple: If you want to live a normal life here, send an e-mail, transfer money, rent an apartment, you had better be on the right side.”
“How is that different from what happens in China?” the host then asked rhetorically. “Call us and let us know if you can spot the difference; we can’t.”
Here are a few other examples Carlson provided (all quotations are his):
Target temporarily banned a book on the dangers of “gender transitioning” among girls; “a lawyer at the ACLU, which, of course, used to defend civil liberties, cheered that decision and said the book should be burned.”
Major video game company Ubisoft “erased a voice actor called Helen Lewis from one of its titles, retroactively” because “she wrote a forum post that anonymous people on the Internet felt was transphobic.”
“The mob then went to work trying to destroy [actress] Gina Carano because “she criticized mask mandates and quote ‘preferred pronouns.’”
Carlson also pointed out that a Biden (Harris) administration would be full of Big Tech types and other ex-corporate-world figures. So the Democrats are the party of the little guy? Well, of little minds and morals, maybe.
So will “this remain a free country?” Carlson also asked rhetorically. “Can you disagree with Corporate America and still live here? Would we be allowed to fly on an airplane? Stay in a hotel? Have a credit card? Use e-mail? Will tiny brain Napoleon’s like Chris Coons determine what science is and what you can say about it or not?”
Next question: What’s in this for Big Tech and Big Gov? What’s the end game? Carlson believes it’s about “control.” They know that if “they can dictate what you have the right to say about trans-rights or mask mandates,” he stated, they “can dictate what you can say about anything.”
I’ll add that just as people can lust after sex or food or money, so also can they lust after power, though it’s a rarer motivation. Yet these power-mongers are attracted to the arena that allows them control, “public service,” so they’re overrepresented in government.
In keeping with this, the state will not only let Big Tech get away with monopolistic behavior, but will (perhaps secretly) applaud it — as long as the state can control the monopoly. There’s a congruence here, too: A big central state has a governmental monopoly over the people while a leviathan business realm has a market monopoly over them.
The two fit well together joined at the hip. Not fearing nationalization, big business knows that being cozy with big government can help increase profits, as greased politicians will help corporations tilt the playing field against competitors that under a freer market might threaten their dominance. In turn, government also gets more control. For example, it can do an end run around the First Amendment by having ubiquitous Big Tech effect its censorship by proxy.
Speaking of Big Gov’s and Big Tech’s common ground and in light of the above, is it any wonder both hate President Trump and have conspired to oust him from office? For one thing is certain, if you want “China” in America, Trump is not your man.
