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Big Tech’s War on Free Speech

On January 8, in the wake of the protests two days earlier at the U.S. Capitol that left five dead and derailed congressional debate over election fraud, Twitter and Facebook permanently banned President Trump from their platforms. Jack Dorsey, the scruffy billionaire CEO of Twitter, apparently banned Trump while vacationing in French Polynesia.

This action by Twitter and Facebook, while shocking, should not surprise anyone. This is the latest salvo in a war that began the day Trump declared his candidacy. In a series of calculated escalations that will be recounted here, Big Tech has achieved something that would have been unthinkable four years ago, the cancellation of a U.S. President.

Twitter, in a statement said “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.” Surprisingly, because this is rarely done by any of the social media platforms when they ban someone, Twitter identified two tweets made by the President on January 8 that resulted in their decision to ban him.

“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”

And, shortly after that:

“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

What? That’s it?

Reading Twitter’s explanations for why these tweets were so dangerous that they closed his account offers a fresh view into the leftist mind. This is a mentality where thoughts they disagree with are not merely disagreeable, they are “violent.” In their overview, key points they make about these two tweets include the following arguments:

That Trump is not attending the inauguration implies he believes the election result is illegitimate, and that Trump is “disavowing” his commitment to an orderly transition. But Trump, along with millions of voters and thousands of witnesses, have a right to believe the election result was illegitimate. And not attending the inauguration can be as much an indication he wants to preserve an “orderly transition” as it might indicate the opposite. It gets worse. Twitter goes on to claim that by saying he will not attend, Trump is encouraging people to violently disrupt the inauguration.

Twitter then claims Trump’s use of the words “American Patriots” is meant to support violent acts, that Trump’s saying his supporters have a “giant voice” and “will not be disrespected” is “as further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an orderly transition.” Finally, Twitter claims “plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off Twitter,” which somehow, according to Twitter, is linked to Trump’s offending tweets.

Facebook’s newsroom also released a statement on January 7 explaining their deplatforming of the President. Facebook owns Instagram, so they cancelled Trump’s accounts on both platforms. Their explanation was less specific, stating “We believe the risks of allowing President Trump to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great, so we are extending the block we have placed on his Facebook and Instagram accounts indefinitely.”

There is simply no logic to these assertions. Trump’s speech on January 6 (read transcript), and his tweets before and after that, did not include calls to violence. Trump’s enemies in big tech made gratuitous inferences because silencing Trump is part of their ongoing campaign to silence any dissent to the leftist corporate state, of which they are an integral part.

The Big Tech War Against Conservatives Started in 2016

Big tech’s war on right-of-center free speech started in earnest in late 2016 when, against all expectations, Trump defeated Hillary Clinton and became president elect. Realizing that Trump supporters had utilized social media more effectively than Clinton supporters, Big Tech’s response was to begin deplatforming influential right wing content producers. As the 2018 mid-term elections loomed, their work became urgent.

Alex Jones and his “Infowars” website is a good case study in the tactics used to reduce his impact. In the month of November 2016, Jones attracted 125 million video views. By July 2018 that number had been cut to 25 million views. According to Advertising Age, the decline was because the platforms that drove viewers to InfoWars, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube search, “clearly were trying to reduce his impact.” But this wasn’t good enough. Jones had to be silenced.

For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, Alex Jones “Infowars” was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6th, Twitter followed suit. On September 8th, Apple banned Alex Jones InfoWars app from its App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.

The acts of suppression or outright deplatforming perpetrated by Big Tech on right-of-center content creators since 2018 are countless and global. They started with someone like Alex Jones, whose influence constituted a genuine threat, at the same time as his polarizing rhetoric meant a lot of people would think he deserved to be deplatformed. But by the middle of 2019, any outspoken foe of globalism with more than a few followers was at risk. An article published in July 2019 by the BBC made the establishment position embarrassingly plain on the threat represented by right-of-center narratives:

“The more mainstream these narratives become, the greater the tension will be over whether they really are extreme or whether they represent acceptable political discourse, and the views of a substantial number of real people.”

“These narratives.” That is the threat. What if “real people” don’t want open borders? What if they would like facts instead of lies regarding how immigration policies affect the economy and social cohesion? What if they want balanced opinions, or just want to hear the other side for a change, on the issues of multiculturalism, race, feminism, gender “equity” and social justice? What if “real people” sometimes find an unrepentant critic of identity politics to be a breath of fresh air? What if they believe there should be a robust and honest debate over globalism, or over climate change?

Big Tech’s War Escalated During the 2018 Midterm Elections

And then the midterms came. A great example of YouTube censorship, by now starting to become more brazen, was the treatment of a video debunking some preposterous claims made by Beto O’Rourke in a primary debate. O’Rourke, lying through his teeth, spewed out a torrent of falsehoods regarding rates of incarceration, hate crimes, school punishment, illegal immigrant crime rates, and the legacy of slavery. Meanwhile, a few days later, a right-of-center critic of O’Rourke, Vincent James O’Connor, posted a video on YouTube that refuted, using impeccable sources such as FBI crime statistics, every one of O’Rourke’s points.

This couldn’t be tolerated, and with no explanation, YouTube removed O’Connor’s video (his rebuttal to O’Rourke is summarized here). O’Rourke, back in mid-2019, was still a darling of the leftist establishment. YouTube protected him, without a shred of moral or legal justification to do so. More recently, unsurprisingly, YouTube deleted O’Connor’s channel altogether. He can still be found on BitChute and elsewhere.

According to the Los Angeles Times, by mid-October 2018, Facebook purged more than 800 accounts and pages pushing “political messages.” Matt Lamb, director of communications for Students for Life of America, provided dozens of examples of biased deplatforming in a guest editorial for USA Today titled, “Google, Twitter and Facebook should just be honest if they don’t like conservatives.”

By 2020 Big Tech Was in Open War Against the American Right

If the mid-term election’s round of cancellations was the prelude, actions during and since the 2020 election are the first main act. Big Tech’s actions were constant and consistent: If you challenge the establishment narrative, you will be banned. Here are just a few highlights:

In August they banned videos discussing alternative treatments for COVID-19, presumably because President Trump had promoted these treatments. This suppression is ongoing, and inexplicable. The damage to President Trump has been done. “Inject bleach into your arm,” and other distorted versions of what he really said are forever tagged to Trump, and Trump’s days in the White House are numbered. So what’s going on? Has Big Pharma joined up with Big Tech and Big Finance? It appears to be so.

In August Facebook threatened to cancel the Hodge Twins, brothers who committed the unforgivable crimes of being pro-Trump while Black, being not only persuasive but wickedly funny, and in the process amassing over 6 million followers. Facebook stopped short of deplatforming the Hodge’s, but it will be interesting to see how long these funny guys, who among other things sell t-shirts that say “Biden Sucks, Kamala Swallows” are going to last.

Sparing their enemies who were too popular to dare to cancel didn’t stop Facebook from ramping up manipulative, agenda driven content in their “information centers,” nor did it prevent them from hiring biased “fact checkers,” to help them justify new waves of cancellations.

In October, as early voting was well underway in several states, the New York Post published an expose linking Hunter Biden to unsavory deals with unsavory international businesses where he traded on his relationship with his father to enrich himself, and possibly also his father. Twitter blocked the URL to this story entirely, while Facebook “limited distribution” of the story. But while this was going on, the Big Tech platforms simultaneously engaged in a wholesale purge of the so-called “Q-Anon” accounts.

If all you consume is establishment media, you may be forgiven for thinking that all these Q related content creators do is accuse the Democratic party of being Satan worshipers who eat babies and sexually abuse children.

In fact, what the Q websites were doing, and still are doing in the online backwaters to which they have been driven, are investigating suppressed evidence of corruption throughout the federal government and powerful institutions in international business and finance. Needless to say, also targets of the Q collective’s investigations include the Bidens and the Clintons. The Q investigators are a threat. That is why they have been censored.

Over a few days in mid October, YouTube banned over 30 major Q related channels, and hundreds of minor ones. They also took on some thorns in their side that weren’t Q related, largest of which was Mouthy Buddha, an insouciant rebel channel that had earned over 10 million subscribers. Gone. Overnight. But it wasn’t until after the election of November 3 that Big Tech stepped up their censorship game even further.

“Election Misinformation” – Carte Blanche to Censor

By now everyone has seen the post-election “warnings” on Twitter. They started with a simple sentence they would paste under any posts that question the integrity of the voting, which read “this claim about election fraud is disputed.” Users who wanted to reply, retweet or like any such posts would have to click twice, first seeing a dedicated page presenting Twitter’s arguments against claims of election fraud, then only after clicking through that page were they allowed to log their reaction. But this wasn’t enough.

Twitter’s more recent attempts to manipulate election related posts moves from an annoying inconvenience to outright censorship, with a new warning that read “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, Retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence.”

It was almost as if Twitter was trying to establish a precedent. First Facebook says that this belief – that the election was not secure and fraud may have changed the outcome – is misinformation that will incite violence, and then if there is violence, Facebook will say they were right, and now they have to censor even more people. And that’s what happened, and that’s exactly what they did. President Trump is far from the only victim of the massive purge that’s happening right now, across all platforms. Here are just a few examples.

In just the last few hours, Twitter banned the account of the Trump campaign’s digital director, Gary Coby, accusing him of letting Trump use his account. At the same time, conservatives on Twitter are reporting they’re losing tens of thousands of followers: Brian Kilmeade “lost 30K followers in 4 hours,” Terrence K Williams “I lost 100,000 followers,” Omar Navarro “Lost 28K followers in one day, Dave Rubin “I’ve lost over 35K followers on this authoritarian shitscape in the last 48 hours,” Kristy Swanson “Lost another 20,000 followers overnight,” Rachel Campos-Duffy “I lost 8K followers in 24 hours, Michael Malice “just lost 200 followers in the last 5 minutes,” Byron York “now down nearly 29,000.”

Facebook and Instagram have just banned journalist Elijah Schaffer, an utterly harmless investigator who was known for his revealing interviews with leftist demonstrators. As is typical when this happens, Facebook offered no explanation for their action. In another significant development, Brandon Straka’s #WalkAway movement, with over 500,000 members, has just been banned from Facebook. Not only was Straka’s campaign account removed, but his personal account along with the accounts of every member of his team.

Straka, an inspiring leader who launched the “#WalkAway” movement to welcome former liberals like himself, who realized they had been abandoned by the takeover of the Democratic party by the leftist corporate establishment, will probably get his account reinstated. His persona is too popular, his support too broad, his message and his tone too defensible, for the ban to stand. But the fact that it happened at all is further evidence of Big Tech arrogance.

Reactions to the Great Purge

Just to underscore how alienated the American right in general, and Trump supporters in particular, have become, consider this reaction from Reuters: “Facebook and Twitter crackdown around Capitol siege is too little, too late.” They’re not kidding. The general argument in the Reuters report seems to be “we can’t just ban extreme hate speech and overt calls to violence, because people just adapt with speech that doesn’t sound hateful and doesn’t overtly call for violence, so therefore we have to ban everybody.” They don’t exactly say that in the article, but that’s the logical inference. And the actions of Big Tech since the events of January 6 bear this out.

At least one leftist institution has found its conscience, however. As reported in Newsweek, “A legislative counsel member of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warned Friday that the suspension of President Donald Trump’s social media accounts wielded ‘unchecked power,’ by Twitter and Facebook,” and that “the decision to suspend Trump from social media could set a precedent for big tech companies to silence less privileged voices.” It will be interesting to see if the ACLU, which back in 1978 defended the right of Nazis to march through Skokie, Illinois, will return to their original principle of defending all speech.

Reaction on the right has been furious. Mega-pundits Rush Limbaugh, Dan Bongino, and Mark Levin have all just cancelled or deactivated their Twitter accounts. Donald Trump Jr., expecting to be banned from Twitter any day, said “Big tech is able to censor the President? Free speech is dead & controlled by leftist overlords.”

As quoted in Politico, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said “he was ‘more determined than ever‘ to repeal Section 230, a measure that protects internet platforms from lawsuits concerning third party content. But if platforms lose their immunity as platforms, things might get worse instead of better for free speech advocates. Not only would all platforms be forced to regulate speech more tightly than ever, but only the big platforms – the leftist giants – would have the financial resources to withstand the inevitable and unrelenting torrent of lawsuits. Better to just force platforms to adhere to Section 230, or break them up. The nuclear option of abolishing Section 230 protection could backfire in spectacular fashion.

Which leads us to an equally important form of censorship, which is occurring with or without Section 230. Connecting free speech to whether or not content platforms adhere to Section 230 doesn’t address the silencing and denial of service coming from other online service providers. Section 230 has no effect on what decisions are made by the banks, the app stores, the payment processors or crowd funding sites, or, for that matter, the ride sharing companies and online retailers. The war on right-of-center America is corporate, full-spectrum, and it has just begun.

Full Spectrum Cancellation is the Next Wave of Supression

A harbinger for how Big Tech would move beyond mere deplatforming to engage in full spectrum warfare against right-of-center content creators can be found in the case of Lana Lokteff, who is the host of Red Ice TV” along with her husband Henrik Palmgren. Lockteff’s channel has never engaged in hate speech nor has it ever issued calls to violence, even if what they’ve had to say doesn’t necessarily represent the mainstream right-wing.

But Big Tech’s war on Red Ice TV reaches way beyond just being deplatformed by YouTube, which occurred in October 2019. In subsequent months they have also been banned by PayPal, Braintree, Venmo, Zelle, iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Wells Fargo, Coinbase, Skrill, Pinterest and iHeartRadio. In August 2020, in a move that exemplifies how Big Finance is working in tandem with Big Tech, Red Ice TV actually ended up on the MATCH List, a blacklist maintained by the credit card processors, designed to thwart terrorists and drug cartels.

Think that can’t happen to you? What about Laura Loomer, a content creator who is critical of Islam and mass immigration, a Jewish American, and a recent GOP congressional candidate in Florida? As described in a scathing video released by a friend of Loomer, recently elected congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Loomer has been banned from banned from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Paypal, Venmo, GoFundMe, CashApp, Periscope, Uber, Uber Eats, Medium, Lyft, TeeSpring, and Chase. For what? Sharing her opinion?

Loomer’s work was interesting; hard to find these days. She often engaged in performative videos, such as one in which she arrived at Nancy Pelosi’s home late one night with two undocumented migrants, sit up a “sanctuary” on the front lawn, and invited Pelosi to offer them food and shelter. Controversial? Sure. But only an agenda-driven ideologue would consider this material that deserves the treatment Loomer’s received.

Equally ominous evidence of a full spectrum war on right-of-center content creators is the behavior of the hosting companies. On November 15, WordPress, which is a major website hosting service, kicked the Conservative Treehouse off its servers. Without providing specific reasons for their decision, WordPress gave the Conservative Treehouse until December 2 to find a new host. With between 500,000 and 1 million site visits per day, the Conservative Treehouse is not a lightweight. They found a new host. But what WordPress did was not unique, as evidenced by what Parler is going through right now.

A conservative alternative to Twitter, Parler has grown in less than two years from a start-up to a platform with over 10 million users. For a brief time on January 8, Parler’s website crashed and experienced timeouts caused by the flood of new users that were migrating to it from Twitter. Expected to add millions of users and one Trump endorsement short of becoming a mainstream competitor to Twitter, Parler attracted the attention of Big Tech. The attacks came quick.

First came threats from Apple and Google, demanding Parler moderate its content or see its app banned from both Apple and Google’s online app stores. Making good on its threat, mere hours later Google removed the Parler app from the Google Play Store, supposedly based on reports that Trump will join the platform. Meanwhile, Apple gave Parler only 24 hours to present them with a plan for how they will moderate their content – an impossible demand and one which Parler’s CEO John Matze has already rejected. But that’s just half the story.

Parler, as a website already fielding high volume traffic, uses Amazon servers to deliver fast, global coverage. There are only a handful of vendors in the world capable of offering hosting services to websites that generate traffic in the hundreds of millions and billions of transactions per month, and Amazon is one of them. But not for long. Amazon served notice to Parler that they will have to find a new hosting service by midnight on Sunday January 11 or they will go dark. Parler intends to make the transition, but the message is clear. Big Tech intends to control everything Americans think and say.

The Hypocrisy and the Power of Big Tech

It isn’t necessary to dwell on just how hypocritical this reaction to the events of January 6 in the nation’s capital has been. Everyone knows what happened should not have happened. Everyone knows it was wrong. And everyone paying attention knows that Trump didn’t encourage any of it. There’s a deeper problem, which is that the connectivity that social media enables is the reason people can organize and communicate with a speed and reach that was unthinkable even just ten years ago. That means flash mobs in the thousands, comprised of like-minded, potentially extremist individuals, can be mobilized and unleashed for pennies. How do you stop this, when it becomes destructive to lives and property?

This is a legitimate question. But where was Big Tech while BLM and Antifa protesters were (and still are) rampaging through the downtowns of dozens of American cities all summer long? Why weren’t the social media accounts managed by these groups turned off? Why weren’t the politicians and newscasters who encouraged this violence ejected from Twitter and Facebook? The reason is obvious; the leftist violence that burned down buildings, broke windows, looted businesses, costing billions of dollars and costing dozens of lives, was serving the agenda of the leftist corporate establishment. It served notice to every centrist or right-of-center politician, celebrity, business owner, or just plain ordinary voter in America: You reelect Trump, and we’re coming for you.

An American who just watches the supposedly unbiased legacy networks, ABC, CBS, NBC and NPR, will never see what videographer Andy Ngo, has recorded and posted for months. Black clad Antifa cadres marching through the streets of America, beating up anyone they deem “fascist,” and fighting pitched battles night after night with police. Meanwhile, the ABC News Political Director Rick Klein, in a tweet he later deleted, wrote “Trump will be an ex-president in 13 days. The fact is that getting rid of Trump is the easy part, cleansing the movement he commands is going to be something else.”

One of many eloquent responses to this outrageous hypocrisy comes from MRC TV’s Britt Hughes. In a blistering seven minute rant that anyone angry at the hypocrisy should watch just to let its cathartic eloquence sink in and sooth the nerves, Hughes covers all the bases, says everything that needs to be said, and helps her listeners feel like somebody got it all out and exposed the entire rotten leftist edifice of lies and gave it the withering sunshine it deserves.

Americans who supported President Trump for all the right reasons – his policies on trade, energy and the environment, immigration, foreign policy, deregulation, education, and free speech, to name a few – are in a fight for their lives. They are facing the most formidable assemblage of financial and media special interests in the history of the world. This is no exaggeration. Big Tech doesn’t just exercise overwhelming and unprecedented control over communications in America, these companies also wield stupefying financial power. A look at seven of the most influential proves this.

Just seven companies – Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Netflix – back in October of 2018 had total cash on hand of $386 billion, with a collective market value of $4.5 trillion. Then the pandemic came along, and even more commerce and communication was forced online. As of August 2020, less than two years later, these same companies had total cash-on-hand of $495 billion – that’s a half-trillion dollars in their checking accounts. Their cumulative market value had soared to $7.6 trillion, up 71 percent from just 22 months earlier.

This is what Americans who value free speech are up against. This is what Americans who want to resist leftist answers to the issues of  trade, energy and the environment, immigration, foreign policy, deregulation, and education are up against. The events of January 6 gave these companies, along with their other corporate and political partners on the Left, an excuse to clamp down harder and faster on free speech and on the people who still oppose their plans.

The only possible glimmer of hope in all this is the possibility they have not done “too little, too late,” but too much, too soon. They’ve shown their hand. Perhaps more people will Walk Away. Perhaps more people will take the Red Pill. Perhaps more people will realize that Trump wasn’t their enemy; that he was fighting for them; that he was fighting for all of us.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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The Power of Big Tech is Greater Than Ever

Earlier this month Twitter engaged in what has become all to common among the online communications giants, they banned conservative content from their platform. This time, their targets were conservative humorists.

Two of the banned accounts, Titania McGrath and the Babylon Bee, offer some of the most hilarious satire to be found anywhere. And as with any great satire, sometimes at first glance, the uninitiated will not even realize its a joke.

After a few days, Twitter reinstated both of these accounts, but another target of the ban, the satirist Jarvis DuPont, remains inaccessible. DuPont’s musings can still be found on Spectator USA, but because the focus of his ridicule was trans ideology – which constitutes the uttermost pinnacle of intersectional sanctity – he shall never be seen on Twitter again.

It is difficult to overstate the global power of these companies. Not quite two years ago, in an article entitled (all too accurately) “How Big Tech Will Swing the Midterms, Then Take Over the World,” a financial snapshot of the seven biggest high tech and social media companies was included. That graphic is reproduced below:These are companies of almost unimaginable financial power. Twitter, the smallest kid on the block, by far, in terms of their market value, back in late 2018 was nonetheless sitting on nearly six billion dollars in cash. That’s cold hard cash, sitting in their checking account.

Together, these seven companies, which collectively exercise almost absolute control over what information reaches the vast majority of Americans, had $386 billion in cash back in late 2018, and had a combined market value of 4.4 trillion. For those who haven’t thought this through, a trillion is equal to one thousand billion, or one million million. And that was then.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the shut down of small businesses across America, with many of them never to come back. It also empowered the further consolidation of the American economy in the hands of multi-national corporations. But among those behemoths, few have done as well as big tech. With outdoor activities sharply reduced and shops closed, screen shopping and screen entertainment fills the void. The total market value of these seven companies is at an all time high, all of them have nearly doubled since October 2018; combined they are now worth $7.6 trillion, up 71 percent from less than two years ago.

As for their cash position, these seven companies now have just shy of a half-trillion dollars to deploy, anywhere, anytime. Twitter, still the small fry among these titans, now has nearly $8 billion in cash.

Companies this big have the power of nation states. Of the five companies on earth that have market values of $1.0 trillion or more, four of them are among these big tech companies. The only other company worth over $1.0 trillion is Aramco, the state-owned oil company of Saudi Arabia. In comparison to national GDP, the market value of these seven big tech companies, $7.6 trillion, puts them in third place, behind the United States and China. Even when making the more apt comparison of the combined sales of these seven companies, $1.0 trillion, to national GDP, they come in at #17 in the world, right behind Indonesia ($1.1 trillion) and ahead of the Netherlands ($0.9 trillion).

Financial Power is Only Part of Big Tech’s Power

It’s important to describe just how wealthy a handful of companies, controlled by a literally a few dozen people living on America’s West Coast, because it’s even greater than one might casually assume. These are companies that are financially powerful enough to buy small nations. They are powerful enough to invest in almost any market sector on earth and dominate it. They are powerful enough to absorb or crush any emerging competitor, any time, and they do. But that’s only half the story.

What Big Tech does with their money, and their technology, is far more significant than the mere fact of their insanely immense wealth. For all practical purposes, these companies exercise monopolistic control over how we access information and communicate. In the earlier article on Big Tech, how these companies accomplish this is covered in some detail. They are rewriting history, redefining language, arbitrating international borders and manipulating how we perceive physical geography. They are managing what information we are exposed to, or not, as well as controlling the underlying messages in news reports. And of course, they are using this power to influence elections.

To describe the grip Big Tech wields on how we communicate and access information, however, is still to only reveal a fraction of their power. A troubling video released on August 15 by online reporter and journalist Millie Weaver called “Shadowgate” alleges that government directed and funded private contractors are using radical new technologies to manipulate public opinion and retool law enforcement. Weaver’s video only lasted a few days on Facebook and YouTube, but can still be found on BitChute. As an aside, it is perhaps futile, yet pertinent, to ask exactly how YouTube justified the Shadowgate video being “removed for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech,” or, why Millie Weaver was arrested a few days before she released her video.

To discuss all of the allegations included in the Shadowgate video would go beyond the scope of this article. And the question of how interlinked the Big Tech giants are with these private contractors was not answered. Clearly the technologies being employed to microtarget individual American citizens with so-called “internet influence operations,” as well as the desire to see Donald Trump replaced by Joe Biden in January 2021, are shared by these contractors and Big Tech. But to what extent are they working together?

The whistleblowers interviewed in the Shadowgate video – who do not enjoy whistleblower protection because they worked for private contractors, not the government – explained how it is now possible, using existing online surveillance assets and AI programs, for private contractors to “get inside their minds, know what makes them angry, happy, get into their world, know everything about them, their fears, their friends, their secrets, their injuries, use their fears, their anxieties to control their behavior” – for every individual person in America.

Where mental manipulation fails, there is law enforcement. In this realm as well, Big Tech is ushering in a paradigm shifting revolution. In the Shadowgate video the people interviewed allege that the anti-racist “defund the police” movement, as well as the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the provisions of the “Green New Deal,” are all being used to facilitate this paradigm shift.

As they put it, “AI and robotics for law enforcement are already here. There is an international push for autonomous law enforcement to remove the human factor. The objective is full integration of all data including the internet of things, autonomous patrol robots, autonomous drones, computer vision software, tracking and tracking systems, nanotech vaccines, contact tracing apps, predictive modeling for social distancing, and forecasting tools such as systems and methods for electronically monitoring everyone to determine potential risk.”

An ominous corollary to this is the medicalization of all three of the facilitating initiatives being pushed by Big Tech and the state establishment. Along with COVID-19, “systemic racism” and “climate change” are now being increasingly touted as medical emergencies. Housing and homelessness are now “public health issues.” And as the COVID-19 pandemic has made all too clear, medical emergencies supersede the Bill of Rights as well as property rights. These emergency declarations could begin the day Joe Biden takes office, and it’s awful hard not to conclude that is the reason that Big Tech and the state establishment are doing everything they can to make certain Joe Biden becomes the next president of the United States.

Against this backdrop, it is almost a sideshow that Big Tech is cancelling anyone and anything online that contradicts their preferred narrative and political agenda. Online censorship violates everything Americans have traditionally believed in. It is a fundamental threat to freedom of speech, a right that Americans used to take for granted. But it is nonetheless only a part of something much bigger. Big Tech is using its considerable power to restructure American society in what may well be a fatal erosion of all the freedoms Americans have taken for granted.

In that context, the fact that Twitter banned three conservative satirists, and then allowed two of them back (gee, thanks), is relatively insignificant. But it does indicate something more about where we’re headed, thanks to Big Tech and the establishment state. The culture that we’re being steered into has no sense of humor. No ability to laugh at itself. There are few signs of tyranny more obvious than the failure to appreciate a clever joke, especially one that mocks the dominant culture.

So go tell a trans joke, if you dare. But watch out. It may be your last public utterance.

This article originally appeared on the website American Greatness.

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How Big Tech Will Swing the 2018 Elections, Then Take Over the World

Facebook is a menace to grassroots political organizing—and to free and fair elections generally. The social media giant this week announced it would ban “misinformation” about the upcoming midterm elections. According to a Reuters story about the new policy, “Facebook Inc. will ban false information about voting requirements and fact-check fake reports of violence or long lines at polling stations ahead of next month’s U.S. midterm elections, . . . the latest effort to reduce voter manipulation on its service.”

But not to worry: “The world’s largest online social network, with 1.5 billion daily users, has stopped short of banning all false or misleading posts, something that Facebook has shied away from as it would likely increase its expenses and leave it open to charges of censorship.”

In an article published last month titled, “How Facebook Policy Hinders Political Speech,” Ruth Papazian explained in excruciating detail just how difficult it has become to place political ads on Facebook. What this monopolistic communications behemoth has done to the abilities of grassroots groups to spread their messages far and wide cannot be understated.

Facebook selectively has disabled the most effective means of grassroots organizing ever devised. The timing of the move, a few months before one of the most pivotal midterm elections in American history, denies every small neighborhood group and individual activist the capacity to quickly tailor the content of their ads to local voters.

With growing assertiveness, an assortment of mega-corporations that, for all practical purposes, control virtually all online communications in America, some of them the largest companies on earth, are making a concerted effort to influence the 2018 elections. And their ambitions reach far beyond this November.

These corporations have left-leaning employees and left-leaning top management. They wield an ability not only to suppress viewpoints with which they don’t agree and promote viewpoints with which they do agree, but they can also use search results and proprietary search content to shape behaviors and values dramatically.

To present an embarrassingly obvious example of how Big Tech is rewriting history, take a look at the result that comes up on Google if you search under the term “American Inventors.” You will see portrait images of fifty individuals who are, according to Google, the top inventors in American history. There are 21 black men, 11 black women, and 18 white men. Curiously, no white women are included on the list.

This blatant distortion of historical reality matters more than might readily be apparent. First, it is part of a pervasive pattern whereby the left-wingers who control high-tech companies are rewriting history. But it is more pernicious in its consequences than just that. How will a 10-year-old African-American view his role in society, if he believes that two out of three of the most significant American inventions came from the minds of brilliant African Americans but that these contributions deliberately have been neglected? Won’t that be evidence to support the leftist assertion that racism, and only racism, account for lack of prominent mention for blacks in American history?

If this were an isolated example, it would not matter. But it is emblematic of how Big Tech is controlling not only who can communicate and what we can see, but how we view ourselves, our society, and our origins.

The Biggest Companies in the World
When we say “Big Tech,” that’s no exaggeration. The table below presents the financial power of some of the primary players controlling how we learn and communicate.

The data on this table makes obvious that behind the monopolies or near monopolies these companies wield in data search, social networks, videos, online retail including books, movies, and music, smartphones, and web browsers, there is almost unimaginable financial power. These seven companies together are sitting on $385 billion in cash. Think about this. The smallest of the seven, Twitter, has nearly $4 billion sitting in its checking account.

The pieces are in place for these companies, if not literally to take over the world, then at least to play a crucial role, if not the crucial role, in shaping what kind of world we leave to the next generation. For all practical purposes, they have monopolistic control over how we learn and communicate. And they have more discretionary cash than any other private interest, anywhere. The tools of influence they wield are only beginning to be developed.

To explore the dystopian potential of these dawning technologies, you don’t have to rely on conservative analysts. Arguments aplenty can be found in the liberal media; you would think they’d connect the dots and recognize what could happen if and when Big Tech is no longer controlled by liberals.

Writing for The Atlantic, Yuval Noah Harari suggests “perhaps in the 21st century, populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.” He suggests that the AI revolution may transfer the relative efficiency of a nation’s political economy from one currently favoring democracies to one favoring dictatorships. He argues that the power of massively connected networks, incorporated into everything we use and present everywhere we go, controlled by powerful AI systems, flips the equation, explaining that “the main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century—the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place—may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.”

Elaborating on this point in his recent article published by The Guardian, “The Myth of Freedom,” Harari describes human beings as “hackable.” He writes, “propaganda and manipulation are nothing new. But whereas in the past they worked like carpet bombing, now they are becoming precision-guided munitions. When Hitler gave a speech on the radio, he aimed at the lowest common denominator, because he couldn’t tailor his message to the unique weaknesses of individual brains. Now it has become possible to do exactly that.”

Think about it. Your Fitbit, always connected, monitors how you react as you click on various links online. This means that not only your clicks but your simultaneous physical reaction to what you are seeing are monitored and compiled. Eventually, the machines know you better than you know yourself. Your brain has been hacked. Dr. Pavlov, meet Brave New World.

Even the hyper-liberal New Yorker has alluded to how technology enables totalitarian regimes, in the closing paragraphs of a September 2018 article, “What Termites Can Teach Us.” Writer Amia Srinivasan refers to the “RoboBee,” “a mechanical bee, smaller than a paper clip, that can take off, fly, and land.” She cites a paper published by the Center for a New American Security, “Robotics on the Battlefield Part II: The Coming Swarm,” which holds up the RoboBee as evidence of the possibility of 3-D-printed, less-than-a-dollar-apiece drones that, in vast quantities, “could ‘flood’ civilian and combat areas as ‘smart clouds.’”

Patriots, you may or may not have reason to be paranoid, but in any case, don’t rely on your AR-15s to preserve your liberty. Start a hacker collective. The “smart cloud” is coming. You can’t shoot down a swarm of bees. Then again, you may not care.

Big Tech Is Redrawing International Maps
Consider the map feature on Google. The planet’s nations and cities include bitterly disputed borders and place names. But even physical features require subjective decisions. Shall higher altitudes be depicted in summer or winter? A summer image might feed the imagination of anyone inclined to believe the “planet has a fever.”

Call up Google’s “satellite view” of the vast savannas of Africa or the steppes of Asia—are they summer brown or spring green? A vastly differing impression is created. And how green is the green? Are the watered areas of earth verdant and lustrous with life, or tepidly broaching a bit of tentative foliage wilting on a warming world? What about snowpacks and glaciers? What view? Winter or summer?

When it comes to political geography, Google is an international actor with enormous influence. It’s a tough job, drawing borders on a map when everyone on earth uses your map.

According to Google, the city of Srinagar is no longer part of Indian Kashmir. Instead, it’s in a region with dotted borders indicating uncertain sovereignty. Similarly, the entire northeastern portion of Kashmir is lopped off, with dotted lines again, indicating that this area may actually be part of China. A province in the extreme northeast of India, Arunachal Pradesh, now has a dotted line drawn through its middle, questioning whether the northern half of that province belongs to India or to China. Ditto for the eastern border of Tajikistan, where Google’s dotted line asserts that nobody knows where Tajikistan ends and China begins. But among Google’s mapmakers, who decides? Where’s Tibet? Why no dotted line to delineate that occupied land?

While Google ignores Tibetan claims to nationhood, they recognize every indigenous tribe in North America. Observe the United States. When the lower 48 fills about half your screen, you’ll see the names of each state. Zoom in one notch. Suddenly the Navajo, Blackfeet, Crow, Yakima, Cheyenne and dozens of other tribes all have nations—reservations with borders and place names written in faint but capitalized fonts larger than those used for names of major cities. Same thing for Canada and South America.

Even if Google’s mapmakers didn’t have an agenda, millions of people would disagree with their choices. But billions more would accept the lines they draw, solid and dotted alike, as truth. The manner in which Google arbitrates international borders constitutes real power. Google controls 92 percent of the global mapping and GIS market. The company also controls more than 90 percent of the global internet searchmarket, and through YouTube, it controls 79 percent of multimedia websites and video portals worldwide. And Google has more than $100 billion in its checking account.

Big Tech Is Reprogramming Americans En Masse
That the founders and the employees of big tech companies are overwhelmingly Democrats should by now be beyond serious debate. And evidence mounts that these biases inform how they write their algorithms. There’s nothing objective about an algorithm—it may process every query with complete impartiality, but built into the logic and lookup tables are the preferences and priorities of a human being.

One widely reported study claims that biased search results can influence elections in close races. The study, authored in 2015 by Robert Epstein and Ronald E. Robertson and published in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences, reached four conclusions regarding search engines and search engine manipulation: First, they identify a positive feedback loop, whereby when search rankings affect voter preferences, those voters then search on terms that are, for example, favorable towards a particular candidate. This results in those favorable search results receiving more clicks which in-turn causes them to be ranked higher still, generating more views and clicks, and so on.

Second, search engine manipulation is very hard to detect, leading those influenced by it to believe they have formed their new opinions voluntarily.

Third, unlike explicit campaigning, where candidates have equal access to conventional means of voter outreach, search engine manipulation occurs at the discretion of the company that owns the search engine, leaving out-of-favor candidates with no means to counter its effects.

Fourth, conventional means of voter outreach continue to lose effectiveness relative to the impact of online resources such as search engines.

The elephant in the room here is Google, and even if that company isn’t directing its programmers to introduce liberal bias into their search results, the culture within Google suggests their programmers would be doing it anyway.

After all, this is the company that fired James Damore for circulating an internal memo that committed the heresy of arguing that disparities in group achievement might be due to something other than racism and sexism. This is the company where, in a leaked email, their former head of “multicultural marketing” described efforts she led on behalf of the company to increase Latino turnout in the 2016 election and bemoaned the fact that not enough of them voted for Democrats. This is the company where 90 percent of reported political donations by executives and employees went to Democrats in the period between 2004 and 2016; over $15 million.

And it isn’t just Google, of course. Twitter “shadowbans.” Facebook suppresses conservative commentators. YouTube restricts conservative videos. Apple bans “controversial” programs from its App Store. Can Amazon and other eBook purveyors even rewrite classic literature? Well, why not? The tactics these companies employ are difficult to detect and nearly impossible to counter.

Increasingly, this handful of mega-corporations have the power to rewrite history, to determine who is permitted to have a public voice, and to decide what is a fact and what is not a fact. And it extends to nearly every facet of life, not just election manipulation, but the foundations of Western Civilization; culture, race, gender, patriarchy, nationalism, patriotism, meritocracy, underachievement, even the reasons for climate change.

As Big Tech arbitrates the premises of reality, facts, according to their own beliefs and biases, a complicit media follows suit. For example, the BBC recently updated their guidelines for future reporting on climate change issues. Suddenly certain conclusions are no longer heard. But facts are based on data. And data can often be analyzed and interpreted, with integrity, to yield diametrically opposed conclusions. “Facts” are often opinions. This skepticism used to be the lifeblood of both science and journalism, but skepticism is only selectively encouraged anymore. Big Tech is narrowing that range when it ought to be expanding it.

Pessimists frequently refer to George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 as representative of where we’re headed. But more likely we are being herded into a future more reminiscent of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. That novel, written in 1931, is astonishingly prescient. In his forward to the 1946 edition of Brave New World, Huxley writes: “There is, of course, no reason why the new totalitarianism should resemble the old. A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

Stare into the glass. The mesmerizing blue light. Click. Click again. Let the dopamine flow.

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