“Trump’s Early Victory Declarations Test Tech Giant’s Mettle in Policing Threats to the Election.”
No joke — that was the Washington Post’s headline two days ago. I won’t pay Jeff Bezos to read the article, but the headline is astonishing. Big Brother in Silicon Valley is responsible for “policing” the election.
“Big Brother is Watching You” was the meme of George Orwell’s 1984. Today it’s “Big Tech is Policing You.”
I don’t know whether voter fraud turned the presidential vote against Trump. That’s hard to prove in court. But the blatant manipulation of social media as well as major media is up front and obvious, and it’s a form of fraud that presents a mortal threat to our democracy. Twitter published the ravings of ISIS supporters endorsing this week’s mass murder in Vienna, but canceled Steve Bannon’s Twitter account because he said that he wanted Dr. Fauci’s “head on a pike,” metaphorically, of course.
Welcome to totalitarian dystopia. A friend asked whether this is more like Orwell’s 1984 or Huxley’s Brave New World. In fact, we’ve got both. Orwell’s Memory Hole takes the form of Internet censorship. Pretty soon, “offensive” material will disappear from Google searches — I have that on high authority. From thi Brave New World we have Prozac, Tinder, and (soon) designer babies; from Orwell we have universal monitoring and the Two Minutes Hate (except the face on the screen is Donald Trump rather than “Emanuel Goldstein”).
Big Tech and mainstream media learned their lesson in 2016: Social media circulated stories that the mainstream played down, and people learned to get their news from friends rather than the TV tube. This time both Facebook and Twitter prevented users from sharing stories about the Hunter Biden emails — stories that originated in the 219-year-old New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton.
Big Tech wants to maintain our deplorable population with a bare-minimum income and lots of video games and porn to pass the time.
Who gives instructions to Big Tech about what information to suppress? The Deep State, of course. I wrote in Asia Times this week under the headline, “The Treason of the Spooks”:
In 1927, the French writer Julian Benda published La Trahison des Clercs, or “Treason of the Clerks,” blasting the likes of politician, poet and critic Charles Maurras for their turn to a reactionary, racist nationalism.
Today’s counterpart is the treason of the spooks, namely the 50 former top intelligence officials who published a manifesto on October 19 denouncing inquiries into presidential aspirant Joe Biden’s family finances as a “Russian information operation.”
“We write to say that the arrival on the US political scene of emails purportedly belonging to Vice President Biden’s son Hunter, much of it related to his time serving on the Board of the Ukrainian company Burisma, has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
This is perhaps the most flabbergasting document in American political history. The New York Post, a right-leaning tabloid, published emails from Joe Biden’s son Hunter and his associates, including one from a dodgy Ukrainian businessman thanking Hunter for introducing him to the then-vice president Biden.
In 2016 the media dissected the Hillary Clinton email stories, and the New York Times, among other mainstream media, ran copious exposes of the Clinton Foundation’s corruption. Massive evidence of Clinton corruption wasn’t the only factor in Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, of course, but it helped. Suppression of evidence of Biden family corruption doubtless was a big factor in the 2020 outcome.
What’s coming next, I have on high authority, is the suppression of “offensive” content on the Internet itself: Google searches won’t turn up content that you aren’t supposed to see.
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