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zuckerberg and his groveling,
ass-kissing sycophants. don't they remind you of how
disgusting techies robots are?
Facebook Oversight Board Will Use International Speech Norms to Police Americans
4:16
Facebook’s Oversight Board, which will hear appeals on content removal and is packed with left-wing members, will herald a further shift away from a “a U.S. constitutional-law paradigm towards an international human rights approach” towards censorship and free speech.
That’s the verdict of law professor Sejal Parmar, a member of the Council of Europe’s “Committee on Combating Hate Speech,” and a former assistant professor at George Soros’s Central European University.
In an article, which was shared on Twitter by Catalina Botero-Marino, one of the Facebook Oversight board’s four co-chairs, Parmer hails the shift away from American norms towards European and international ones:
Great expectations surround Facebook’s Oversight Board, an audacious experiment in platform self-regulation, with its first 20 members announced on May 6. It was a milestone in Facebook’s response to compelling calls for greater accountability and transparency. The board evokes constitutional law notions in various ways: its original conceptualization by Mark Zuckerberg as “almost like a Supreme Court;” its power to deliver “binding decisions,” as well as “policy advisory statements;” the institution-building language and framework of its charter and bylaws; and the fact that its initial membership encompasses six constitutional lawyers, including three specialists in American constitutional law, with two serving as co-chairs.Such “constitutional features” exist against a backdrop of approaches to content moderation by Facebook and other platforms that so far have been “undergirded by American free speech norms.” Facebook’s creation of the board suggests a clear and conscious turn from such a U.S. constitutional-law paradigm towards an international human rights approach in content moderation by the world’s most powerful social media company. But the nature and degree of this shift depend on how the board, in delivering its decisions within the confines of its jurisdiction, will interpret the relationship between Facebook’s community standards and values, on the one hand, and international human rights standards, encompassing international treaty law and non-binding standards, on the other.
The move away from American free speech norms and towards “international human rights standards” means less free speech, and more curtailing of so-called “hate speech.” In contrast to America’s First Amendment tradition, international human rights law’s idea of “free speech” is any speech that political elites haven’t categorized as hateful or “harmful.”
It is further confirmation of the trend Google described in its leaked briefing document “The Good Censor,” which was first published by Breitbart News in 2018. That document admitted that Google and other tech companies, including Facebook, “shifted towards censorship” after 2016, moving away from the American tradition, which in Google’s view “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility,” and the European approach, which “favors dignity over liberty, and civility over freedom.”
Facebook’s refusal to let American users be governed by American speech norms is, according to Parmar, another sign that Silicon Valley is using its vast power over online speech to introduce Soros-backed international and European speech norms into American public discourse.
With no major Trump supporters among the 20 members of the Oversight Board, and certainly no-one who could be said to believe that Facebook should use the First Amendment standard in cases of so-called hate speech, even for American users, Facebook’s new organization is skewed to the globalist left. For this reason, it has come under sustained criticism from conservatives around the world, including in Hungary and Britain, who will be subject to its corporate-backed system of “justice.”
Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
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Paul
Gosar Urges AG William Barr to Investigate Facebook’s Censorship of Laura
Loomer
9 May 20201,055
2:46
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) has written a
letter to Attorney General William Barr calling on him to investigate Facebook
for falsely labeling conservative influencers as “dangerous individuals,” and
for making vast, undisclosed in-kind campaign contributions by censoring the
political opponents of Democrats.
The
letter highlights the cases of Republican congressional primary candidate Laura
Loomer and the popular YouTuber Paul Joseph Watson.
Carr
wrote: “In the case of one person, Laura Loomer, all she has done is been an
outspoken advocate for America First public policy, shared her concerns as a
Jewish woman about threats from anti-Semites, and publicly supported President
Trump”
“In
return, Facebook classified her as “dangerous” and banned her from its platform.
As noted, she was not given a hearing, or any option to defend herself, before
being defamed and libeled.”
“Similar
to Loomer, Paul Joseph Watson was deemed “dangerous” and de-platformed. He
never had a trial. Was never able to defend himself. Never met his accusers or
was provided with a shred of evidence. As he wrote earlier this year: ‘I
have never advocated
violence and I have never advocated
‘hate’ against any individual or group. The establishment is putting me in the
same category as human traffickers, serial killers, and terrorists.'”
Facebook’s
“dangerous individuals and organizations” policy bans
organizations and individuals that “proclaim a violent mission or are engaged
in violence,” including terrorist activity, organized hate, mass murder, human
trafficking, and organized violence or criminal activity.
The
letter also highlights the political impact on Loomer, who is running for
office as a Republican primary contender in Florida’s 21st district.
“Facebook
is in essence preventing Loomer from using that platform to speak to potential
voters, to raise money, and in effect, Facebook is supporting her opponent.
This is a campaign contribution that has not been reported and the value of
which far exceeds the campaign limitations.”
“We
ask that you investigate this matter on behalf of the American people who
should not have views censored by corporate entities or have corporations
engage in illegal campaign assistance and in-kind contributions.”
Are
you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company
who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your
company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email
address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum
Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
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Vice
Media CEO Attacks Big Tech’s ‘Chokehold’ on Journalism
16 May 20201
3:00
Vice
Media CEO Nancy Dubuc attacked the Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe in a
memo to all employees sent as the company lays off 155 staffers. Dubuc’s memo
says that Big Tech’s “squeeze” is becoming a “Chokehold” on the new business,
as platforms are “not just taking a larger slice of the pie, but almost the
whole pie.”
As Vice Media slashes its newsroom staff, its chief executive
officer is blaming Silicon Valley giants for destroying journalism, saying that
big tech firms are strangling the news profession.
“The squeeze is becoming a
chokehold. Platforms are not just taking a larger slice of the pie, but almost
the whole pie,” Vice CEO Nancy Dubuc wrote in a blistering memo obtained by the Hollywood
Reporter.
Vice Media said Friday that it is laying off 55 staffers in the
U.S., plus about 100 staffers overseas in the coming weeks. The layoffs are
part of a larger bloodbath to overtake the news industry in the wake of the
Chinese coronavirus pandemic.
Buzzfeed has announced the closure
of its U.K. and Australia offices, while Quartz announced layoffs earlier
this week. Numerous local newspapers have cut staff, while some major outlets
including the Los Angeles
Times and Gannett-owned papers have enacted furloughs and pay
cuts.
Vice’s announcement on Friday represents a major hit to the once
invincible news brand that targeted millennials with a mix original video
content, long-form reporting, and clickbait.
“We grew our digital business faster than anyone at a time when
we believed that as more pies were baked, we’d keep getting a slice,” Vice CEO
Dubuc wrote in her memo.
“Now, after many years of this, the squeeze is becoming a
chokehold. Platforms are not just taking a larger slice of the pie, but almost
the whole pie. And while the crescendo has been building for some time, now it
is more clear than ever … 36,000+ lost jobs in journalism is enough to take
your breath away.”
Dubuc didn’t name specific tech companies in her memo. But the
news industry has long blamed Facebook and Google for its decline, saying that
the platforms have soaked up advertising dollars while benefiting from original
reporting done by others.
“It’s time we stand together as a media industry and address the
serious issues that have slowly eroded the original promise of the Internet: a
tool to bring society on more equal footing through knowledge and creativity
unparalleled,” Dubuc wrote.
On Friday, Vice Media’s newsroom union blasted the company’s
decision to lay off staffers.
“We understand that the entire news industry is hurting. We do
not understand why Vice chose to lay off many of our colleagues in the middle of
a global pandemic instead of exhausting all options to save these jobs,” the
union said in a statement.
Our statement regarding today's layoffs:
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Facebook Puts Soros, Muslim
Brotherhood, Activists in Charge of Censorship
The Leftist-Islam Supreme
Court of Social Media Censorship is here.
May 11, 2020
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield,
a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic
terrorism.
Facebook controls as much as
80% of social media traffic. That means that it has the power to erase
conversations, shift narratives, and control how people speak to one another.
With 190 million users in the
United States, the social network monopoly has more control over what people
see than all of the media giants combined do. And now Facebook is putting some
very troubling political activists in charge of its Oversight Board who will
decide how it censors.
“You can imagine some sort of
structure, almost like a Supreme Court, that is made up of independent folks
who don’t work for Facebook, who ultimately make the final judgment call on
what should be acceptable speech in a community that reflects the social norms
and values of people all around the world,” Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg had
described the Board.
What does Facebook’s Supreme
Court of Censorship look like when you zoom in?
Only a quarter of the Oversight
Board originates from the United States. That means three quarters of the
censorship court comes from countries with no First Amendment. While people
from outside the United States may believe in certain kinds of free speech,
political speech in this country will be determined by a majority Third World
board of left-leaning political activists.
And even there the balance is
curiously tilted.
3 members of the 20 member
board are Muslim or come from Muslim countries. Only one board member is Hindu.
Considering that there are approximately 1.1 billion Hindus and 1.8 billion
Muslims, the Facebook Oversight Board favors Muslim countries at the expense of
Hindus.
Considering the pressure by
Islamists and their allies to censor India’s Hindu political movements and
civil rights organizations combating Islamic violence, this is troubling.
The Oversight Board also has
only one Asian member for around 1.8 billion people.
Of the 3 Muslim nationals, Kyle
Shideler of the Center for Security Policy has noted that Tawakkol
Karman was a top leader in a Muslim Brotherhood linked group with ties to Al
Qaeda.
“The Brotherhood is a movement
fighting for freedom," Karman wrote of the organization whose leaders have
called for the murder of Jews and whose history includes Nazi collaboration.
“Because it is an integral part
of this region, the Brotherhood is the one who will rule Riyadh and Abu
Dhabi," she even predicted.
Facebook has added an Islamist
who believes that a theocracy will rule the region, and put her in charge of
determining content moderation policies for the entire planet. A member aligned
with a violently bigoted organization will help Facebook police “hate speech”.
What will happen to ex-Muslims
and secular activists in Muslim countries under this setup?
These numbers make it clear
that the Board is not proportional by population, and despite its international
makeup, reflects the political agendas of Facebook’s left-leaning leadership.
The first member, in
alphabetical order, is a program manager at the Open Society Initiative, a part
of the George Soros global political empire of NGOs. There is no indication
that the Soros employee will be stepping down from her role so that, despite
previous clashes with the radical billionaire, George Soros will effectively
control a seat on Facebook’s Oversight Board.
At least.
Andras Sajo has held positions
in Open Society organizations, including on the Board of Directors of the Open
Society Justice Initiative and is allegedly an old friend of Soros.
Helle Thorning-Schmidt sits on
the Board of Trustees of Soros' International Crisis Group along with the
extremist billionaire and his son.
Maina Kiai sits on the Advisory
Board for the Human Rights Initiative of Soros' Open Society Foundations.
Sudhir Krishnaswamy also appears to have benefited
from an Open Society grant. This is not unusual considering that the Oversight
Board is weighed heavily toward NGOs with members from Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International. Even dismissing members who have only appeared at Soros
events or made use of grants from Soros organizations, four Oversight Board
members are deeply involved in Soros organizations. And Soros has made his
hostility to free speech, and his conviction that conservatives must be
censored, abundantly clear.
Soros has demanded that
Facebook "should be held accountable for the content that appears on its
site" and complained that the company "fails to adequately punish
those who spread false information.” Will Oversight Board members who work for
Soros or sit on the boards of his organizations protect free speech or support
the billionaire’s crusade to censor the opposition?
If the Oversight Board is going
to be the final determinative body for Facebook censorship, why stack it with
so many professional human rights activists who are not lawyers or professors?
Courts don’t invite in activists to issue rulings. That’s because activists come
with agendas. And their agendas may involve empowerment, but usually for a
small and narrowly defined group.
They are also rarely
independent, but often funded by billionaires with their own agendas.
But even the Oversight Board’s
academic members can be as repressive as a Soros.
Nicolas Suzor had written that
"neutrality" on social media platforms is "causing
problems" and that "neutral tools that do not actively take
inequality into account will almost inevitably contribute to the amplification
of inequality." He even suggested that dissent from the Left's global
warming positions could also be viewed as dangerous. "Racism, misogyny,
and bigotry, anti-vaccination content, misinformation, self-harm, and climate
change denial — all require difficult judgments about when one person’s speech
is harmful to others."
In a Twitter exchange, a prof
argued that, "many of the most controversial content moderation decisions
are about leave-ups. Think: Pelosi video, hate speech in Myanmar, Alex Jones...
not having this in scope for the Board from the start is a huge…
Oversight." Suzor replied that, "totally
agree that expanding the scope as soon as we can is really important."
That should worry anyone whose
speech might one day fall afoul of the Soroses and Suzors.
Dubious claims that some form
of speech is dangerous have been used to justify crackdowns by social media
giants on everything from pro-life views to support for conservative
candidates. The current wave of censorship has been justified by insisting that
conservative speech is either a product of foreign disinformation (the Russia
hoax), that it’s medically dangerous (suppression of political protests,
dissent on coronavirus policy, or opposition to abortion), or that any speech
offensive to an identity politics group causes inequality and psychological
harm.
Combine the three together and
they add up to censoring any political speech the Left opposes.
And, as Michael Moore’s
censorship by environmentalists shows, not even career leftists are immune from
the Orwellian political orthodoxy that brands some views anathema overnight.
(That is why leftists might
want to reconsider their abandonment of liberalism before it’s too late.
History shows that the ideology most likely to purge lefties for ideological
dissent is the Left.)
Facebook set up the Oversight
Board to outsource its censorship while evading responsibility for its
repression. The dot com giant wants to be a monopoly that has a stranglehold on
the marketplace of ideas, but it doesn’t want to be open to the marketplace’s
diversity of ideas.
That is the totalitarian
fallacy of most of the Big Tech giants who want users on their terms.
Stacking the board with Soros
cronies and assorted human rights activists, digital experts, and the other
sorts of people who spend all their time appearing on panels and giving TED
talks, is how Big Tech companies have their censorship cake and eat it too.
After this, when conservatives complain about Facebook censorship, it won’t be
Mark Zuckerberg’s fault.
But it will be.
The Oversight Board, like most
Facebook initiatives, is rigged from the ground up. It contains a few token
libertarians, but is tilted toward lefties. It contains an Islamist, but hardly
anyone likely to advocate for the values of traditional Christians and Jews.
Behind the facade of international diversity, the Supreme Court of Censorship
has very little intellectual or religious diversity.
Two libertarian/conservative
establishment figures don’t balance out eight lefties just as bringing in an
Israeli leftist does not balance out a Yemeni Muslim Brotherhood figure. Giving
Soros four seats and Koch one is not only rigging the game, but failing to
address the real issues at stake.
The social media giant is
responding to pressure to censor conservative views, especially in the US, the
UK, Israel, Latin America, Myanmar, and India, yet has no representatives of
the sorts of people who are likely to be censored. Instead it stacked the deck
with those likely to censor.
Where are the Trump supporters,
the Modi backers, the Bolsonaro fans, the Zionists, the Buddhist monks of
Myanmar, or any group that dissents from the Left on any major issue?
Of the groups likely to be
censored, only the Islamists get their own representative at Facebook.
The Supreme Court of Censorship
is rigged in favor of the censors and against the censored.
Facebook has assembled a grab
bag of globalist personalities that wouldn’t be out of place at a UN conference
(and a number have worked at or for the UN in some capacity) and put them in
charge of determining what can be said by billions of people around the world.
And by countless millions in
the United States of America.
The United States is tasked
with protecting the essential freedoms of its citizens from interference by its
government, by foreign governments, or by any force so powerful that it can
singly blot out any of the Bill of Rights. The Big Tech monopolies like Google,
Amazon, and Facebook pose a unique threat to the unalienable rights among which
are, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness", for whose
protection, "Governments are instituted among Men."
This is the role that Jefferson
envisioned for government in the Declaration of Independence.
Governments wield power by the
“consent of the governed” who can vote and remove any government. Facebook
would like us to think that its powers to censor will derive from a bunch of
globalist NGO activists and lefty law professors. No individual or group has
the power to stop Facebook’s monopoly over social media. It has become too rich
and powerful.
Only our government can fulfill
its role by restoring our freedom to speak and be heard.
Otherwise all political speech
that is not of the Left will be erased from the public square. If there were
any doubt about that, Facebook’s Supreme Court of Censorship has settled it.
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Tech
Investor Jeffrey Wernick Blasts Facebook’s Oversight Board as ‘Technofascism’
575Alex Wong/Getty Images
9 May 2020242
2:57
Tech investor Jeffrey Wernick is the latest prominent voice to
speak out against Facebook’s new “oversight board” that will have the
power to control speech on the social media platform. Wernick has described the
board as a form of “technofascism” and an affront to the First Amendment.
“Shame on Facebook. Shame on anyone who embraces this concept,”
Wernick said in a statement released on Friday. “And shame on anyone who would
agree to serve on this Committee. They are free speech frauds who want to
control language and thought.”
He also accused Facebook of being a “data rapist” in an apparent
reference to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal
information of millions of Facebook users was used without their consent ahead
of the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook’s oversight board — also
known as its “Supreme Court” — is expected to wield significant power over what
can and cannot be said on the platform. But the 20-person group, which will
operate semi-independently of Facebook, has already come under fire for being compromised largely of left-wing and anti-Trump
figures.
The board includes Stanford University law professor Pamela
Karlan, who earlier this year joked about President Trump’s then-13-year-old
son Barron while she testified at the House impeachment hearings. Another
member is Australian law professor Nicolas Suzor, who once tweeted that he
“loved” an article comparing President Trump to Adolf Hitler.
Other members include a former aide to Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA)
and three people who have documented ties to leftist billionaire George Soros.
A coalition of 60 conservative
organizations and publishers recently called on Facebook to do away with its politically skewed oversight board. The coalition
also warned that the board is stacked with individuals from other countries who
may not uphold America’s First Amendment principles.
Jeffrey Wernick, who has invested in
bitcoin technology and serves as a strategic advisor to the competing social
network start-up Parler, is encouraging people to abandon Facebook.
“My proposed solution is for people to simply get off Facebook,”
he said in his statement. “Facebook is an acknowledged data rapist who promotes
digital assassinations of individuals and groups. And is now recruiting more
people to further legitimize those practices. Do not be distracted by the
window dressing. Shame everyone and anyone who is willing to serve on [the
board] and practice technofascism.”
Other prominent figures to criticize
Facebook’s oversight board include Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO), who has been a
consistent voice against Silicon Valley overreach, and Brendan Carr, one of the four
commissioners of the FCC.
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Silicon Valley’s Control Virus
The tech industry’s Chinese surveillance solution to the Wuhan
virus.
April 30, 2020
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the
Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the
radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Silicon Valley was both the epicenter of one
of the country’s first Wuhan Virus outbreaks, hosting the 2nd case
in California and the 7th in the country, and of the
technological tools of the lockdown, from contact tracing and drone tracking,
to the virtualization of everything from education to socialization.
The tech industry represents the apex of both globalization and
repression. On its massive campuses, foreign workers likely played a role in
spreading the virus even as their industry became the public face of fighting
the virus by unleashing a new wave of censorship and surveillance against
Americans.
Before long, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg could be seen warning
that the social media giant would delete any protests against the lockdown,
YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki declaring that any videos that contradicted WHO would
be deleted, and Microsoft’s Bill Gates speculating about immunity passports.
And Google and Apple came together to build a contact tracing
system that would track everyone.
Silicon Valley’s titans and monopolies want to be the heroes of
this pandemic, but the only things they have to offer are the totalitarian
tools of surveillance that have destroyed public trust in the industry.
Santa Clara County has, as of this writing, experienced nearly
100 deaths. A Stanford study last month speculated that there were 48,000
infected. Even as Silicon Valley has helped spread the Wuhan Virus, it has its
own form of immunity. Barbers can’t work online, but interface designers can.
Tech industry stocks may have taken a beating, but unlike countless small
businesses, they will bounce back.
And the virus culture of lockdowns and social distancing,
wholesale civil rights violations and the elimination of privacy is trending the
tech industry’s way. The massive databases of the huge monopolies are making it
a lot easier for the authorities to track lockdown scofflaws. The creepy
visions of an automated posthuman society have become the default response to
the virus across America.
Social distancing is completing Silicon Valley’s vision of a
world of isolated people who can only connect to each other through the
mediation of their services. The brave new world in which Facebook is family,
Twitter is politics, and Google is reality is a lot closer than ever before in
the new Safer at Home society.
While the tech giants have much to say about what people can and
can’t do, they have little to say about the origins of the Wuhan Virus and how
Santa Clara County ended up with its own pandemic.
"China did a lot of things right at the beginning, like any
country where a virus first shows up," Bill Gates told CNN. In a Washington Post editorial,
he described Microsoft China as a model of whose "roughly 6,200
employees", "about half are now coming in to work."
China is more than the tech industry’s partner: it’s the future.
The social credit system and surveillance society, the skyscrapers and
robotics, the high-speed rail and the massive factories are more than just TED
talks, they’re a grim chrome-plated reality. The censorship, surveillance, and
propaganda deployed by Silicon Valley in response to the pandemic was a Chinese
solution privatized in an American fashion.
Gates, like other Silicon Valley technocrats, has to keep
spreading the myth of Chinese expertise in battling the Wuhan Virus, not just
because Microsoft needs the approval of the Communists, but because the Peeps
are to tech industry technocrats what the Soviet Union with its collective
farms and planned economy was to the New York and Chicago academics of nine
decades ago. The future.
That’s why Democrats have spent the last generation mumbling
that we should be more like China. Perhaps not the forced abortions, organ
trafficking, or camps, but they do make the trains run on time. And California
can’t even manage to build a train. It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley looks
westward even as it uses the pandemic to unleash technodystopian solutions
worthy of three William Gibson novels.
The one thing that China’s Xi and Gates’ corporate culture in
Redmond could agree on is that people are stupid and need to be told what to
do. Most will never do what they’re supposed to unless they’re manipulated,
prodded, and even bullied into doing what the masters of the universe think
they should.
That’s exactly why the tech industry’s monopolies have created a
toxic culture that has infected our culture, poisoned our politics, and is
depriving us of our civil rights. Its number dot zero web divides and conquers,
fragmenting our society along algorithmic lines, creating crises for its own
profit, and then brutally stamping on the consequent conflicts with its unseen
machinery of surveillance and censorship.
Silicon Valley isn’t fixing the pandemic with its control freak
responses, instead it’s worsening it. The tech industry might have learned from
its Chinese cohorts that censorship doesn’t inspire confidence, it creates
distrust, manufacturing a consensus by silencing everyone who disagrees spreads
paranoia.
In a dissentless culture, everyone echoes the propaganda, but no
one really trusts or believes anything.
Control, surveillance, and suppression don’t solve problems.
They just convince members of the elite that the problem is under control.
That’s what the Communist elite accomplished in China. Their lies,
intimidation, and likely killings aren’t fooling the people in the affected
areas, just their bosses.
That’s also how Silicon Valley works. Instead of proverbs from
Mao’s Little Red Book, there are buzzwords. But they all serve the same function,
ghost cities and vaporware, phantom industries and fake economics, entire
Potemkin realities built on lies that fall apart when you pull back the
curtain.
Who really needs this level of control and deceit? Thieves and
liars. The bigger the con, the harder you have to grip the tiger so it doesn’t
eat you. That’s as true in China as it is in California.
Communist China’s dirty little secret is that it doesn’t work.
Its fake economy is built on massive thievery and fraud. If the United States
ever stopped buying its own stolen property back from the Commies, along with
the rest of the world, the whole thing would collapse as badly as Mao’s sparrow
hunt.
American technocrats who insist that we imitate China are
falling for a fraud. And every time the Democrats try to sincerely imitate a
fraud, the whole thing fails miserably on them like all their high-speed rail
projects that never get off the ground and only do one thing at high speed,
spend money.
High-speed rail, like an internet run by a handful of monopolies,
seems very appealing to control freaks. But the American model is two cars in
every garage and a decentralized web that has room for everyone. The pandemic
solution championed by American technocrats envisions one lockdown for everyone
and one token ring to bind them all. People, both Commies and dot commies often
assume, are interchangeable. What holds true in New York will be just as true
in South Carolina or Wyoming.
The Wuhan Virus is a wake-up call about globalization and
centralization. America isn’t just a gear in a global machine, and states
aren’t interchangeable parts in a national puzzle. Americans are as
individualistic as their communities. We’re not glowing dots to be herded by
drones, barked at by public safety announcements, and lied to for our own good
by dot com and gov public-private partnerships.
The tech industry’s monopolies have built a dystopian culture
that has divided neighbors, families and a nation. It’s time to break up
the dystopia, end the monopolies, and rebuild the American community.
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WSJ: Mark Zuckerberg Is
Tightening His Control over Facebook
1
AMY OSBORNE/Getty
30 Apr
20208
2:33
Mark Zuckerberg’s personal control
over the operation of Facebook and its affiliated tech platforms is growing,
according to an in-depth report in the Wall Street
Journal.
The Journal reports that
Zuckerberg is “pushing aside dissenters” as he reasserts control over the
company he founded, and is taking new power over Facebook-owned services like
Instagram and WhatsApp, despite earlier promises to leave the acquired
platforms relatively independent.
Facebook announced the departure of
two directors, and added a longtime friend of Mr. Zuckerberg’s to the board.
The moves were the culmination of the chief executive’s campaign over the past
two years to consolidate decision-making at the company he co-founded 16 years
ago. The 35-year-old tycoon also jumped into action steering Facebook into a
high-profile campaign in the coronavirus response, while putting himself in the
spotlight interviewing prominent health officials and politicians.
The result is a Facebook CEO and
chairman more actively and visibly in charge than he has been in years.
….
Mr. Zuckerberg in 2018 took on the
role of a wartime leader who needed to
act quickly and, sometimes, unilaterally. He announced a series of products
that took Facebook in new directions, starting with the March 2019 announcement
that the company would emphasize private, encrypted messaging instead of the
public posts that made it famous.
As Breitbart News covered in a column
last week, Zuckerberg’s tightening control over the social media giant
coincides with a series of unprecedented acts of censorship, including the
censoring of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. The Facebook CEO has
also described anti-lockdown
protests as “misinformation,” as his company proactively reached out to state
governments to collude in the suppression of the protests’ organization on the
platform.
As Zuckerberg’s control over
Facebook grows, so too does Facebook’s control over the global flow of
information — aided by the ongoing panic over coronavirus “misinformation.”
Are you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter, or any other
tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at
your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email
address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at
Breitbart News.
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants. don't they remind you of how disgusting techies robots are?
Facebook is
Spending Millions to Plant Radical Activists in Local Newspapers
Renting out newsrooms to a left-wing
agenda.
April 29, 2020
Daniel Greenfield
Daniel
Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an
investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic
terrorism
When
the Alliance Defending Freedom helped a local church sue Chattanooga for
banning its drive-in prayer service, the article in the Chattanooga Times Free Press repeated
the Southern Poverty Law Center's smear of the religious civil rights
organization as a hate group. But the reporter who wrote the article was no
ordinary employee. Wyatt Massey was one of the 225 members of Report for
America's 'corps' who are planted in local newsrooms to promote the radical
agendas of the left-wing group.
“Will
Trump’s new public charge rule close door on immigrants’ hope of the American
dream?” Manuel Obed asked at The
Dallas News. Obed has been with the RFA ‘corps’ pushing out
pro-illegal stories.
In
1976, William Garrison, along with two other thugs, broke into a home in
Detroit, killed a man, and shot two other people. When Garrison recently died
of coronavirus, the Detroit
Free Press article treating him like a victim was written by
Angie Jackson, another 'corps' member. Jackson’s beat, according to Report for
America, is “formerly incarcerated citizens re-entering the community.”
While
Report for America claims that it’s funding local journalism, what it’s
actually doing is embedding social justice activists in local papers who are
often targeted at pursuing a narrow political agenda.
Leah
Willingham was placed at the Associated
Press to focus on the "Mississippi state
legislature" and its "actions affecting the poor", Kyeland
Jackson was planted in Twin Cities Public Television to cover the "causes,
effects and solutions to racial disparities in Minnesota", Shivani Patel
was dispatched to the Ventura
County Star to write about “equity in education in the
county”, and Devna Bose was shoved into The
Charlotte Observer to report on "poor and minority communities
in prosperous Charlotte".
The
agenda is often built into the very description of what Report for America’s
activists are doing. Or at least it is to Report for America’s donors who are
told what the activists they fund are doing. But ordinary readers of local
publications and stations are often not told that what they’re reading isn’t
real local reporting: it’s the work of activists funded by a national
organization and its wealthy backers.
The
lack of transparency is dishonest, unethical, and a new low even in the era of
fake news.
The
left-wing foundations and donors aren’t funding journalism, they’re buying
coverage that fits their agenda. And local newspapers are renting out their
newsrooms to wealthy left-wing organizations. Beyond the usual radical foundations like the Ford
Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Knight Foundation, the Facebook
Journalism Project has poured millions of dollars into RFA.
“Local
journalists are providing us with an extraordinary public service 24 hours a
day,” Facebook's Campbell Brown, falsely claimed. “We all need to understand
how the virus is impacting the communities where we live—it’s vital information
that’s helping keep our friends and families safe, and we’re proud to support
Report for America in this effort.”
Except
that Report for America’s model is finding young activists and parachuting them
into local communities to purse some narrow political agenda. That’s not
journalism. 6 of the activists from RFA’s current class will be covering
‘climate change’, 9 will be covering poverty, and 4 will be covering prisons.
Report
for America's focus on identity politics and its base of white lefties
parachuting in to produce agitprop sometimes results ludicrous pairings like
Samuel Bojarski, a Jewish freelance writer from Pittsburgh, being dumped
into The Haitian
Times to cover the Haitian community. But mostly its activists
are young women, some have worked for lefty organizations, and their politics
are predictable.
Facebook
has often been accused of spreading fake news. Here it, along with the Google
News Initiative, which kicked in $400,000, is literally financing a fake news
project which pays half the salaries of the reporters it embeds in local
newsrooms, while its own funding comes from wealthy left-wing groups.
Most
newspapers are happy with the arrangement: it’s the readers who are cheated.
Facebook
has claimed that its Journalism Project will fight fake news, instead it’s
funding it. If the social media monopoly giant wanted to support journalism, it
could do so in any number of ways. By financing Report for America’s activism,
it’s helping fund papers on the condition that they run propaganda.
This
isn’t philanthropy, it’s politics.
Not
only is Facebook financing a political agenda, its funding of RFA represents an
even deeper conflict of interest when the embedded activists from the left-wing
group start functioning as fact checkers. The social media monopoly has used
media fact checkers in an on and off way to censor conservatives.
The
current RFA 'corps' class embedded Clara Hendrickson, of the left-wing
Brookings Institute think tank, into the Detroit Free Press, where she’s tasked with
'fact checking' Michigan politicians for the paper and for the PolitiFact site.
The
conflicts of interest here are so convoluted that they require their own flow
chart.
A
research analyst for a partisan think tank is funded by a left-wing
organization to ‘fact check’ political candidates for a major newspaper which
has already accepted two other embedded RFA activists. PolitiFact then intends
to treat her attacks on Republicans as ‘facts’, and Facebook, which is funding
the whole shebang, will censor conservatives on social media based on her
partisan hit pieces.
Fact
checking already consists of partisan attacks by the media under the guise of
objectivity. RFA is helping the media shelve even the thinnest pretenses of
objectivity and ethics in pursuit of its goals.
Or,
as Hendrickson tweeted, “I'm thrilled to say I'll be joining @freep in
partnership with @PolitiFact as a @report4america corps member, fact-checking
federal, state and local candidates in a key swing state ahead of the 2020
election.” Is ‘fact checking’ federal candidates any more important in a swing
state? It is if your goal isn’t searching for the truth, but helping Joe Biden
win the White House.
Like
its activist, RFA zeroed in on the ‘key swing state’ element to justify
Hendrickson’s role, explaining that, “Michigan’s need for fact-checking is
particularly critical because it has been identified as one of only four true
“swing” states in the 2020 presidential election… additionally, there is a
Senate race in Michigan in 2020 that is widely considered a toss-up.” This
isn’t journalism, it’s an election strategy.
Or,
as PolitiFact Editor Angie Drobnic Holan noted in her gushing statement about
the 'fact checking' site's partnership with a left-wing group, "We intend
to fact-check the messaging of the presidential election, as well as the race
for U.S. Senate." Actual journalists check their own facts. Activists
redefine activism, partisan messaging, and hit pieces as fact checking because
it still fools some people.
Here's
a sample of Clara's commitment to truth and facts, "Spoiler: Trump's
racist rhetoric has encouraged violence in America."
The
only thing the PolitiFact partnership demonstrates is that ‘fact checkers’ are
just as eager to rent out their coverage to wealthy donors as newspapers as
long as it’s for the same left-wing causes.
Brokering
complicated entanglements between wealthy lefty donors, lefty non-profits, and
newspapers into unethical conflicts of interest is one of the few things that
Report for America does well.
The
Kansas City Star accepted three of RFA’s activists who
will all be tasked with finding solutions to gun violence. These solutions will
not involve locking up the shooters and throwing away the key. One of the RFA
activists at the Kansas City Star is Humera Lodhi, a Muslim blogger at
the Huffington Post,
with a fellowship at the Marshall Project, a left-wing pro-crime think tank
that blames gun violence on guns.
The
Star not only managed to bring in an activist who is
funded by one left-wing organization, but two left-wing organizations, while
having her cover the very area of advocacy that is a major focus of the second
organization. It’s hard to imagine how this arrangement could be any more
biased and unethical. But there’s little doubt that Report for America will
find a way.
Report
for America is an initiative of the Ground Truth Project, a non-profit, which
is partnering with for-profit papers, and the Project was born out GlobalPost,
a for-profit organization. GlobalPost was going to use GTP to produce reporting
for it. This conflict of interest went national when GTP was spun off into its
own non-profit and RTA is used to seed content into for-profit publications.
Despite
its peans to journalism, dumping a few activists into local papers and then
paying half their salaries won’t keep local news alive. If anything, it will
help alienate more of the remaining subscribers. RTA is just another venture by
former journalists to monetize the last remains of journalism by turning it
into a political weapon. There’s not much money in journalism, but lots of cash
flowing into politics.
Corrupting,
prostituting, and weaponizing journalism is helping destroy what little
integrity it has.
RTA
is eliminating what little difference there is between the media and political
activism. It’s not alone in the field, but it’s the most successful
organization and has the best financed of any of its rivals. Its founders have
seen the bright future where journalism is a vestigial limb of political
non-profits who instead of buying election ads, buy the whole paper without
having to manage it or pay taxes on it.
And
the whole thing is funded by the dot com monopolies who helped destroy
journalism.
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants. don't they remind you of how disgusting techies robots are?
Free
Speech Platform Parler: ‘Facebook Egregiously Spun Their Six-Year Web of Lies’
29 Apr 20209
2:38
Social media start-up
Parler is once again punching above its weight class, saying that Facebook
ought to pay more than the $5 billion fine recently approved by a federal judge
for the company’s violations of user privacy.
Facebook
agreed last year to pay a record $5 billion fine to the Federal Trade
Commission to settle a government investigation into its privacy
practices. The settlement, which was approved last week by a federal court in
Washington, D.C., also requires Facebook to improve privacy protections for its
2 billion users and report to an independent oversight board.
The
social media giant was caught up in the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which
the personal information of millions of Facebook users was used without their
consent ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Parler
said in a statement Tuesday that $5 billion is inadequate given Facebook’s
valuation, which exceeds $550 billion, and the seriousness of the offense.
“Facebook
conned and misled its community members by using their private information to
build an empire” Parler Chief Marketing Officer Elise Rhodes said in a
statement this week.
“They
got caught with their back against the wall and agreed to stop the abuse.
Facebook then made the conscious and intentional decision to keep exploiting,
plundering, and peddling their community member’s data for every possible penny
with the objective to extract every ounce of flesh. While Facebook egregiously
spun their six-year web of lies, their value exploded to nearly $600 billion.
In that perspective, what’s a $5 billion fine?”
Facebook
has defended the settlement, saying last week that it goes beyond what the law
requires. “The agreement approved today goes beyond anything required by U.S.
law, and we believe that it can and should serve as a roadmap for more
comprehensive privacy regulation, as other parts of the world have explored. We
hope this leads to further progress on developing consistent legislation in the
U.S. and elsewhere,” Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Michel Protti said in a statement.
“Ultimately,
our goal is to honor people’s privacy and focus on doing what’s right for
people. We believe that’s what the billions of people who use our products
expect from us, and we’re going to keep doing that work for them.”
Parler,
which launched in 2018, promotes itself as a politically unbiased
platform that protects its users’ rights.
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants. don't they remind you of how disgusting techies robots are?
Facebook Admits Banning Users
for Saying They Are ‘Proud to Be English’4
Lee Haywood via Flickr (Creative Commons)
27 Apr 2020306
2:22
Facebook has admitted
to banning swathes of users for posting messages saying they were “Proud to be
English” on St George’s Day.
As
England’s patron saint, St George’s Day has long been celebrated as the English
national day — if with less official enthusiasm than St Patrick’s Day in
neighbouring Ireland, given the embarrassment of much of the academic, media,
and political establishment at expressions of “Englishness”, which they have
associated with racism and imperialism.
Someone,
some group, or some algorithm moderating also appears to have bought into this
mentality, with people who marked St George’s Day with messages expressing
pride in the country and their heritage reporting that they were banned from
the social media platform.
An
image bearing the legend “Proud to Be English” and two crossed flagpoles
carrying the English St George’s Cross and the white lion on a red field — a
banner associated with Anglo-Saxons — appears to have proved particularly
offensive to the so-called “Masters of the Universe“.
Users
who shared the image reported receiving messages informing them they
had been subject to various bans and suspensions because they had posted
content which “goes against our Community Standards on dangerous individuals
and organisations”.
UK Health Sec Thanks Muslims for Lockdown
‘Sacrifice’ on St George’s Day, Doesn’t Mention St George’s Day https://t.co/3Xg9E5XZUt
Facebook
would eventually confirm that claims they were banning people for the “Proud to
be English” posts were true — but that this was “likely” a “mistake”.
“We’re
investigating what happened. Our team reviews millions of pages, posts and
images each week and we occasionally make a mistake, as has likely happened
here,” a spokesman said in comments reported by The Sun.
“We
have removed any restrictions placed on the impacted accounts,” they continued,
adding that “We apologise for any upset caused.”
Hostility
to St George’s Day in 2020 was not just limited to Big Tech and establishment
figures, however, with one couple who celebrated the English national day by
putting up a model of the country’s patron saint holding a sign saying “The NHS
will slay Covid-19” — a reference to his legendary dragon-slaying exploits —
having their home vandalised with “NAZI” graffiti and
50 bags of dog faeces thrown into the garden.
Home of Couple Celebrating St George's
Day Defaced with Dog Dirt and 'NAZI' Graffiti https://t.co/5ofesIg5fW
Follow Jack Montgomery on Twitter: @JackBMontgomery
Follow Breitbart London on Facebook: Breitbart London
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants. don't they remind you of how disgusting techies robots are?
Josh
Hawley: GOP Must Defend Middle Class Americans Against ‘Concentrated Corporate
Power,’ Tech Billionaires
The
Republican Party must defend America’s working and middle class against
“concentrated corporate power” and the monopolization of entire sectors of the
United States’ economy, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) says.
In
an interview on The Realignment podcast, Hawley said that “long gone
are the days where” American workers can depend on big business to look out for
their needs and the needs of their communities.
Instead,
Hawley explained that increasing “concentrated corporate power” of whole
sectors of the American economy — specifically among Silicon Valley’s giant
tech conglomerates — is at the expense of working and middle class Americans.
“One
of the things Republicans need to recover today is a defense of an open,
free-market, of a fair healthy competing market and the length between that and
Democratic citizenship,” Hawley said, and continued:
At
the end of the day, we are trying to support and sustain here a great
democracy. We’re not trying to make a select group of people rich. They’ve
already done that. The tech billionaires are already billionaires, they don’t
need any more help from government. I’m not interested in trying to help them
further. I’m interested in trying to help sustain the great middle of this
country that makes our democracy run and that’s the most important challenge of
this day.
“You
have these businesses who for years now have said ‘Well, we’re based in the
United States, but we’re not actually an American company, we’re a global
company,'” Hawley said. “And you know, what has driven profits for some of our
biggest multinational corporations? It’s been … moving jobs overseas where it’s
cheaper … moving your profits out of this country so you don’t have to pay any
taxes.”
“I
think that we have here at the same time that our economy has become more
concentrated, we have bigger and bigger corporations that control more and more
of our key sectors, those same corporations see themselves as less and less
American and frankly they are less committed to American workers and American
communities,” Hawley continued. “That’s turned out to be a problem which is one
of the reasons we need to restore good, healthy, robust competition in this
country that’s going to push up wages, that’s going to bring jobs back to the
middle parts of this country, and most importantly, to the middle and working
class of this country.”
While
multinational corporations monopolize industries, Hawley said the GOP must
defend working and middle class Americans and that big business interests
should not come before the needs of American communities:
A
free market is one where you can enter it, where there are new ideas, and also
by the way, where people can start a small family business, you shouldn’t have
to be gigantic in order to succeed in this country. Most people don’t want to
start a tech company. [Americans] maybe want to work in their family’s
business, which may be some corner shop in a small town … they want to be
able to make a living and then give that to their kids or give their kids an
option to do that. [Emphasis added]
The
problem with corporate concentration is that it tends to kill all of that. The
worst thing about corporate concentration is that it inevitably believes to a
partnership with big government. Big business and big government always
get together, always. And that is exactly what has happened now with the tech
sector, for instance, and arguably many other sectors where you have this
alliance between big government and big business … whatever you call it, it’s a
problem and it’s something we need to address. [Emphasis added]
Hawley
blasted the free trade-at-all-costs doctrine that has dominated the Republican
and Democrat Party establishments for decades, crediting the globalist economic
model with hollowing “out entire industries, entire supply chains” and sending
them to China, among other countries.
“The
thing is in this country is that not only do we not make very much stuff
anymore, we don’t even make the machines that make the stuff,” Hawley said.
“The entire supply chain up and down has gone overseas, and a lot of it to
China, and this is a result of policies over some decades now.”
As
Breitbart News reported, Hawley detailed in the interview how Republicans like
former President George H.W. Bush’s ‘New World Order’ agenda and Democrats have
helped to create a corporatist economy that disproportionately benefits the
nation’s richest executives and donor class.
The
billionaire class, the top 0.01 percent of earners, has enjoyed more than 15 times as much wage growth as the
bottom 90 percent since 1979. That economy has been reinforced with federal rules
that largely benefits the wealthiest of wealthiest earners. A study released last month revealed that the richest
Americans are, in fact, paying a lower tax rate than all other Americans.
Image of neo-fascist runt mark zuckerberg and his groveling, ass-kissing sycophants. don't they remind you of how disgusting techies robots are?
Tucker
Carlson Exposes D.C. ‘Conservatives’ for Doing Big Tech’s Bidding
Rich Polk/Getty
ALLUM
BOKHARI
21
Dec 20190
3:53
Fox News host Tucker
Carlson slammed establishment conservatives for taking money from big tech
companies to do their bidding, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Friday
night.
The
popular host, known for his no-holds-barred denunciations of establishment
conservatives as well as Democrats, revealed massive spending by the
establishment conservative Koch Foundation to protect big tech in Washington.
Tucker
revealed that Americans for Prosperity, a “purportedly conservative group”
controlled by the Kochs, launched an ad campaign trying to stave off the
closing net of antitrust enforcement against Google and Facebook. The ads
targeted Republican and Democrat state attorneys general that were
investigating alleged antitrust violations by big tech companies.
The
Koch-funded group also targeted members of the Senate Judiciary Committee with
digital ads urging them to “oppose any effort to use antitrust laws to break up
America’s innovative tech companies,” reported Carlson.
The
Fox host ran through a laundry list of allegedly “conservative” D.C. think
tanks that take money from big tech, and often advocate against regulating them
over political bias or any other matter.
“In
all, the Koch network quietly spent at least $10 million defending Silicon
Valley companies that work to silence conservatives.”
Tucker Carlson Slamming
Conservative Inc. for Defending Big Tech
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."
Tucker Calls Out
-Kochs
-Heritage Foundation
-American Conservative Union
-AEI
"Big Tech Companies silence Conservatives, Conservative Non-Profits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it."
“Google
has given money to at least 22 right-leaning institutions that are also funded
by the Koch network,” reported Carlson.
“Those
institutions include the American Conservative Union, the American Enterprise
Institute, the National Review Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
the Heritage Foundation, and the Mercatus Center.”
Carlson
explained that this spending gets results.
“In
September of 2018, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups
funded by Google and the Kochs sent a joint letter to the Attorney General
at the time, Jeff Sessions, expressing grave concerns over the DoJ’s plans to
look into whether search engines and social media were hurting competition and
stifling speech.”
Carlson
also called out The Heritage Foundation, arguing that its shilling for big tech
meant that it “no longer represents the interest of conservatives, at least on
the question of tech.”
“A
recent paper by Heritage, entitled ‘Free Enterprise Is the Best Remedy For Online Bias
Concerns,’ defends the special privileges that Congress has given
to left-wing Silicon Valley monopolies. And if conservatives don’t like it,
Heritage says, well they can just start their own Google!”
Evidence
of big tech’s efforts to co-opt establishment conservatives has been
accumulating for some time. In March, Breitbart News published leaked audio from
a senior director of public policy at Google, talking about using
funding of conservative institutions to “steer” the movement. Another part of the leaked audio
transcript was also revealed on Tucker Carlson’s show at the same time.
The
Heritage Foundation has continued to defend big
tech against efforts to strip them of their special legal privileges, which
were given to them by Congress in the 1990s and are enjoyed by no other type of
company.
This
is despite the fact that Google publicly snubbed the foundation last year,
canceling the formation of a planned “A.I ethics” council after far-left
employees of the tech company threw a hissy fit over
the fact that Heritage president Kay Coles James was set to be one of its
members.
Are
you an insider at Google, Facebook, Twitter or any other tech company who wants
to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach
out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com.
Allum
Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom,
with the nation’s widest gap between middle
and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57 percent—and
its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live in Los
Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the highest
property crime rate among major cities.
December 20, 2019
California Preening
The Golden State is on a path to high-tech feudalism, but there’s
still time to change course.
“We are the modern equivalent of the ancient city-states of Athens
and Sparta. California has the ideas of Athens and the power of Sparta,” declared then-governor Arnold
Schwarzenegger in 2007. “Not only can we lead California into the future . . .
we can show the nation and the world how to get there.” When a movie star who
once played Hercules says so who’s to disagree? The idea of California as a
model, of course, precedes the former governor’s tenure. Now the state’s
anti-Trump resistance—in its zeal on matters concerning climate, technology, gender, or race—believes
that it knows how to create a just, affluent, and enlightened society. “The
future depends on us,” Governor Gavin Newsom said at his inauguration. “And we will
seize this moment.”
In truth, the Golden State is becoming a semi-feudal kingdom,
with the nation’s widest gap between
middle and upper incomes—72 percent, compared with the U.S. average of 57
percent—and its highest poverty rate. Roughly half of America’s homeless live
in Los Angeles or San Francisco, which now has the
highest property crime rate among major cities. California hasn’t yet become a full-scale dystopia, of course, but
it’s heading in a troubling direction.
This didn’t have to happen. No place on earth has more going for
it than the Golden State. Unlike the East Coast and Midwest, California benefited
from comparatively late industrialization, with an economy based less on auto
manufacturing and steel than on science-based fields like aerospace, software,
and semiconductors. In the mid-twentieth century, the state also gained from
the best aspects of progressive rule, culminating in an elite public university
system, a massive water system reminiscent of the Roman Empire, and a vast
infrastructure network of highways, ports, and bridges. The state was
fortunate, too, in drawing people from around the U.S. and the world. The
eighteenth-century French traveler J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur described the American as “this new man,” and California—innovative,
independent, and less bound by tradition or old prejudice—reflected that
insight. Though remnants of this California still exist, its population is
aging, less mobile, and more pessimistic, and its roads, schools, and
universities are in decline.
In the second half of the twentieth century, California’s
remarkably diverse economy spread prosperity from the coast into the state’s
inland regions. Though pockets of severe poverty existed—urban barrios, south
Los Angeles, the rural Central Valley—they were limited in scope. In
fact, growth often favored suburban and
exurban communities, where middle-class families, including minorities, settled
after World War II.
In the last two decades, the state has adopted policies that
undermine the basis for middle-class growth. State energy policies, for
example, have made California’s gas and electricity prices among the steepest
in the country. Since 2011, electricity prices have risen five times faster than the
national average. Meantime, strict land-use controls have raised housing costs
to the nation’s highest, while taxes—once average, considering
California’s urban scale—now exceed those of virtually every state. At the same time, California’s economy has shed industrial
diversity in favor of dependence on one industry: Big Tech. Just a decade
before, the state’s largest firms included those in the aerospace, finance,
energy, and service industries. Today’s 11 largest companies hail from the tech
sector, while energy firms—excluding Chevron, which has moved much of its
operations to Houston—have disappeared. Not a single top
aerospace firm—the iconic industry of twentieth-century California—retains its
headquarters here.
Though lionized in the press, this tech-oriented economy hasn’t
resulted in that many middle- and high-paying job opportunities for
Californians, particularly outside the Bay Area. Since 2008, notes Chapman
University’s Marshall Toplansky, the state has created five times the number of
low-paying, as opposed to high-wage, jobs. A remarkable 86 percent of new jobs
paid below the median income, while almost half paid under $40,000. Moreover,
California, including Silicon Valley, created fewer high-paying positions than
the national average, and far less than prime competitors like Salt Lake City,
Seattle, or Austin. Los Angeles County features the lowest pay of any of the
nation’s 50 largest counties.
No state advertises its multicultural bona fides more than
California, now a majority-minority state. This is evident at the University of California, where professors
are required to prove their service to “people of color,” to the state’s high school curricula, with its new ethnic
studies component. Much of California’s anti-Trump resistance has a racial
context. State Attorney General Xavier Becerra has sued the administration
numerous times over immigration policy while he helps ensure California’s
distinction as a sanctuary for illegal immigrants. So far, more than 1 million illegal residents have received
driver’s licenses, and they qualify for free health care, too. San Francisco
now permits illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.
Such radical policies may make progressives feel better about
themselves, though they seem less concerned about how these actions affect
everyday people. California’s Latinos and African-Americans have seen good
blue-collar jobs in manufacturing and energy vanish. According to one United Way study, over half of Latino
households can barely pay their bills. “For Latinos,” notes long-time political
consultant Mike Madrid, “the California Dream is
becoming an unattainable fantasy.”
In the past, poorer Californians could count on education to help
them move up. But today’s educators appear more interested in political
indoctrination than results. Among the 50 states, California ranked 49th in the performance of low-income
students. In wealthy San Francisco, test scores for black students are the
worst of any California county. Many minority residents, especially
African-Americans, are fleeing the state. In a recent UC Berkeley poll, 58
percent of black expressed interest in leaving California, a higher percentage
than for any racial group, though approximately 45 percent of Asians and
Latinos also considered moving out.
Perhaps the biggest demographic disaster is generational. For
decades, California incubated youth culture, creating trends like beatniks,
hippies, surfers, and Latino and Asian art, music, and cuisine. The state is a
fountainhead of youthful wokeness and rebellion, but that may
prove short-lived as millennials leave. From 2014 to 2018, notes demographer
Wendell Cox, net domestic out-migration grew from 46,000 to 156,000. The exiles
are increasingly in their family-formation years. In the 2010s, California
suffered higher net declines in virtually every age category under 54, with the
biggest rate of loss coming among the 35-to-44 cohort.
As families with children leave, and international migration slows
to one-third of Texas’s level, the remaining population is rapidly aging. Since
2010, California’s fertility rate has dropped 60 percent, more than the
national average; the state is now aging 50 percent more rapidly than the rest
of the country. A growing number of tech firms and millennials have headed to
the Intermountain West. Low rates of
homeownership among younger people play a big role in this trend, with
California millennials forced to rent, with little
chance of buying their own home, while many of the state’s biggest metros lead the nation in long-term owners. California is increasingly a greying refuge for those who bought
property when housing was affordable.
After Governor Schwarzenegger morphed into a progressive
environmentalist, climate concerns began driving state policy. His successors
have embraced California “leadership” on climate issues. Jerry Brown recently told a crowd in China that the
rest of the world should follow California’s example. The state’s top
Democrats, like state senate president pro tem Kevin DeLeon, Los Angeles mayor
Eric Garcetti, and billionaire Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer,
now compete for the green mantle.
Their policies have worsened conditions for many
middle- and working-class Californians. Oblivious to these concerns, Greens
ignore practical ideas—nuclear power, natural gas cars, job creation in
affordable areas, home-based work—that could help reduce emissions without
disrupting people’s lives. Ultra-green policies also work against the
state’s proclaimed goal of building
more than 3.5 million new housing units by 2025. In accordance with its efforts
to reduce car use, the state mandates that most growth occurs in
already-crowded coastal areas, where land prices are highest. But in cities
like San Francisco, the cost of building one unit for a homeless
person surpasses $700,000. California’s inland regions, though experiencing
population gains, keep losing state funding for decrepit highways in favor of
urban-centric, mass transit projects—yet transit use has stagnated, especially
in greater Los Angeles.
The state, nevertheless, continues its pursuit of policies that
would eliminate all fossil fuels and nuclear power—outpacing national or even
Paris Accord levels and guaranteeing ever-rising energy prices. Mandating
everything from electric cars to electric homes will only
drive more working-class Californians into “energy poverty.” High energy prices
also directly affect the manufacturing and logistics firms that employ
blue-collar workers at decent wages. Business relocation expert Joe Vranich notes that industrial firms
account for many of the 2,000 employers that left the state this decade.
California’s industrial growth has fallen to the bottom tier of states; last year, it
ranked 44th, with a rate of growth one-third to one-quarter that of prime
competitors like Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Nevada, and Florida.
Similarly, the high energy prices tend to hit the interior
counties that, besides being poorer, have far less temperate climates. Cities
like Bakersfield, capital of the state’s
once-vibrant oil industry, are particularly hard-hit. High energy prices will
cost the region, northeast of the Los Angeles Basin, 14,000 generally high-paid
jobs, even as the state continues to import oil from Saudi Arabia.
California’s leaders apply climate change to excuse virtually
every failure of state policy. During the California drought, Brown and his minions blamed the
“climate” for the dry period, refusing to take responsibility for insufficient water storage that would have
helped farmers. When the rains returned and reservoirs filled, this argument
was forgotten, and little effort has been made to conserve water for next time.
Likewise, Newsom and his supporters in the media have blamed recent fires on
changes in the global climate, but the disaster had as much to do with green
mandates against controlled burns and brush clearance than anything
occurring on a planetary scale. Brown joined greens and others in blocking such sensible
policies.
Few climate advocates ever seem to ask if their policies actually
help the planet. Indeed, California’s green policy, as one paper demonstrates, may be
increasing total greenhouse-gas emissions by pushing people and industries to
states with less mild climates. In the past decade, the state ranked 40th in
per-capita reductions, and its global carbon footprint is minimal. Renewable
energy may be expensive and unreliable, but state policy nevertheless enriches the green-energy investments
of tech leaders, even when their efforts—like
the Google-backed Ivanpah solar farm—fail to deliver
affordable, reliable energy.
It’s not so surprising, given these enthusiasms, that progressive
politicians like Garcetti—who leads a city with paralyzing
traffic congestion, rampant inequality, a huge rat infestation, and proliferating
homeless camps—would rather talk about becoming chair of the C40 Cities Climate
Leadership Group.
Reality is asserting itself, though. Tech firms already show signs
of restlessness with the current regulatory regime and appear to be
shifting employment to other states, notably Texas, Tennessee, Nevada, Colorado, and Arizona. Economic-modeling firm Emsi estimates that several
states—Idaho, Tennessee, Washington, and Utah—are growing their tech employment
faster than California. The state is losing momentum in professional and
technical services—the largest high-wage sector—and now stands roughly in the
middle of the pack behind other western states such as Texas, Tennessee, and
Florida. And Assembly Bill 5, the state law regulating certain forms of contract labor, reclassifies part-time workers.
Aimed initially at ride-sharing giants Uber and Lyft, the legislation also extends to
independent contractors in industries from media to trucking.
At some point, as even Brown noted, the ultra-high capital
gains returns will fall and, combined with the costs of an expanding welfare
state, could leave the state in fiscal chaos. Big Tech could stumble, a
possibility made more real by the recent $100 billion drop in the value of
privately held “unicorn” companies, including WeWork. If the tech economy
slows, a rift could develop between two of the state’s biggest forces—unions
and the green establishment—over future levels of taxation. More than two-thirds of California cities don’t
have any funds set aside for retiree health care and other retirement expenses.
The state also confronts $1 trillion in pension debt, according to former
Democratic state senator Joe Nation. U.S. News & Report ranks
California, despite the tech boom, 42nd in fiscal health among the states.
The good news: some Californians are waking up. A recent PPIC poll found that
increasing proportions of Californians believe that the state is headed in the
wrong direction—a figure that exceeds 55 percent in the inland areas. And
voters dislike the state legislature even more than
they dislike Donald Trump. Newsom’s approval rating stands at 43 percent, placing him toward the bottom among the nation’s governors. A conservative-led campaign to
recall him is unlikely to succeed, but surveys reveal growing opposition to the new tax hikes proposed
by the legislature. There’s a growing concern about the state’s expanding
homeless population.
And a rebellion against the state’s energy policies is already
under way. Recently, 110 cities, with total population exceeding 8 million, have demanded changes
in California’s drive to prevent new natural gas hookups. The state’s Chamber
of Commerce and the three most prominent ethnic
chambers—African-American, Latino, and Asian-Pacific—have joined this
effort.
Californians need less bombast and progressive pretense from their
leaders and more attention to policies that could counteract the economic and
demographic tides threatening the state. On its current course, California
increasingly resembles a model of what the late Taichi Sakaiya called
“high-tech feudalism,” with a small population of wealthy residents and a
growing mass of modern-day serfs. Delusion and preening ultimately have limits,
as more Californians are beginning to recognize. As the 2020s beckon, the time
for the state to change course is now.
Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in
urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for
Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for
the Rest of Us. His book on the return to
feudalism will be released next year.
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