America Faces No Greater Threat Than Joe Biden and the Democrat Party. Their Assault to Our Borders Is As Great As Their Assault to Free Speech and Free Elections
Friday, August 4, 2023
JOE BIDEN - IF WE CONTROL FREE SPEECH, WE BUILD THE GREATEST GLOBALIST REGIME WITH NO BORDERS SINCE BARACK OBAMA AND HIS BANKSTERS
The Biden regime has an ever-lengthening record of opposition to the freedom of speech: the abortive Disinformation Governance Board, the Twitter Files revelations that regime apparatchiks pressured Twitter to remove dissenting tweets, the weaponization of the “Justice” Department against the regime’s principal opponent, and on and on.
It thus comes as no surprise that the regime pressured Facebook, as well as Twitter, to remove posts that dissented from its line on COVID-19. What’s striking is that the regime even hassled Zuckerberg’s wonks to take down jokes making fun of the regime’s line on the COVID vaccines.
As Thomas More put it long ago, “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.” Neither can authoritarian regimes. Someone in National Socialist Germany who tossed off even the most harmless little quip about Hitler or made Stalin the punchline in the international Socialist Soviet Union was looking at prison and hard labor.
The Biden regime isn’t quite that evil (yet), but it is no less impatient with ridicule. After all, it was Communist strategist Saul Alinsky who pointed out the power of ridicule as a rhetorical weapon against the class enemy: it was infuriating to be on the receiving end, and there was no adequate response. Ridicule is supposed to be a weapon Leftists use, not one that is used against them.
This revelation came from an unnamed Facebook vice president who was “in charge of content policy,” according to a Friday report in the Wall Street Journal. The veep explains, “We were under pressure from the administration and others to do more.” Strikingly, this Facebook wonk adds, “We shouldn’t have done it.” Wait, what? Someone who is against government censorship is a vice president at Facebook? Someone who believes in the freedom of speech is in a position of influence over content in Mark Zuckerberg’s shop? No wonder this person opted to remain anonymous in the WSJ report. Come out for freedom at Facebook, and you’re likely to be pounding the pavement looking for work the next day.
Yet it does seem as if there was pushback from Facebook to the regime’s authoritarian initiative. The Facebook vice president said in an internal email, “There is likely a significant gap between what the WH would like us to remove and what we are comfortable removing. The WH has previously indicated that it thinks humor should be removed if it is premised on the vaccine having side effects, so we expect it would similarly want to see humor about vaccine hesitancy removed.”
Even more strangely, Facebook’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, replied, “I can’t see Mark in a million years being comfortable with removing that — and I wouldn’t recommend it.” Mark Zuckerberg uncomfortable with censorship? What planet were these people on, anyway?
It wasn’t actually that they were revealing themselves to be stalwart defenders of free inquiry. Instead, they were just afraid that removing dissident posts might backfire: “In some of the emails,” the Journal reports, “Facebook executives expressed concern that removing posts in which Americans expressed hesitation about getting vaccinated could actually make them less likely to get a shot.”
One Facebook wonk explained, “There may be risk of pushing them further toward hesitancy by suppressing their speech and making them feel marginalized by large institutions.” Also, “removing such posts could also fuel conspiracy theories about a coverup related to the safety of vaccines.” Can’t have that!
The regime, of course, is insisting that everything was on the up and up. White House spokesditz Karine Jean-Pierre declared, “We have consistently made it clear that we believe social-media companies have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects of their platforms that they have on the American people while making independent decisions about the content of their platforms.” Independent!
A House Democrat spokesman pointed out that Facebook “often disagreed with the White House and denied the Administration’s requests and every witness we have interviewed has confirmed that only Meta made decisions about how to enforce its own terms of service.”
This is not as exculpatory as the Dems wish it were. The fact that the regime pressured Facebook to remove dissident posts was bad enough. If Facebook had some wiggle room in which to refuse, great, but the White House’s demand was bad enough in itself. What should have been the foremost defender of the First Amendment was and is its foremost foe. And that hasn’t changed.
Thomas Jefferson was no fan of newspapers but, when asked about choosing between government without newspapers and newspapers without government, famously answered that he would not hesitate to choose the latter. His observation reflected two things. Firstly, and obviously, newspapers were the dominant medium of his day and, secondly, he profoundly suspected government and, therefore, saw newspapers as a check on unfettered power. Today’s social media, though, would give him pause, for it is the government’s ally, not its watcher.
In recent months, thanks to Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files, the Facebook documents that the Judiciary Committee obtained, and other damning social media discoveries, we now know that the White House (aka The Democrat Party) and an assortment of governmental agencies have persistently exerted heavy influence, including monetary payoffs, to control information on social media. Subpoenaed documents from other firms like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are supposed to be forthcoming and may reveal more.
We finally are having confirmed those suspicions that Democrats (including social media) have for years denounced as conspiracy theories. Yes, there was shadow banning; yes, Russians were not overwhelming us with disinformation; and yes, people were being deplatformed, censored, and locked out of their accounts. But just how big of a deal is this?
To answer that question, you first must have a handle on social media’s significance and influence overall. Few Americans do, believing this is just another iteration of media evolution.
Over the centuries and decades, the balance of power has shifted amongst various media (e.g., in-person speeches, newspapers, books, theater, radio, magazines, billboards, television, movies, etc.) While newspapers may have been the dominant medium in Jefferson’s day, they were not pervasive. A relatively small portion of the population had access to them, and word of mouth still represented a powerful competitor.
As this pervasiveness escalated, so did the emergence of alternative media—radio and then television—keeping that power balance somewhat in check. However, since the advent of the internet, particularly over the last decade, the significance of virtually all other media has been diminished dramatically by a new competitor—the digital leviathan.
Whether the digital format is audio, video, news websites, advertising, or social media, it is expanding as old-world media have been relegated to niche or dying. Pew tells us that more than 8 in 10 U.S. adults now get their news digitally from their smartphone, computer, or tablet—far more than any other format.
Okay, but isn’t social media merely one of the many influential digital channels impacting information flow and opinion formation? Well, not quite. More accurately, it is the 800 pound-gorilla in a rapidly shrinking cage.
Since the advent of the smartphone, social media has absolutely exploded, with American usage rocketing from 5% in 2005 to over 70% today. Some estimates indicate that as much as 38% of all internet time today is devoted to social media. Part of the reason for the meteoric rise is that access to information is as simple as reaching in your pocket. It is estimated that Americans now spend about one-third of their waking hours on their mobile phones—about 4.1 hours per day—with 7 of every 10 minutes spent on social media.
Facebook, which also owns two other surging social media firms (Instagram and WhatsApp), remains the social media king, commanding 53% of all usage. The statistics regarding adoption rates, minutes of use, and influence is mind numbing. In his meticulously researched book, The Four, Scott Galloway calls Facebook “the most successful thing in the history of humankind.” Seventy-four percent of Facebook’s nearly 3 billion users visit the site daily, and more than half of them visit it several times per day.
While not matching Facebook in users, 70% of U.S. journalists identify it as the site they use most for their jobs. Along with its hashtag system, this gives Twitter a strong magnifying effect.
One of the fastest-rising stars in social media is TikTok, an app launched in 2016 that specializes in short videos. Its usership mushroomed to over one billion in just five years—a milestone that took twice as long for Facebook to reach. But if you thought that TikTok was merely the place for dancing bikini-clad girls and guys performing unadvisable skateboard stunts, think again. A quarter of adults under the age of 30 now report getting their news from this source.
Importantly, brevity is the key to success with social media. It feeds on headlines, bite-sized stories, and videos, that is, things that can be consumed in 60 seconds or less. Thus, what matters isn’t any in-depth content and analysis; what matters is how the information appears at a glance.
In sum, social media is the dominant and growing digital channel, and the 5” x 3” screen is now the dominant device for that channel. Social media sites are the central educational, social, and economic window in most Americans’ lives.
When you have the power to promote or disparage a given person, claim, or story, or as importantly, prevent that claim or story from even appearing on that screen, preventing tens of millions, perhaps, even billions of eyes from even seeing it, you wield more power than Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst could ever have imagined. Some would go so far as to say such power could even influence national elections.
So how big of a deal is it that The White House, governmental agencies, and the world’s most influential social media companies all colluded to push false narratives and censor true information on social media? It’s overwhelmingly important.
Referring solely to the Twitter Files revelation, author John Daniel Davidson has declared that it is “one of the most important news stories of our time,” adding that it
encompasses, and to a large extent connects, every major political scandal of the Trump-Biden era. Put simply, the Twitter Files reveal an unholy alliance between Big Tech and the deep state designed to throttle free speech and maintain an official narrative through censorship and propaganda.
Given Jefferson’s view on media and government, consider how horrified he would have been at another proposition—not only a government with newspapers (social media), but a government controlling the newspapers (social media). That is where we are today. And it is a very big deal, indeed.
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New materials obtained by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), have shed further light on the Biden White House’s efforts to influence Facebook — even asking about algorithm changes to make its preferred media sources more visible to users.
In the latest round of disclosures, which Rep. Jordan is calling “The Facebook Files,” Biden White House digital strategy director Rob Flaherty can be seen suggesting Facebook change its algorithm to promote corporate establishment media including The New York Times over competitors, including Tomi Lahren and the Daily Wire.
“If you were to change the algorithm so that people were more likely to see NYT, WSJ, any authoritative news source over Daily Wire, Tomi Lahren, polarizing people,” said Flaherty. “You wouldn’t have a mechanism to check the material impact?”
This is the latest release in Rep. Jordan’s Facebook Files, a cache of communications between Facebook and the Biden White House which were only obtained after the Judiciary Committee brought considerable pressure to bear on the tech company, including a threat to hold Mark Zuckerberg in contempt of Congress.
It’s not the first time that Flaherty’s name has come up. More emails between Biden’s point man on digital strategy and Facebook officials have been released through Missouri v. Biden, showing Flaherty pressuring Facebook to spy on and censor users on WhatsApp, a supposedly encrypted private messaging platform.
Rob Flaherty / LinkedIn
In an email to Facebook officials disclosed through the lawsuit, Flaherty asked how Facebook could prevent “misinformation” on WhatsApp if they couldn’t see people’s messages.
“If you can’t see the message, I’m genuinely curious—how do you know what kinds of messages you’ve cut down on?”
In another email, Flaherty tore into Facebook for not reducing the spread of “vaccine-skeptical” content.
“I care mostly about what actions and changes you’re making to ensure you’re not making our country’s vaccine hesitancy problem worse,” he wrote. “I still don’t have a good, empirical answer on how effective you’ve been at reducing the spread of vaccine-skeptical content and misinformation to vaccine fence sitters.”
Brooks tried to explain why so many millions of Americans suffer from the elitist-run economy of outsourcing, wage-cutting migration, woke language, urban wealth, chaotic transgenderism, and racial favoritism.
Zuckerberg Lobbyist Pressures NYT Columnist Back into the Bubble
A New York Times columnist is escaping from the establishment’s bubble, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s D.C. lobbyist is trying to scare him back inside.
“What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?” columnist David Brooks wrote in an August 2 article published seven years after ordinary Americans put Donald Trump into the White House.
Brooks tried to explain why so many millions of Americans suffer from the elitist-run economy of outsourcing, wage-cutting migration, woke language, urban wealth, chaotic transgenderism, and racial favoritism.
Thousands of New Yorkers took to the streets of Manhattan to participate on the Reclaim Pride Coalition’s (RPC) fifth annual Queer Liberation March. (Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty Images)
“Members of our class are always publicly speaking out for the marginalized, but somehow we always end up building systems that serve ourselves,” Brooks wrote:
The most important of those systems is the modern meritocracy. We built an entire social order that sorts and excludes people on the basis of the quality that we possess most: academic achievement. Highly educated parents go to elite schools, marry each other, work at high-paying professional jobs and pour enormous resources into our children, who get into the same elite schools, marry each other and pass their exclusive class privileges down from generation to generation.
…
Armed with all kinds of economic, cultural and political power, we support policies that help ourselves. Free trade makes the products we buy cheaper, and our jobs are unlikely to be moved to China. Open immigration makes our service staff cheaper, but new, less-educated immigrants aren’t likely to put downward pressure on our wages.
Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.
So the wealthiest elites with Wall Street money are trying to scare Brooks back into the bubble.
“Yeesh,” tweeted Todd Schulte, the president of Mark Zuckerberg’s FWD.us pro-migration lobbying group for coastal investors:
I dont care to engage much with the rest of this piece, but the implication that that “open immigration” is good for rich people but hurts the wages of middle class Americans is completely false. @nytdavidbrooksif you’re interested in correcting this, please reach out.
Schulte will have a hard time persuading Brooks that immigration does not cut wages because Schulte has repeatedly argued that migration does indeed cut wages.
Central American migrants, part of a caravan hoping to reach the U.S. border. (AP Photo/Moises Castillo)
For example, in 2023, Schulte’s FWD.us touted an economic study that argued that migration cuts wages, saying:
When labor is in short supply relative to demand, employers offer higher wages, which are in turn passed on to consumers, leading to rising prices. While these worker shortages have occurred for many reasons, a significant driver is the lower number of immigrants who have entered the U.S. in the past several years.
…
The presence of an immigrant workforce typically can help local communities mitigate sudden labor shortages, particularly in industries such as construction and hospitality. But, as immigration decreased before and during the pandemic, these jobs remained largely unfilled, leading to extreme labor shortages and rising wages. In other words, inflation rose in part because of a tightening labor market.
But FWD.us is a self-serving advocacy organization, not a disinterested academic center.
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Zuckerberg’s FWD.us network of coastal investors stands to gain from more government-provided cheap labor, consumers, and urban renters. The investor group is backing legislation that would accelerate the inflow of consumers, unskilled workers, and skilled workers into the U.S. economy, where they can help spike the investors’ stock market shares.
And Schulte’s FWD.us has many friends at the New York Times.
Yet an increasing share of Americans — including some elites — recognize the economic skew imposed by migration.
“This country has prioritized the importation of cheap labor,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) wrote in his book, titled Decades of Decadence: How Our Spoiled Elites Blew America’s Inheritance of Liberty, Security, and Prosperity.
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) speaks at the Heritage Foundation on March 29, 2022. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
“It began, as many of America’s problems do, with the fundamental shift toward a globalized economy,” Rubio wrote:
But not every business could be exported, which meant Wall Street simply figured out how to import cheap labor, much of it [clarification, not all] coming from illegal immigrants. This was a slower, more subtle process. Sure, some politicians made a big deal about “jobs Americans wouldn’t do,” but otherwise the only outcry came from workers who found their wages stalled, benefits cut, and hours slashed until they could be replaced by someone willing to work more hours for less.
More often than not, it is about jobs Wall Street doesn’t want Americans to do because hiring Americans would require higher wages and better working conditions. To them, it is better to import cheap labor and buy off Americans with cash welfare programs provided by the government.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said he wants more productivity, not more migration, in a July 31 economic speech in New Hampshire:
We need a strong and fair labor market. We have to secure our border, we have to stop illegal immigration, we need to end things like chain migration and the diversity visa lottery. We should not have massive amounts of unskilled migration coming into this country. What we want is immigration that benefits the average American. We don’t want to be bringing people in on programs to undercut wages of American citizens.
And so that has got to be our touchstone: what is benefiting the American worker and what is benefiting the wages of the average American.
Watch the video here:
Brooks’s column “is not just a good column, it is a *fantastic* column,” tweeted Seth Mandel, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner Magazine. It is “a column of a quality reached a few times a year by a few writers [and] will be criticized angrily because it shows empathy and elite introspection, which will prove it correct.”
A 54 percent majority of Americans say Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according toan August 2022 pollcommissioned by the left-of-center National Public Radio (NPR). The 54 percent “invasion” majority included 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats.
A July 29-August 1 poll of 1,500 adults by YouGov showed that a 35 percent plurality of Americans believe migration makes America “worse off.”
President Joe Biden on June 15, 2023. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
The migrant inflow has successfullyforced down Americans’ wages and alsoboosted rentsandhousing prices. The inflow has also pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors and contributed to therising death rateof poor Americans.
The lethal policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers.
The population inflow alsoreduces the politicalcloutof native-born Americans, because the population replacement allows elites and the establishment to divorce themselves fromthe needsandinterestsof ordinary Americans.
In many speeches, border chief Alejandro Mayorkas says he is building a mass migration system to deliver workers to wealthy employers and investors and “equity” to poor foreigners. The nation’s border laws are subordinate to elite opinion about “the values of our country” Mayorkas claims.
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