J.D. Vance: Facebook-FBI Censorship Collusion Undermines ‘Free Enterprise’ Defense of Big Tech
J.D. Vance, Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat from Ohio, said on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow that Facebook co-founder and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent admission of his company’s digital censorship of news and information related to Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 presidential election contradicts the framing of Big Tech companies as operating within a free market.
Last Thursday, Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan on the latter’s eponymous podcast that the FBI advised his company of digitally circulated “Russian disinformation” in relation to news and information regarding the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
When asked about Big Tech censorship of reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Zuckerberg said, “The FBI, I think basically came to us — some folks on our team and was like, ‘Hey, um, just so you know, like, you should be on high alert. There was the — we thought that there was a lot of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election. We have it on notice that basically there’s about to be some kind of dump of — that’s similar to that. So just be vigilant.’”
The FBI’s role in Facebook’s digital censorship should have led to “wall-to-wall coverage for a couple of weeks,” Vance said, highlighting much of the news media’s refusal to report on the government’s coordination with technology companies’ political restrictions on access to information.
Vance alluded to governmental circumvention of the First Amendment by outsourcing its political censorship to ideologically aligned Big Tech firms.
He remarked, “I argue that Big Tech is too powerful and that conservatives need to wake up and realize what moment we’re in and actually go after these guys. The counterargument I always get is, ‘Well, they’re a private company, and of course we believe in free enterprise and we [believe] in capitalism.'”
“This a perfect illustration of why that argument is so inadequate,” he continued, “because these guys are not only censoring because the dictates of the market require them to. They’re sometimes censoring because the government shows up at their doorstep that says, ‘Do this, or else,’ and then they do it in a way that affects the presidential election.”
Marlow described the coordinated censorship between Big Tech and the FBI as “tantamount to election interference” given the potential impact that news and information about the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop could have had on voters’ decisions ahead of November 2020.
Vance remarked, “According to independent studies — some done by pro-Biden groups — millions of votes were changed because of the lack of coverage of the Hunter Biden story, because it implicates the entire Biden family in corruption, and it wasn’t covered. It wasn’t shared on social media nearly the way it should have been, because our government told Mark Zuckerberg what to do with this digital media company.”
“It is an earth-shattering story,” he emphasized. “Unless we rein in the technology companies and unless we rein in the amount of power and influence they have over American elections, we’re never going to win the long-term battle.”
Free speech and expression are essential to a properly functioning American public capable of creating “better public policy” and making “better decisions,” Vance argued. Technology companies “backed up by the government agencies,” he concluded, “are denying us” these essential freedoms.
Hunter Biden is the subject of a brand new narrative film My Son Hunter, marking Breitbart’s expansion into film distribution. It’s the story the establishment media don’t want you to see. It’s available for PRE-ORDER NOW at MySonHunter.com. The film becomes available for Streaming and Downloading September 7. The trailer has already been viewed over 3.5 million times across social media.
If You Liked Big Brother, Meet Google’s Big MUM
The Big Tech monopoly has a new way to suppress conservatives.
Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.
Forget Big Brother, Big MUM is Google’s new tool for suppressing conservatives.
MUM or Multitask Unified Model was hyped last year as the company’s new machine learning algorithm. MUM had been initially described as an innovative way to allow Google’s dying search service to answer natural language questions by drawing on multiple sources.
While MUM’s applications initially appeared to be apolitical, that quickly changed.
Google first unleashed MUM to fight what it considered COVID “misinformation” by making sure that everyone saw “high quality and timely information from trusted health authorities like the World Health Organization”. By reducing the number of sources to only those that agree with its agenda, Google is able to deliver fast results while getting rid of different points of view.
A Forbes article described how MUM would "check information across multiple reliable sources" to allow "the system to come to a general consensus". Google had once built its search around the vast diversity of a bygone internet, but it has spent the last decade draining the diversity and depth of the pool and replacing it with the shallow manufactured consensus of its agenda.
Google long ago ceased being a way to find different answers and its search results are deliberately repetitive. Search is an illusion. The user thinks that he’s browsing the internet when he’s actually spinning his wheels in Google’s walled garden. This is most obvious in shopping and in politics: two areas where Google has strong interests and tries to manipulate users into believing that they are exploring options when they’re being hand fed variations on a theme.
Or as Pandu Nayak, VP of search at Google, wrote in a recent post, “By using our latest AI model, Multitask Unified Model (MUM), our systems can now understand the notion of consensus, which is when multiple high-quality sources on the web all agree on the same fact.”
The last thing the world needs is another centralized computer system enforcing a consensus.
Google disagrees with many of its users about what “reliable sources” or “high-quality sources” entail. MUM helps the Big Tech search monopoly manufacture a consensus, on what it claims is a universal fact, and to promote snippets on its own site that promote that consensus.
The monopoly doesn’t see its search service as a way to rank sites. The Big Tech monopoly, like its counterparts, doesn’t want users actually leaving its sites, and wants to force a “consensus” answer on them in its search engine. MUM is another tool for keeping users on its digital plantation. The underlying notion behind MUM is a continuing redefinition of search, not as browsing an array of sources, but as a way of delivering a single instantaneous answer.
Googlers have long been obsessed with the idea of replicating Star Trek's fictional computer which would offer the answer to any question in a robotic female voice.
MUM is the next step in this Big Sister quest.
“The Star Trek computer is not just a metaphor that we use to explain to others what we’re building. It is the ideal that we’re aiming to build—the ideal version done realistically," Amit Singhal, then the head of Google's search rankings team, boasted.
Singhal was later forced to leave the company over sexual harassment allegations.
“It was the perfect search engine,” he gushed about the Star Trek computer. “You could ask it a question and it would tell you exactly the right answer, one right answer—and sometimes it would tell you things you needed to know in advance, before you could ask it.”
In 2022, Google’s search is hopelessly broken because the company no longer has any interest in providing the search service that made it a monopoly, giving a ranked list of diverse results, but wants everyone to speak into their phones and receive a single answer. The consensus.
Google’s snippets and knowledge panels displace links to actual sites and provide what the monopoly claims is the definitive answer. Its search assistant is similarly set up to provide a single answer. Google doesn’t want you to compare answers, but to listen to MUM.
And sometimes Google wants to give you the information before you ask it.
If you own an advanced Android phone, you may find that Google Assistant will interrupt conversations to offer its own “insights”. Google is also pursuing “prebunking” of what it considers “misinformation” with preemptive propaganda campaigns.
Jigsaw, the company’s most explicitly political arm, is researching what it calls "prebunking" or attacking views it opposes before they can even gain traction. Prebunking is currently being experimentally tested by Google's Jigsaw to fight "misinformation" in Poland and other Eastern European countries against Ukrainian migrants. This is only a test and Jigsaw expects there to be much wider application for the information techniques that its “researchers” are developing.
Google's YouTube already has a broad set of bans covering everything from questioning global warming, contradicting medical experts, and debating 2020 election results. These are a window into the company’s political agendas and how it seeks to enforce political conformity.
While it seeks to narrow the sphere of acceptable information in its platforms, Google is working with the leftist Poynter Institute, one of the most notoriously biased fact check spammers, to develop "media literacy.". The company claims to have spent $75 million on efforts to fight "misinformation." And who determines what misinformation is? He who controls the algorithms.
As the midterm elections approach, YouTube spokeswoman, Ivy Choi, promised that the video site's recommendations are “continuously and prominently surfacing midterms-related content from authoritative news sources and limiting the spread of harmful midterms-related misinformation.” The technical term for this is mass propaganda. That’s what Big Tech does.
The internet was revolutionary because it upended the central systems of mass propaganda which allowed a government and a handful of men to enforce their consensus on a helpless public through the mass media of newspapers, radio stations, movie theaters and television sets. Big Tech’s Web 2.0 killed the revolution and restored the oligarchy. Its monopolists see the internet as only a faster way to deliver more immersive propaganda to the masses.
The Big Tech monopolies took off by taming the web, shrinking its vast promise and diversity of content into smaller walled gardens that they could dominate and monetize. Facebook inhaled most of the social interactions on the internet and locked it up in its private platform. Google is determined to do the same thing to the bewildering parade of ideas of the entire internet.
When Google’s senior VP Prabhakar Raghavan first introduced MUM, he suggested that the goal was to “develop not only a better understanding of information on the Web, but a better understanding of the world." What happens on the internet doesn’t stay on the internet.
Conservatives are one of the cultural barriers because their existence is a marked reminder that Big Tech does not control everything. While its executives and employees are socially insulated wokes operating in major urban centers, they manage systems that extend around the country and the world. When they encounter different points of view, they seek to wipe them out.
MUM is yet another tool for enforcing a totalitarian conformity on the diversity of the internet.
Google doesn’t want you to think differently or to think for yourself. What it wants users to do is to shut up and listen to Big MUM.
A GLIMPSE INTO THE GLOBALIST AGENDA OF A NATION RULE BY AND FOR THE RICH AND WALL STREET. THIS REQUIRES OPEN BORDERS FOR ENDLESS HORDES OF ‘CHEAP’ LABOR TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED AND FINISH OFF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) says the “Masters of the Universe” (HIGH TECH BILLIONAIRES) want more legal immigration to the United States to further diminish the incomes of American working and middle-class families.
So why do the citizens of blue hells not rebel? That is the question -- Anton and Hanson and Jenkins, like so many of us, know they must.
Maybe that’s part of it. I do think that the movement in the direction of feudal, tyrannical governance is being aided by the influx of millions of illegal immigrants from places where this kind of government is the norm.
Is Feudalism Our Future?
It’s increasingly clear that one-party polities are corrupt, badly managed and serve the interests only of those at the top and their courtiers. I think that if Biden and Harris win, the entire country will devolve to a kingdom of state and regional duchies composed of often semi-hereditary rulers in the pay of the rich, donor class, the clerisy (media scribblers, complaisant judicial appointees and academic rent seekers who promote favored policies and shut out the dissenters), an impoverished, smaller, and powerless middle class and a vast layer of muzzled, docile poor serfs. They will rule by fiat (often inconsistently and illogically) as they have been in dealing with COVID-19. Because they can, the Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding.
In a lengthy essay, Michael Anton details why he thinks the leftist dream (which, in essence is a feudal form of tyranny) is within reach if Trump loses. I urge you all to read in its entirety this thoughtful article at your leisure. At best, I can only highlight some of the many salient points he makes.
1. Since the 1960s policies and practices have enriched the ruling class and “erode our natural and constitutionally guaranteed rights and liberties” as they degraded our culture and dishonored our heritage.
2. At present the office of the presidency is seriously weaker than the unitary executive described in the Constitution intended as an entrenched bureaucracy undermines, flouts and disobeys the president at every turn if he dares to advance policies “unpopular with the deep state.”
3. The benign phrase “public-private partnership” is no less than “the use of state power to serve private interests” and the relationship is one in which the senior partner is always big business.
4. Congress, he argues “is a joke.” Our government is run by “The cogs and lickspittles in the bureaucracy, led by a small elite in corporations, above all in Big Tech and finance, will determine all important policies, foreign and domestic.”
5. The COVID lockdowns and mandates engineered by governors and mayors without laws to permit them based on “expert” lies continue even as we know the virus is definitely not the plague we were told it would be.
He argues that should Trump lose we can expect increasingly anti-democratic governance “committed to social engineering and grievance politics” and a continued undermining of virtue and promotion of vice.
Anton talks about the undermining of the right to self-defense and the outrageous prosecution of Kyle Rittenhouse, who in Kenosha did just that against three attackers whose marauding had been encouraged by the Wisconsin governor’s and local mayor’s refusal to enforce the laws to maintain order.
Attorney Lin Wood, who successfully sued on behalf of Robert Jewell and Nick Sandmann and who this week volunteered to represent Kyle Rittenhouse (the hero of Kenosha) for defamation says we are facing a revolution and need to prepare ourselves for the fight.
Lin Wood @LLinWood
(1) Republicans are talking “policy differences” while focusing on upcoming election. They are not taking the current situation serious or they are just plain stupid. They need to face truth that our country is under attack.
(2) The former President, Barack Obama, is calling for sustained protests. The leader of the resistance movement, Hillary Clinton, is saying that we should not accept the results of the next election.
(3) The Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, is describing our President, @realDonaldTrump, as an enemy of the state. Many radical members of Congress are openly calling for the overthrow of our government.
(4) 1 + 1 + 1 = Revolution.
#FightBack
5:55 AM · Aug 29, 2020
The Duchy of Newsom as the Template of the New Order
No better example of what Anton describes as our future can I find than the sad state of California under the governorship of Gavin Newsom. I’ve written elsewhere of the Green New Deal disaster he helped birth and which now plunges much of his state into darkness and misery.
Victor David Hanson has written extensively on what has brought his home state so rich in natural resources to its knees. Here’s but one of his latest reports. It begins (and then extensively documents): “Power outages, fires, water shortages, rising taxes, crumbling and congested highways, dismal schools, lawlessness…”
At the Wall Street Journal, Holman Jenkins, Jr. notes that California politicians obsess about things like “climate change” they are powerless to do anything about while ignoring serious problems they could do something about if only they had the skills and will to govern. In that one-party state there is simply no accountability for failure of vision and execution:
Unfortunately, the people running the state, including Joe Biden’s prospective veep, have been mostly meme-chasing, pose-striking calculators. Their only career plan: nurse their standing with Hollywood green activists, trial lawyers and public-sector unions. In a one-party state, there is no serious clash of policy prescriptions. That’s how Kamala Harris could reach middle age with a giant vacancy in her résumé where one would normally find some connection to policy ideas.
If the state is to dig out of its deepening hole, it will need something else. It will need, you know, ideas. In fact, only a revolution of ideas can save it from the path it’s on. And the first idea is easy to see. The state will have to wake up from the sheer ludicrousness of devoting so much of its politics to a problem its politics can’t fix at the expense to those it can.
So why do the citizens of blue hells not rebel? That is the question -- Anton and Hanson and Jenkins, like so many of us, know they must.
My online friend “The Infamous Ignatz” sees it in psychological terms:
I don't think the people living in urban blue hells want to live in hell, but irrationality on a mass scale is made up of millions of little individual irrationalities collectivized.
An irrational person has a very, very difficult time choosing the rational option because it involves so many self-negating decisions, not least of which is stopping the magical thinking and the blaming of others for the problem.
That's why I equate irrational society with personality disorders. It's not that people in urban hellscapes aren't miserable, they just don't see any way out. For those outside looking in, American cities' electoral habits fit Einstein's apocryphal definition of insanity better than anything I can think of.
What makes it even more incurable and persistent is the very people the voters think they are hiring as their therapists not only come themselves from the ranks of the disordered but they have very powerful incentives making sure the patient never gets well.
Maybe that’s part of it. I do think that the movement in the direction of feudal, tyrannical governance is being aided by the influx of millions of illegal immigrants from places where this kind of government is the norm. It gained force when civics education was dropped in schools in favor of less significant subjects, and the hollowing out of our higher education institutions, including law schools, which since the 1960s have increasingly become there-oughta-be-a-law schools which encourage future judges and law clerks to imagine themselves as legislators and executives. Nor can we forget the role being played by the tech giants, who are using IT as a weapon for social control and the destruction of privacy. In any event, November will have us in the fight of our lives. Be prepared.
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