By Joy Pullmann |
It appears that global oligarchs have decided to not only collude with China's totalitarian control over its society, but to export it to formerly free nations such as the United States.
We appear to be at the beginning of a massive
crackdown on people who have supported Donald Trump, led by big tech and big
media. These entities are making Trump into an example of their
power to frighten the half of America that supported him in November. We
cannot allow them to intimidate us.
But they sure are trying, and on some, they will succeed.
They are using the excuse of an unrepresentative group of fools criminally
ransacking U.S. Capitol offices with a lighter touch than many of this summer’s
often unpunished Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters. Remember: Some
of those rioters got
away with murder, attacking public buildings
including in
state capitols, arson,
and stopping
ambulances from bringing wounded police into hospitals for treatment. They
were bailed
out with the help of the incoming Democrat vice president.
Now we are being told that an unorganized group of stupid
people knocking down doors and throwing Nancy Pelosi’s desk papers on the floor
are “seditionists” aiming for the “overthrow of the U.S. government”? Please.
That’s giving them credit that they don’t at all deserve.
But they have provided a useful pretext for much darker
strategic actions from much better-funded and better-coordinated powers. On the
assumption with an excellent track record that Republicans have lost all power
and wouldn’t intelligently use any power they have anyway, Twitter has banned
Trump permanently and suspended
Mike Flynn. Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat also
banned Trump.
Google
and Apple
banned the Twitter alternative Parler from their app stores, claiming it’s
because right-wing agitators have used it to organize, although the same is
true of left-wing agitators, mass-murdering foreign dictators, and apolitical
criminals on Twitter. Amazon defenestrated
Parler from its servers Sunday.
One of the Trump campaign’s email service
providers suspended the campaign’s account, according to
Financial Times reporter Dave Lee. Shopify also banned
Trump’s official stores from the platform.
The purge wasn’t at all limited to Trump himself. It’s
also pursuing his supporters. YouTube banned
all videos discussing voter fraud. Reddit shut
down its Donald Trump subreddit. On Jan. 8, Facebook shut
down the Walkaway campaign that shared the stories of people who left the
Democratic Party to vote for Trump, and banned every one of the group’s owners
from using Facebook. The publisher of a forthcoming book by Sen. Josh Hawley
cut ties with him over his support for proving to the American people that our
elections are free and fair.
The National Association of Realtors “has
revised its professional ethics code to ban ‘hate speech and harassing
speech’ by its 1.4 million members,” both on the job and off. To them, hate
speech includes basic conservative ideas, not at all actually racist or
otherwise indefensible words. “The sweeping prohibition applies to association
members 24/7, covering all communication, private and professional, written and
spoken, online and off. Punishment could top out at a maximum fine of $15,000
and expulsion from the organization.”
Police departments across the country have
opened “probes” into whether any of their employees attended the Trump
protest on Jan. 6. They’re not at all alone. Employers
have begun firing people who merely attended the rally of hundreds of
thousands, out of which a minority broke the law.
The label of an indie musician terminated
their relationship because he posted that he had “peacefully” attended the
Trump protest. A Wall Street Journal article documents
the firing of a lawyer for an insurance company who posted on Instagram that he
had attended “peacefully.”
Other such punishments for mere attendees at the Trump
rally were reported and egged on on Twitter, such as this one:
Well-funded groups like The Lincoln Project, Southern Poverty Law Center, and other leftist pressure campaigns are dedicated to earning money and status by destroying the lives of anyone who disagrees with their politics. It’s excellent business. Schmidt has released tweets outlining many of his group’s planned actions, a terrifying blueprint of the cultural revolution mindset ascendant among America’s political left, who just seized control of every branch of the federal government:
Already this creepy lust for punishment has Reddit users
revealing their plans to turn family members into the FBI for attending the
Jan. 6 protest, regardless of whether these family members committed any crimes
or merely, like the vast majority of attendees, walked peacefully in D.C. streets.
A Jan.
8 blog post from Mozilla Chairwoman Mitchell Baker declared tech companies
need to do “more” than deplatforming people like Trump, including “Turn on by
default the tools to amplify factual voices over disinformation” like those
Twitter and Facebook used to interfere in the 2020 election.
You had better believe there are discussions among credit
card companies, banks, and other financial institutions about punishing
organizations they view as opposing leftist political views. In
December, for example, a so-far unnamed credit card processing company refused
to process donations to the American Family Association because it is
socially conservative. Previously, big banks refused
to bank for legal gun manufacturers after pressure from leftist activists.
This is the kind of power the left holds over
all the institutions that make life possible for Americans, and they have
already revealed they are not afraid to flex that power against the left’s
chosen enemies. All of this is merely the next step in years of campaigns to
use economic pressure to control public policy.
The watershed moment was the 2015 Religious Freedom
Restoration Act attempt in Indiana that was turned into LGBT legal preferences
because big corporations decided to override the state’s voters, and then-Gov.
Mike Pence and state Republicans turned tail and ran. When a pressure tactic
works, it will be increased. That’s precisely what has happened in the past
five years, including the most recent information ops on the 2020 election.
We all saw Big Tech and Big Media collude to hide
information damaging to the left and amplify information and narratives
damaging to the right. Corporations are now wielding supragovernmental power
untethered by even the pretense of constitutional legitimacy, and our
government seems entirely powerless to stop them.
This all moves us closer to a nongovernmental social
credit system like that employed by Communist China, which economically and
socially punishes people for “wrongthink.” It appears that global oligarchs
have decided to not only collude with China’s totalitarian control over its
society, but to export that social control to formerly free nations such as the
United States.
Consider these companies’
vocal support for and use
of Chinese slave labor in their supply chains
versus their nuclear retaliation against Trump saying words they don’t like.
Then consider that they still distribute propaganda from foreign leaders who
fomented global instability by mismanaging COVID-19 then lying about it
(China), fund terrorism (Iran and Russia), and confine millions of minorities
in slave camps (China).
These companies give mass murderers, global villains, and
slave traders a platform while denying one to their arch-enemy whose worst
crime is saying mean, imprecise, false, and stupid words while not being a
Democrat. So of course Chinese government censors cheered them on.
This is a world that one of the leading lights of
leftism, The New York Times and columnist Tom Friedman, welcome
with open arms. It silences all those pesky dissidents who just get in the
way of enlightened policymaking like the Green New Deal. If this bright future
requires ignoring a few million enslaved Uighurs, well, omelets require eggs,
you know. Anything for the Party.
This week’s escalation of totalitarian speech controls
and witch hunts — Are you now or have you ever been a supporter of Donald
Trump? — is terrifying, and not just because of the lack of defenses against
leftists’ demonstrated control of information and funding. If they can do this
to the president of the United States, who can’t these corporations do
it to?
If President Trump had actually
called for rioters to stop and “go home in peace,” and firmly
denounced violent lawbreaking while acknowledging the 99.9999999 percent of
his supporters who are peaceful and lawful, but these corporations told the
world he was instead “inciting violence” and encouraging “sedition,” how would
we ever know the truth?
If they choose to lie to us, to lie about one
political party, to lie about events they use to impose draconian speech and
social controls, and to ban us from ever sharing information that proves or
even simply suggests they lied or aren’t telling the whole story, how would we
ever know it?
However long it takes, whatever ethical methods it
takes, their power must be broken. You and I can start by not believing a word
they say. Next, we need to start securing and expanding our ability to find and
proclaim the truth, for as long and as loudly as we can.
Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The
Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her newest ebook is
"The Family Read-Aloud
Advent Calendar," and her bestselling ebook is "Classic Books for Young
Children." A Hillsdale College honors graduate, @JoyPullmann is also the author of
"The
Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,"
from Encounter Books.
