(Article by Jeffrey A. Tucker republished from TheEpochTimes.com)
And they are furious that a federal judge in Louisiana has called them out, issuing an injunction to stop all contacts between government agencies and social media companies. They are livid about this because they had come to believe that the First Amendment was a dead letter already.
What do we mean by all these plural pronouns? The “them” and “they” in this case consist of the unelected bureaucrats at agencies and their mainstream media mouthpieces. All the usual suspects have come out swinging while condemning the remarkable injunction from Missouri v. Biden as nothing more than a conservative plot.
They keep telling us that the judge was appointed by Trump (therefore a bad guy), that his grievances mostly concern “conservatives” (who are deplorable and have no rights), that “right-wing” groups have been kvetching for years that their voices in social media platforms have been silenced (and right-wing complaints are always unmerited). The barrage of caricature, smear, innuendo, and ad hominem has been relentless.
Just consider the headline from the Washington Post yesterday; remember that the paper was a huge champion of lockdowns, mandatory masking, jabs, and the entire pandemic response that massively boosted the stock and industrial rise of its owner’s own company Amazon. The Post is deeply alarmed: “State Dept. cancels Facebook meetings after judge’s ‘censorship’ ruling.”
See the scare quotes around censorship? The point is that the paper thinks it is a wonderful thing to stop the dissemination of ideas that are contrary to its chosen party line. And it’s extremely weird too. How many Americans do you suppose are upset that the State Department is no longer ringing up Facebook to tell them which accounts to ban and what content to take down? Maybe 0.0001 percent?
Indeed, the American people have been getting an earful for days now. I’m guessing that most people did not know that their favorite social-media plaything, the tool that gives them pics of grandkids and birthday cakes, is actually just a stalking horse of Deep-State interests. That’s what it has been for years and never more so than during the COVID years. And the Post is hopping mad that this might be coming to an end.
Why might this be true? Here we get to the bigger picture and the real story behind all of this. Social media was invented to give voice to everyone in order that they might have an impact on public opinion. It was a means by which opinion monopolies would be broken down. Regular people have been for the first time in a position to publicly object to and correct mainstream media narratives.
This is what Big Media despises. This is what they wanted shut down. You see, for decades now the mainstream press has been amplifying government priorities in every area of life. The Deep State and Big Media have long learned how to use each other to their mutual benefit. The foreign policy desk at the New York Times takes its marching orders from the State Department. The transportation desk reports whatever the Department of Transportation wants reported.
The reporters and Deep State bureaucrats are besties and have been for decades. They are people who don’t get kicked out in the next election. They are the permanent class at the FDA, CIA, HUD, HHS, NIH, Justice, State, FTC, and every other bureaucracy. They hang out at the same parties and swirl and whirl in the same social milieu. The path to success for a successful reporter is to cultivate these contacts. That’s how both sides like it.
Social media has been an annoyance for these people for a long time. The wartime footing of the COVID response was the perfect opportunity to shut down the competition. The mainstream media was faithfully echoing government-generated baloney day after day. Their problem was that Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and so on, had people on there who weren’t buying it.
That’s when government acted, calling up these companies and developing deep relationships based on compulsion. They instructed them daily about which posts to take down and which accounts to throttle and ban. There is no question that this was happening constantly.
Here is the Washington Post’s description:
“Leading U.S. social media companies began coordinating regularly with the federal government in 2017, following revelations of a Russian campaign to sow discord among Americans during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Partnerships between Silicon Valley and Washington on what the tech companies call ‘content moderation’ deepened and broadened during the pandemic, when platforms such as Twitter, Google’s YouTube, and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram became hotbeds for conspiracy theories about the virus and opposition to public health guidance.”
Are you rolling your eyes? I sure am. For two and a half years, those of us who have been fighting this stuff — merely seeking the right to speak truth in a time of egregious lies—have been trying to document what we suspected to be true. Our side has filed hundreds of FOIA requests and written thousands of articles that connect the dots.
And now after all this time, the Post flat-out admits it: yes, the collusion has been going on all along. No one doubts it. The spin we are getting from the major national media is simple: this is a good thing and must continue.
They don’t even pretend to have respect for the First Amendment that gave rise to the national media in the first place. They now seek a monopoly of opinion and interpretation. Their motives here are darkly cynical and deeply threatening to every postulate of a free society. But at least now they admit it. They are admitting now what we have long suspected. They don’t want you to have free speech rights. The right to speak belongs to them and only them.
This is why the judge’s order focuses entirely on social media. Nothing about the injunction stops the pharmaceutical desk at the New York Times from taking its marching orders from the FDA, which in turn is owned by the companies themselves and thus forming one big cartelized racket of lies. The judge’s order only prevents the FDA from dictating to social media how it must control the opinions of its users.
The Biden administration has already appealed the judge’s order. And think what that means: the existing regime is coming to the defense of their right to shut you up. That is to say, they do not believe in the rights they are charged with protecting. Please let that sink in.
The same administration is still appealing the Florida mask decision that emancipated you from being forced to wear a stupid piece of cloth on your face while on planes, trains, and buses. Now we know the deeper meaning of the mask: it was a symbolic means of shutting you up.
Notice that Mark Zuckerberg released his competitor to Twitter merely one day after the decision of Missouri v. Biden. They despise Elon Musk at Twitter for having fired all the embedded government agents and letting the user base speak. Facebook’s new “Threads” is an attempt to take back social media from its users and put it back in the hands of the Deep State. This is the essential battle of our time. Users need to beware.
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