RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/16/a-party-of-faction-and-fantasy/

“It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.”— David Hume

There are many lessons to be drawn from the 2020 election. The transformation of the United States of America from a republic into an oligarchy is a large and portentous lesson. 

Why are there some 21,000 troops and oodles of razor wire in Washington D.C.? 

Really, it is an amazing, not to say an ominous, spectacle. As one Twitter wit put it, Donald Trump brought peace to the Middle East, Joe Biden brought war to Washington. 

The ostensible reason for turning the capital of the United States into an armed camp is to protect the mostly virtual inauguration of China’s Big Guy, Joe Biden, against the onslaught of all those “right-wing extremists,” “white supremacists,” etc. that the magical magus Donald Trump is mobilizing through secret “dog whistles” and other shamanistic practices. 

The trouble is, all those “right-wing extremists,” like President Trump’s supposed “incitement” of the crowd at his “Save America” rally on January 6, are a figment of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s addled imaginations. Yes, that meme is assiduously, not to say preposterously, circulated and amplified by the media, social and anti-social alike. But those threatening hordes do not exist.

Just so, the violent mob scene at the Capitol on January 6 was not an “insurrection” or an act of “domestic terrorism” but rather, as Tucker Carlson put it, a political protest that “got out of hand.” 

Here’s something else that has got out of hand: the American political order. 

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/16/locked-down-and-locked-out/

As a coinage goes, “Deep Tech” is superior to “Big Tech.” It better captures the deforming power and tentacular reach into state and civil society of the high-tech monopolists. 

That reach notwithstanding, many libertarian-minded and “small-government conservatives” (a contradiction in terms, considering the national debt is $28 trillion) have been stalwart defenders of the rights of Deep Tech to deploy unprovoked financial force to kneecap those users who don’t conform to the tech oligarchy’s monolithic image of the new Ideal Citizen.

David French, writer at The Dispatch—and one of the many political dwarfs tossed periodically at Donald Trump by NeverTrumpsters (hey, dwarf tossing is a cruel sport)—emphasized the immutable right of private platforms to deplatform (limit and throttle) “millions of Americans who engage in wrongthink,” the president included.   

Let Dissidents Eat Cake 

Let the disenfranchised—those of us who’re routinely blocked from being able to grow our appeal and peddle our intellectual products, now fearful that our books will be digitally burned—create platforms of their own, exhorts French, from the comfort of his conformingly banal, pixelated perches. 

“Find other off-ramps,” exhorted podcaster David Rubin. 

Coming from the conformist mediocracy that runs Conservatism Inc., this cynical suggestion is the equivalent of, “Let them eat cake,” which in practice means “let political dissidents go dark or resort to a barter economy.” 

You might not know it, but financial deplatforming has been a staple of many a long-suffering American dissident’s working life. Financial deplatforming is when you are barred from banking or transacting via PayPal. It is an “existential threat to free speech in America,” inveighed Revolver News. 

This observation both trivializes what’s afoot and misses the point, for financial deplatforming teeters on violating another’s natural right to make a living. 

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/satfbi-state-officials-aware-early-steele-made-major

Shortly before the FBI used his dossier to secure a surveillance warrant targeting the Trump campaign, Christopher Steele met with State Department officials and relayed information suggesting Moscow was running an operation out of the Russian consulate in Miami.

There was just one problem with his intelligence: The Russians didn’t have a consulate in Florida’s largest city.

The anecdote, captured in contemporaneous memos and newly released testimony, illustrates just how bad some of Steele’s intelligence reporting was and how widely that was known inside the FBI, even as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was being assured by the bureau that Steele was deemed credible and there was no derogatory information about his work.

Kenneth Laycock, the FBI’s current Executive Assistant Director, was a section chief for Eurasian intelligence in fall 2016 when Steele made a visit to Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec at the State Department.

During the October 2016 meeting, Steele admitted he was leaking to the news media while working as an FBI informant, a violation of his confidential human source agreement. (He later was terminated for it.) And he also relayed the anecdote about the Russian operation out of the Miami consulate, which officials immediately flagged as false, according to Kavalec’s own notes of the meeting.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-new-corporate-tyranny

“Oh, and one more thing. If you thought this essay was worth reading, you might wish to print out a paper copy before it vanishes from the Internet.”

The American political and legal systems are working just fine, despite a few hiccups. Meanwhile, American corporations are depriving citizens of basic rights and freedoms and destroying our democracy.

Imagine that you are a resident in a low-population county in 1950. You run afoul of the small group of families who are effectively in charge. Your political and legal rights are unimpaired. You are free to vote and you are free to sue in municipal and county and state courts. The police treat you with unfailing courtesy and respect.

But strange things start to happen. The only newspaper in the county refuses to take ads for your business. The only bank in the county announces that it is closing your account and calling in your mortgage. Your car breaks down and the only garage and service shop in the county refuses to repair it. The only general store in the county refuses your patronage and the few restaurants in the county turn you away at the door. After you lose your business to the newspaper advertising boycott, you try to get a job, but discover that you have been blacklisted by all of the employers in the county. Nobody will hire you.

Are you free, in this scenario, just because there is no official interference with your voting rights and your civil rights? Private power is power, no less than government power. You can be immobilized, impoverished, humiliated, tormented, and perhaps driven to suicide by hostile businesses and banks in an otherwise functioning liberal democracy, just as surely as by the police or military in a dictatorship.

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2021/01/14/refuse-to-be-silenced-n2583120

Parler’s gone for now, the victim of a conspiracy to silence, but it will return. The fascists can try, but they can’t shut us up forever. Truth flows like water around obstacles. The Twitbookgram decided to start playing whack-a-prole to bonk unapproved ideas on the noggin and pretty soon too many heads will be popping up out of too many new holes. They will pop up on Gab, or Clouthub, or Dave Rubin’s Locals.com. People will find a way to be heard.

Once you leave their personal domains, the tech overlords become…irrelevant, and powerless.

Now, they can conspire, collaborate, and likely violate antitrust laws, though it is hilarious to assume that a Biden* DoJ will find anything out of sorts about that. The Democrat Party, and far too many Fredocon hacks in the GOP, are bought and paid for. They are happy to auction themselves off in a bidding war between Silicon Valley and Beijing. And there are a few remaining Muh Free Enterprisers who confuse capitalism and monopoly corporatism, and who are happy to surrender their sovereignty if their twisted principles so demand. But there is only so much the silicon villains can do. Eventually, some enterprising entrepreneur in Latvia is going to have a server farm no one in Cupertino can switch off.

They are shooting their wad, as far as the corporate tech censorship goes. It’s a hassle right now, but we will not be gagged.

And we have some plays too. The feds are all on the side of censorship, sure, but what about our red states? Every single state that has a GOP majority has the chance to pass its own laws to protect freedom of thought and speech. And they should. They should do it yesterday.