Twitter Permanently Bans Alex Jones After New Violations ran the headline in the Wall Street Journal. A quick scan through the article informs the reader that it was due to a video Jones posted of his confrontation with a CNN reporter. The ban on Jones extended to Periscope, Twitter’s wholly owned video streaming service.
What the account does not tell you is that the CNN reporter Jones confronted, Oliver Darcy, has spent months essentially playing the role of tattletale, urging social media companies to remove Jones from their platform by alerting them about statements made by Jones that, at least in Darcy’s judgment, constitute a violation of the various platforms’ terms of service agreements.
On Septermber 8, the Wall Street Journal reported that Apple had pulled Infowars apps from its App Store for violations of the company’s app-developer guidelines. Apple noted that the guidelines precluded apps from delivering content that is “offensive, insensitive, upsetting…or in exceptionally poor taste.” The company noted content could be banned for “mean-spirited references or commentary” about religion, race, sexual orientation and gender.
BuzzFeed notes that Apple declined comment on its decision to pull the Infowars apps, pointing to its App Store Review Guidelines.
It’s hard to keep track of just how many sites Jones has been permanently banned from. To this writer’s knowledge, the list includes: iTunes, the Apple App Store, Spotify, Twitter, Periscope, YouTube, Facebook and MailChimp.
This past week, the New York Times ran an article which amounted to a victory lap, the headline gleefully announcing Alex Jones Said Bans Would Strengthen Him. He Was Wrong. This is what liberalism has come to, America’s “newspaper of record” now celebrates the shutting down of debate and free speech.
If anything exposes the rank hypocrisy and intellectual bankruptcy of the mainstream media and the liberal establishment whose interests it represents, this is it.
Now it was not my intention today to write about the ongoing travails of Alex Jones. It would seem that enough has been said on that subject already. But then again, it’s hard to overstate the remarkable evil represented by the campaign to shut him down.
As independent investigative journalist Lee Stranahan noted in a segment last week, the mainstream media (MSM) has spent months setting up Jones for a deplatforming, which now appears to be complete.
The treatment Jones has received should alarm any fair minded person, especially Christians. It matters not whether one likes Jones work, hates it, or is entirely indifferent to it.
When private companies such as Facebook join together with government sponsored organizations such as the Atlantic Council to strangle free speech, this represents a fascist – I use the term fascist in its technical sense here, which is the merger of state and corporate powers; the Deep State embedded in the US federal government is using Facebook and other social media outlets as front organizations to do what they cannot do openly, usurp the first amendment – threat to all.
And no one more so than those who profess faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, who are commanded by Jesus himself to go and to make disciples, to baptize and to teach. For this to happen, Christians must be able to speak. And if we Christians remain silent while the MSM, the Tech Left and the Deep State silence Alex Jones, is there any reason to think our ability to evangelize and preach will be spared from some future crackdown?
With these things in mind, just how should Christians react? It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. But, as YouTuber and Christian journalist Greg Hunter likes to point out, God consistently tells believers in his Word to “fear not.”
As Christians, we are not to fear the power of the Deep State. Our task is to pray that God would give us understanding about what is happening in the world around us and get to work applying his Word to the challenges of the day.
What Christians Should Not Do
The first thing to avoid I’ve already mentioned, fear. As believers, we know that all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to the Lord Jesus Christ. Not one thing takes place without his expressly bringing it about. Further, we know that all things, even those that are seemingly victories for the Evil One, redound to the good of God’s people.
Just as Pilate had no authority over Christ unless it was given to him by heaven, so too does the Deep State have no authority today apart from what God has given it. To paraphrase Martin Luther, the Deep State is real, but it’s God’s Deep State, which he uses to try his people.
Second, Christians must not forget that this is ultimately a spiritual battle. The late journalist Andrew Breitbart famously noted that politics is downstream from culture. This is to say that a nation’s politics are an outgrowth of its culture, not the other way around.
And if it is true that politics is downstream from culture, let’s ask this question, What is culture downstream from? In the opinion of this writer, culture is downstream from a nation’s beliefs about God.
As John Robbins argued in Christ and Civilization, what we now call Western Civilization is the product, not of secular humanism, but of the 16th century Christian Reformation. It was the widespread teaching of, and belief in, the Gospel of Justification by Belief Alone that created a revolution in the way both individual persons and governmental institutions were viewed. Quoting Karl Holl, Professor of Church History at the University of Berlin, John Robbins wrote,
“The individual, for the first time in history, was widely recognized as the direct creation of God, as the image of God, and as the redeemed of God. The discovery of the doctrine of justification elevated the independence of the individual,” wrote Holl. It was the individual person-the human soul-who was feed from pagan and medieval tyranny by the Reformation, and from that freedom arose a free, humane, and civilized society.
The resurgence of collectivist tyranny over the past one hundred years, of which our current problems with the Deep State’s shutting down of free speech is simply the latest manifestation, has occurred because Western men first rejected the Gospel of Jesus Christ, preferring instead to embrace secular philosophy.
Third, Christians should not fall for the lies that the attack by Big Tech on conservatives is merely a matter of private companies exercising control over their own platforms. For the attack did not originate with Facebook et. al, but with the Deep State.
As Hugh Wilford helpfully showed in his 2008 book The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, the American Deep State has a long history of using front organizations to spread its propaganda. In the opinion of this author, this is exactly what is occurring with the purge of conservatives from social media. The Deep State is using private organizations to do for it what it cannot do directly.
For example, in May of this year Facebook announced that it had partnered with the Atlantic Council “to prevent our service from being abused during elections.” So just who is the Atlantic Council? It’s a think tank associated with NATO.
Within the Atlantic Council, the actual organization that works with Facebook supposedly to prevent election fraud is group called the Digital Forensics Research Lab.
So here’s how the anti-free speech scam works. The US government funds NATO, NATO funds the Digital Forensics Research Lab, and the Digital Forensics Research Lab tells Facebook whom to ban. Apparently that includes Alex Jones.
Using this work around, the Deep State is able to use Facebook as a front organization to squelch free speech in a way it otherwise it could not because of the constraints the First Amendment has placed on Congress.
Fourth, Christians should not call for government regulation of the social media companies. After all, were were it not for big government, we would not be in the position of having to fight for our first amendment rights. Calling for government to regulate the internet is just feeding the beast that’s trying to kill us.
Further, as researcher James Corbett has argued those clamoring for the government to “do something” about Big Tech may very well be playing right into its hands.
As Corbett explained, the Big Tech firms may very well want governmental regulation. Why would this be? Simple. Regulation is expensive for firms to comply with. These regulatory expenses can much more easily be borne by large, established companies with lots of cash on hand than by startups just scraping to get by. Regulation, in short, represents a barrier to market entrance for potential competition.
Doubtless, Facebook would like to avoid becoming the next My Space, and governmental regulation would certainly increase their chances of remaining king of the social media hill.
The Deep State also would benefit from regulation of social media, as its favorite front organizations would be ensconced in power by the regulatory state.
Corbett called this ploy the “problem, reaction, solution” model, where the powers-that-be create a problem that they know will provoke a certain reaction that will lead people to demand a solution that’s exactly what the powers-that-be wanted in the first place.
(To be continued…)
Lux Lucet 
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