We are facing an unprecedented, coordinated campaign… of deplatforming, shadow banning, filtering and other foul means of putting dissenting voices into a digital gulag. While the mailed globe belongs to the tech giants and the executives, the hand inside is the government’s.
– Jim Jatras
Early Saturday morning while frequenting a favorite website, I came across a headline that read “Tech Tyranny: The Cries Are Becoming Screams From the Rooftops.”
Curious, I clicked on the link which took me to an article on big tech censorship. At the bottom of the article was an embedded video of Tucker Carlson’s program from Friday night. Carlson, as it happened, had dedicated his entire 8/31 show to big tech censorship.
Since Carlson is one of the few mainstream journalists who rises to the level of interesting, my curiosity was piqued. But when I went to play the video, instead of Tucker Carlson’s show, the only thing that appeared on my screen were the words “This video has been removed because its content violated YouTube’s Terms of Service.”
“How’s that for irony,” I said aloud to no one in particular. “YouTube just made Carlson’s point for him.”
In fairness, when I went back and checked today, Carlson’s video was back up. So, at least for now, the Silicon Valley Ministry of Truth has deigned to allow us minions to view the program.
Now in response to the increasingly aggressive censorship of conservative, libertarian and other dissenting voices, some people have argued that as private companies, the tech giants – and here I’m referring to companies such as Google (Google owns YouTube), Facebook, Twitter and Apple, all of which have had a hand in attempting to silence conservatives – have a right to police their own platforms and boot whomever they want.
As a staunch defender of property rights, I agree. If YouTube wants to ban Alex Jones, as a private company they have every right to do so.
But what if it’s not quite as simple as that? As John Robbins noted, events do not explain themselves, but must themselves be explained. The rise of the internet has allowed those who dissent from the official narrative. What do I mean by narrative? By this term I mean the context in which various world events are explained. The power to explain events is the power to place them within a larger context, that is, within a larger narrative.
Mika Brzenziski of MSNBC famously let the cat out of the bag when she openly complained about Donald Trump’s challenging the mainstream media’s ability to control explanations. She was concerned that Trump had undermined the media’s messaging ability and that he was telling “people exactly what to think.” She continued, “That is our job [telling people exactly what to think].”
What if all the attacks on those who dissent from the official narrative as put forth by the government and the government’s willing accomplices in the press are not just a case of private firms using private means to police their platforms? What if this represents an attempt by the Deep State and by its establishment supporters to regain control of the narrative from independent online journalists by silencing them?
What if Jim Jatras is right and that the Tech Left’s, “unprecedented, coordinated campaign…of deplatforming, shadow banning, filtering and other foul means of putting dissenting voices into digital gulags,” is being done at the behest of powerful, vested interests in the government and the tech companies are merely the Deep State’s means of carrying out its attempt to regain narrative control?
If this is correct, then the deplatforming, shadow banning etc. we’ve seen over the past couple years, and especially the past few months, isn’t just a case of private companies behaving badly, but represents the merger of state and corporate powers – the merger of state and corporate powers is the classic definition of fascism – to control what people think.
It is the studied opinion of this author that this is precisely what is going on. Or as the quote from Jim Jatras at the top of this post reads, “While the mailed glove belongs to the tech giants and the executives, the hand inside is the government’s.”
Lux Lucet 