The following is an except from Thought Control Inc. A recent pamphlet of mine from the Freedom Center that discusses how major monopolies are working with the Left to eliminate the Bill of Rights while banning conservatives from the marketplace of ideas.
On December 2016, fresh off her defeat, Hillary Clinton warned of the “malicious threat of fake news and false propaganda that flooded social media over the past year.”
Fake news was loosely defined. And without definition, it simply meant speech. The threat was that people had said things on Facebook that others disagreed with. The solution was censorship.
Fake news was a “danger that must be addressed and addressed quickly,” Clinton demanded, urging the private and public sector to “protect our democracy and innocent lives.
Before the villain of the 2016 election had become the Russian boogeyman, it was free speech.
“Many of us are beginning to talk about what a big problem this is, both from the campaign and from the administration, and just sort of broader Obama orbit,” Teddy Goff, the Clinton campaign’s chief digital strategist, said. “This is something we were very aware of, saw zero percent chance Facebook was going to be compliant or work with us during the election, but wanted to take on post-election.”
“We will hold social media platforms accountable for the hate infiltrating their platforms, because they have a responsibility to help fight against this threat to our democracy,” Senator Kamala Harris vowed on the 2020 campaign trail. “If you act as a megaphone for misinformation or cyber warfare, if you don’t police your platforms, we are going to hold you accountable.”
Senator Harris was criminalizing speech by treating disagreement as a national security issue while threatening companies that wouldn’t censor views and ideas that the Democrat disagreed with.
Once Twitter, Facebook, and Google agreed to censor content in response to political pressure, they were no longer acting as private businesses policing their platforms, but as government agents.
If Senator Harris had no right to censor the opposition, neither did the dot coms doing her dirty work.
In California, the home of the tech industry, Senate Bill 1424 represented the most direct effort at pressuring dot coms into censorship. It required the Attorney General and the Department of Justice to “draft a model strategic plan for Internet-based social media platforms to use to mitigate the spread of false information through their platforms.” Despite its broad base of Democrat support, Governor Brown vetoed the bill and it was opposed by civil liberties groups over its obvious unconstitutionality.
Direct “public sector” censorship was not legal, but private sector censorship had fewer barriers.
The original version of SB 1424 had required anyone operating a website to use “fact-checkers to verify news stories.” Fact checking had once meant that the media would check the facts it was using. But while the media’s internal fact checking declined, it began deploying editorials disguised as fact checks.
But it wasn’t just about the First Amendment.
Democrat officials were leaning on major financial institutions to impose gun control on their customers. And they weren’t subtle about it.
At a House hearing titled “Holding Megabanks Accountable,” Rep Carolyn Maloney blasted Wells Fargo CEO Timothy Sloan for not having followed the example of other banks that had gone “above and beyond the law” by imposing her idea of “common-sense gun safety policies” on its customers
“I believe in corporate responsibility,” Rep. Maloney declared. “I’m proud of the two banks who’ve come up and said we don’t want to finance gun slaughter.”
“There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and not everything has to be done through legislation explicitly,” Rep. Ocasio-Cortez said. “We can also use the tools that we have here to pressure change in other ways as well.”
What Democrat elected and unelected officials had not been able to accomplish in any of the three branches of government, their covert fourth branch of private sector powerhouses could achieve.
That was an except of Thought Control Inc. You can find the entire pamphlet here.
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