Jay Weber Show transcript 1-13-21 6:05am
My friends...it is sad when leaders in Germany and France need to lecture Americans about censorship and freedom of speech.
It is encouraging to see!-but it’s sad.
It is sad that- over the last few days-it has been angel Merkel and a bunch of Frenchmen who are reminding the American left about the corrosive nature of censorship and the important of free speech and our country’s first amendment.
As we have learned over the last week- big tech might be-the biggest!-current threat to democracy in this country.
Their actions to silence a sitting president and de-platform and try to erase anyone who supported him or his agenda in their public arenas....was beyond alarming.
And that they did so swiftly and with so little thought is downright scary...as the implications of their actions really start to sink in.
I’ve heard other talk show hosts say this isn’t a free speech issue because twitter, Facebook, apple, google-etc are private companies. They aren’t ‘government’ and therefore can run their platforms as they see fit.
There’s actually some question about that when it comes to these massive social media companies, given the role they have willingly and intentionally played for decades now- as some ‘public town hall’for every sort of speech and dissent...
But-the claim this isn’t a free speech issue is wrong. It’s not a ‘first amendment’ issue, no. Not in the cleanest sense of the definition. Because the first amendment is about government taking away your right to speak and be heard-not private business.
So no, it’s not a ‘first amendment’ issue. But it is a ‘free speech’ issue. Because, Americans don’t just take that more narrow definition of free speech to heart, or carefully parcel what is government versus the private sector.
Americans expect to have the right to express their opinions and not be attacked or silenced for their expression. And they certainly don’t expect to see a big tech cleansing of their views-driven by cheap political theatre.
And that’s what this fallout from last Wednesday’s capitol riot has been: it has been democrats recruiting their powerful ‘progressive’ friends in big tech and big media- to help them engage in a national purge....of any conservative expression or thought.
This is absolutely censorship, even if it isn’t ‘government’ censorship.
Anyone or any group in a position of power-can engage in censorship. In fact, the Wikipedia definition is:censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient." censorship can be conducted by governments, private institutions, and other controlling bodies.
Apple, google, twitter, Facebook- have grown to such powerful private institutions that you could actually argue that they exert the sort of power and control over us that is closer to government. Than to any private sector business.
Of course this is censorship.
No discussion related to this ‘woke purge’ that is happening this week...would be complete without connecting these big tech companies directly to the democrat side of the aisle...and the incoming Biden administration.
Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, etc. It’s not like they haven’t been open about their political rooting interests in the past: they are all sizable democrat donors...and several of them have engaged in politicking on behalf of the democrats and their social justice causes.
It wasn’t a secret-before last week- where these powerful CEOs stood, politically. They’ve all been open and active lefties who, at times, even admitted to engaging in actions that suppressed conservative speech.
I mean-we are coming off of four years of twitter and Facebook flagging, blocking, and punishing any right wing rhetoric that they don’t like...and not once have they done the same thing to the left.
Folks-Every hateful tweet and video from Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi and Rachel Maddow and Don Lemon and all of the rest of them are still up and available on Twitter and Facebook.
We only arrived at the flashpoint that we did last Wednesday- thanks to the relentless four year rage and cascade of hate speech against trump and his followers. And it was all circulated by big tech. And all of it remains on their servers, feeds, and old timelines.
Not a single democrat has -to my knowledge-ever been censored, blocked, or banned from twitter or Facebook over the last four years. And that includes openly vile and hateful BLM and antifa material.
The contrast has been obvious and evident and unfair-and they don’t care.
Yesterday Rand Paul’s wife called out the twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey, for allowing torrents of hate directed at her husband to flow over twitter-for years- without ever doing anything about it.
Far more vile, hateful and insightful crap than Donald Trump ever tweeted.
This is a purge. A ‘great social silencing’ by powerful bullies on the left. And it is a free speech issue...given how all-powerful these companies are and how intrusive they have become in our lives.
Folks-Facebook and amazon do-far- far-more spying on us than government does. It’s not even in question. They know far more about us all-collectively and individually-than our federal government does, and it’s not even close.
And -as private companies- they can and do use that information against us. So, in some ways, these private big tech companies are more powerful than government and can do more harm to us.
Let’s not dismiss this as just ‘private companies should be allowed to do what they want’..so..whatever.
For the last decade! Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, Dorsey, etc....have been engaging in very biased political manipulations. And so, if course it took very little last week to convince them to take the final step and use a quick crisis to block out all conservative thought.
Do you know that Joe Biden has close ties to all five of these major tech companies?
This is an incestuous relationship that goes much farther back than last week, folks.
This is one political party with such a powerful reach into the private sector-that they can use the biggest private companies and their CEOs as hand puppets...to serve the left wing agenda.
Wash times columnist Cheryl Chumley is right when she says- a big purge like this is just the start in socialist regimes:
And it ends with American’s hearts and minds enslaved...as a small group of elite totalitarian masters call all of the shots and make every decision for us.
And the American left feels like it has never been closer to realizing this dream. And yet-clearly-they also feel like they have never had a more tenuous grip on the American people.
Socialism always fails because trying to force the human spirit. A human being’s hopes and dreams and independence-into a box that some distant power can then control-----Never works.
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