Republicans and Democrats hammered Big Tech CEOs during a House hearing Wednesday, although for different reasons.

Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Tim Cook of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Sundar Pichai of Google testified via the internet on free speech concerns before the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust, commercial, and administrative law.

“Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, these corporations already stood out as titans in our economy. In the wake of COVID-19 … they’re likely to emerge stronger and more powerful than ever before,” subcommittee Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., said.

Here are four key highlights of the hearing.

---

Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today. But what side are you on? And how can you sharpen up on how to defend your position? Learn more now >>

---

1. ‘Out to Get Conservatives’

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, opened his comments by saying, “I’ll cut to the chase: Big Tech is out to get conservatives.”

Jordan noted that in 2020, Google removed the home pages of Breitbart and The Daily Caller and threatened to demonetize The Federalist.

Amazon banned a conservative commentator’s book on the coronavirus, Jordan said. Its Amazon Smile charity won’t allow customers to give to conservative groups such as Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, but allows donations to Planned Parenthood, he said.

“Google and YouTube announced a policy censoring the content that conflicts with recommendations of the World Health Organization.” Jordan said. “Think about that, the World Health Organization. The organization that lied to us, that shilled for China. If you contradict something they say—they can lie for China, they can shill for China—you say something against them, you get censored.”

The Ohio Republican said such moves by Big Tech companies matter before the November elections:

The power these companies have to impact what could happen in an election, what American citizens get to see prior to their voting, is pretty darn important. We all think the free market is great. We all think competition is great. We love the fact that these are American companies. What’s not great is censoring people, censoring conservatives, and trying to impact elections. If it doesn’t end, there has to be consequences.

Jordan asked Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc. and subsidiary Google LLC, whether Google would commit to trying not to tilt the election to Democrats. Pichai seemed slow to respond.

“Congressman, we approach our work—we support both campaigns today,” he said. “We think political ads are an important part of free speech in democratic societies, and we engage with campaigns according to law and we approach our work in a nonpartisan way.”

Jordan said: “It was a yes or no question.”

Pichai responded: “We support work that campaigns do.”

Jordan appeared to become exasperated.

“I understand that,” he said, adding: “Can you today assure Americans you won’t tailor your features to help, specifically help, any candidate over another?”

Finally, Pichai said: “We won’t do any work to politically tilt anything one way or the other. It’s against our core values.”

After Jordan’s exchange with the Google executive, Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon, D-Pa., said: “Thank you, gentlemen. I’d like to redirect your attention to antitrust law rather than fringe conspiracy theories.”

Jordan jumped to defend himself. But Cicilline, using his power as chairman, said: “Mr. Jordan, you do not have the time. Please be respectful of your colleagues.”

“When someone comes after my motives for asking a question,” Jordan said, “I get a chance to respond.”

But Cicilline didn’t allow that.

2. Bezos and Customer Data

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., noted that last year she asked Amazon’s associate general counsel whether the company used any specific seller data in creating its own product.

The counsel told her no, Jayapal said. However, on Wednesday, Bezos gave a different response than the company lawyer to the same question, she said.

“In July 2019, your employee Nate Sutton told me under oath in this committee that Amazon does not, quote, ‘use any specific seller data when creating its own private brand product,’” Jayapal said. “So, let me ask you, Mr. Bezos, does Amazon access and use third-party seller data when making business decisions? And just a yes or no will suffice, sir.”

Bezos didn’t offer such clarity.

“I can’t answer that question yes or no,” the Amazon CEO said. “What I can tell you is that we have a policy against using seller-specific data to aid our private label business. But, I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.”

Jayapal noted a Wall Street Journal story that said the company violated the policy.

“Mr. Bezos, you’re probably aware that an April 2020 report in The Wall Street Journal revealed that your company does access data on third-party sellers, both by reviewing data on popular individual sellers and products and by creating tiny product categories that allowed your company to categorically access detailed seller information in a supposedly aggregate category,” Jayapal said. “Do you deny that report?”

Bezos, also the owner of The Washington Post, seemed to question the Journal’s report on his company because of the use of anonymous sources.

“I’m familiar with The Wall Street Journal article you’re talking about. We continue to look into that very carefully,” Bezos said.  “We’re not yet satisfied that we’ve gotten to the bottom of it. We’re going to keep looking at it. It’s not as easy as you would think, because some of the sources in the article are anonymous. But we continue to look into it.”

Jayapal replied: “I take that as you’re not denying that. You’re looking into it.”

3. Facebook Would Take Down ‘Risky’ COVID-19 Post

Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., ranking member of the subcommittee, pressed Zuckerberg on Facebook’s threshold for taking down content. He cited Twitter’s suspension of Donald Trump Jr. for posting about drugs to treat COVID-19.

“Exactly what are your standards in, quote, ‘filtering out political speech’ that maybe some people out there don’t agree with?” Sensenbrenner asked.

Zuckerberg said the goal is to “offer a platform for all ideas,” adding:

Frankly, I think we’ve distinguished ourselves as one of the companies that defends free expression the most. We do have community standards around things that you can and cannot say. I think you would likely agree with most of them. They ban categories of harm such as promoting terrorist propaganda, child exploitation, incitement of violence, some more legalistic things like intellectual property violations. They also ban things like hate speech that could lead to dehumanizing people and encouraging violence down the road.

Zuckerberg said he could speak to policies at Facebook, but noted that Twitter and not Facebook had penalized the younger Trump.

“Stating there is a proven cure for COVID, when there is in fact none, might encourage someone to go take something that could have an adverse effect,” Zuckerberg said. “So, we do take that down. We do not prohibit discussion around trials of drugs, or people saying that they think that things might work.”

Sensenbrenner pushed back, stating that such opinions should be open for debate or fact-checkers to probe.

“In general, I agree with you,” Zuckerberg said. “We do not want to become arbiters of truth. That would be a bad position for us to be in and not what we should be doing. But, on specific claims, if someone is going to go out and say that hydroxychloroquine is proven to cure COVID, when in fact it  has not been proven to cure COVID, and that statement could lead people to, in some cases it could be harmful to people, we should take that down. That could cause imminent risk of harm.”

4. Apple CEO ‘OK’ With Huawei

Cook, CEO of Apple, stressed that his company is not a monopoly. He later brought up Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., among other competing companies, as having an approach that he is OK with.

Huawei is a Chinese government-run company that has been accused of unfair competitive practices.

“If you want to put it simply, products like iPhone just work,” Cook said. “When customers consistently give iPhone a 99% satisfaction rating, that’s the message they’re sending about the user experience.”

He then listed competitors, including Huawei.

“But we also know that customers have a lot of choices and that our products face fierce competition,” Cook said. “Companies like Samsung, LG, Huawei, and Google have built successful businesses with different approaches. We’re OK with that. Our goal is the best, not the most. In fact, we don’t have a dominant share in any market or any product category where we do business.”

COLUMN BY

Fred Lucas

Fred Lucas is the White House correspondent for The Daily Signal and co-host of “The Right Side of History” podcast. Lucas is also the author of “Tainted by Suspicion: The Secret Deals and Electoral Chaos of Disputed Presidential Elections.” Send an email to Fred. Twitter: @FredLucasWH.

---

These are trying times in our nation’s history. Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today, with polar opposite viewpoints on public policy and the government’s role in our lives.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation asked world-class speaker, educator, and researcher David Azerrad to walk you through his research and outline the differences between the “two regimes” in our society today—conservatism and progressivism—and their primary differences.

When you get access to this course today, you’ll learn key takeaways like what it means to be a conservative, what “modern progressivism” is, how a conservative worldview differs from a progressive one, and much, much more.

You will come away from this online course with a better understanding of the differing points of view, how they align with your principles, and how to defend your beliefs.

Don’t wait—start taking “The Case for Conservatism” course online now.

The following is an excerpt from the introduction to “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free,” a new book by Mike Gonzalez, senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Allison Center for Foreign Policy and Angeles T. Arredondo E Pluribus Unum fellow, published by Encounter Books.

---

Identity politics is all around us. Whether you know it or not, we are all bathing in it. Some Americans have embraced it gladly, while others have simply become inured to it and no longer bat an eyelid. Many others, however, have begun to take notice, and to them something does not seem right.

If you are one of the latter, you raise an eyebrow when the princi­pal at your daughter’s school repeats the incantation “diversity is our strength!” and you hear that some subjects, even math, are taught differently depending on a student’s race.

You think of Orwell—“War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery.” But you understand why parents don’t put up a fuss. Who wants to get on the wrong side of the principal by explaining to her that, in fact, we can observe in the laws of physics, and in the social sciences, that it is unity that forges strength? Who wants to tell her that two plus two always equals four no matter what your race is?

---

Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today. But what side are you on? And how can you sharpen up on how to defend your position? Learn more now >>

---

Likewise, at the office, when the head of human resources asks you to place a sign on your desk that reads, “I’m an ally!” you stifle the urge to wisecrack, “Why? Are we at war?” It’s the head of human resources, after all.

Again, you understand why so many of your colleagues put the darn sign on their desk, and you refrain from asking about rumors that another session is afoot to uncover employees’ subconscious bias.

Back at home, when the talking head on TV spends the first 10 minutes of airtime discussing all the identity groups that the newly elected dogcatcher belongs to, you want to snap back, “Who cares? Can she catch strays?”

Only crazy people talk to the TV, however. But you do talk back when the next news item is about a father who has lost custody of his 7-year-old son because he disagrees with his estranged wife, who wants the boy to “transition” into a girl.

Later that evening, when your own son, who is applying to college, announces he will identify as Hispanic because your mother’s father was born in Monterrey, your first reaction is to tell him, “But I never even met Grampa Ortiz.”

On second thought, it might get Jimmy into Cornell, so you repress the unease you feel about gaming the system. You also feel relieved that, if he’s no longer considered white, at least he won’t be made to feel at fault for everything.

At the same time, it will sting your neighbor deeply when he finds out that his small company did not get the city contract. He couldn’t produce a narrative of oppres­sion, and someone else got the contract through a set-aside program.

His mother’s father was born in Salerno, and after immigrating was repeatedly beat up by rough Irish kids in Boston. But that doesn’t do your neighbor any good, since Italians are not one of the designated oppressed minorities.

Or say you’re an immigrant from Peru’s port of Callao. You came to New York in the 1970s, settling in Queens with dreams of becom­ing American and one day having American children, the same as other Americans.

Soon after your arrival, however, you heard people on TV saying that you were now a third thing, a Hispanic, and you should be proud of belonging to this category. Joining the American mainstream was an unattainable goal, said these loud people, and you shouldn’t aspire to it, anyway. America is a racist place, they went on, and if you wanted to have a measure of success, you had to join this massive new ethnic collective.

All this disturbed you somehow, even if you could not articulate why. Decades later, it dawns on you that you had been enlisted into a struggle to overturn the very country and system that had attracted you to emigrate in the first place, and you are not happy about this.

In all these small and large ways, identity politics has become the operating system of our national hardware. As with war, even if you are not interested in it, identity politics is interested in you.

But what is identity politics, anyway? In a Twitter exchange on this question with Vox Media reporter Jane Coaston last year, I took a stab at defining the term:

I mean the deliberate creation of pan-ethnic and other identity groups; the idea that members of this panoply of collec­tives should get compensatory justice; the culture of victimhood all of this engenders.

Twitter’s character limits force us to cram complicated ideas into pithy epigrams, and in my tweet I tried to concisely pres­ent the main elements of what has become an ideology of our times. The purpose of this book is to explain how and why these elements came together, who was behind the ideology’s rise, and what we can do about it.

Many theories have been put forward to explain how this ideology was suddenly sprung on America. They cover the gamut, from the demise of the family, to the erosion of social capital in many working-class neighborhoods, to the absence of a unifying enemy following America’s victory in the Cold War.

What follows in this book is a more-or-less-chronological account of the rise of identity politics, put in the context of the doctrines and philosophies that fed into it, and discussion of its impact on the American system and the threat it poses to the liberties that sustain the American way of life.

We have identity politics today because our government has created ethnic and sexual categories whose members have been instilled with resentments against the country and its system and given real financial benefits for nursing their grievances. Insisting on group grievances thereby perpetuates the identity groups. If we stop this vicious cycle, we may be able to free ourselves from the grip of identity politics.

The book traces the origins of identity politics to the late 1960s and 1970s, when the white establishment panicked over the black riots then tearing up parts of northern cities.

This panic led to two main outcomes. First, members of the establishment offered “temporary” racial benefits to pacify Northern blacks, who had seen fewer advances than their Southern counterparts during the civil rights era.

Second, they accepted the assertion by leftist activists claiming to mediate on behalf of other groups that there was an analogy to be made between the suffering of blacks and the experiences of Americans of Mexican, Chinese, Puerto Rican, Japanese, Filipino, and other descents. This analogy, which was also extended to women as a group, was drawn over and over.

It was, of course, dishonest and deceitful: The experi­ence of black Americans was in fact unique. Nevertheless, this way of thinking led in time to such absurdities as immigrants fresh off the boat receiving “compensatory justice” for the real and imagined suf­fering of their ancestors.

Racial preferences also never went away, but more than half a century later have become a fixture of American life, and keep being expanded.

As this book further demonstrates, activ­ists of those earlier decades sought to move the country away from its limited-government traditions inherited from the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment toward the centralized state planning drawn from the Continental Kantian, Hegelian, and Marxian worldviews.

Stated plainly, my goal is to change how the nation thinks about identity politics and identity groups.

We do not have to accept these categories, the discourses of “privilege” and “victimhood,” or politically loaded (and recent) terms such as “minorities,” “diversity,” and “persons of color.” Rather, I seek to snap the country out of its identity trance by exposing the actors, their actions, how they came up with these terms, and the theories that led us to this juncture.

The identity collectives have done nothing to alleviate the very real racial discrimination and social injustice that continues to exist in America—nor were they intended to do so—but have only exacerbated them.

COMMENTARY BY

Mike Gonzalez

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, is a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America. He served in the George W. Bush administration, first at the Securities and Exchange Commission and then at the State Department, and is the author of the forthcoming book “The Plot to Change America: How Identity Politics is Dividing the Land of the Free.” Read his research. Twitter: @Gundisalvus.

RELATED ARTICLE: Rioters Are Seditionists, Not Protesters

---

A Note for our Readers:

These are trying times in our nation’s history. Two regimes are fighting an ideological war in America today, with polar opposite viewpoints on public policy and the government’s role in our lives.

Our friends at The Heritage Foundation asked world-class speaker, educator, and researcher David Azerrad to walk you through his research and outline the differences between the “two regimes” in our society today—conservatism and progressivism—and their primary differences.

When you get access to this course today, you’ll learn key takeaways like what it means to be a conservative, what “modern progressivism” is, how a conservative worldview differs from a progressive one, and much, much more.

You will come away from this online course with a better understanding of the differing points of view, how they align with your principles, and how to defend your beliefs.

Don’t wait—start taking “The Case for Conservatism” course online now.

GET YOUR FREE ACCESS NOW »

---

EDITORS NOTE: This Daily Signal column is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.