Multiple Silicon Valley CEOs congratulated President-elect Donald Trump on his win Tuesday night, from Jeff Bezos to Mark Zuckerberg.
Many of the CEOs congratulating Trump have faced accusations of left-wing bias and censorship, and their companies experienced backlash from conservatives. But despite Silicon Valley’s historically left-wing bent, multiple tech CEOs praised Trump on Wednesday.
Jeff Bezos congratulated the next president on “an extraordinary political comeback.” Bezos owns The Washington Post, which did not issue an endorsement for the 2024 presidential election. The refusal to endorse Kamala Harris reportedly cost the paper hundreds of thousands of subscribers and triggered backlash amongst its own staff.
Bezos previously wrote an op-ed detailing why “Americans don’t trust the news media anymore.”
Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory. No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.
That was only Bezos’s second tweet this year. In July, he tweeted in support of Trump after an assassination attempt at his rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
Our former President showed tremendous grace and courage under literal fire tonight. So thankful for his safety and so sad for the victims and their families.
However, The Post and Amazon both have a history of left-wing bias.
The Post recently ran an article titled “Trump embraces violent rhetoric, suggests Cheney should have guns ‘trained on her face’” in reference to the false claim that Trump wanted Liz Cheney put in front of a firing squad.
Endorsements from the editorial board aren’t what killed the reputation of the @washingtonpost, it’s the blatant leftwing bias of the reporters and editors on the news side that caused them to lose the trust of so many Americans.
Amazon’s Alexa previously expressed support for Harris over Trump for president, although the company claimed it was an error. Amazon has also censored books written by conservatives.
In one instance, it removed a book critical of the transgender movement from its online store in 2021. The book, “When Harry Became Sally: Responding To The Transgender Moment” was a bestseller. The Biden-Harris administration also pressured Amazon to censor books skeptical of the COVID-19 vaccine, according to emails obtained by the House Judiciary Committee.
Notably, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy also issued a statement congratulating Trump on his victory.
“We look forward to working with you and your administration on issues important to our customers, employees, communities, and country,” Jassy stated.
Congratulations to President-elect @realDonaldTrump on a hard-fought victory. We look forward to working with you and your administration on issues important to our customers, employees, communities, and country.
Other big names congratulating Trump included Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
“Congratulations President Trump on your victory!” Cook stated in a post. “We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.”
Congratulations President Trump on your victory! We look forward to engaging with you and your administration to help make sure the United States continues to lead with and be fueled by ingenuity, innovation, and creativity.
“Congratulations to President Trump on a decisive victory,” Zuckerberg stated on Instagram Threads. “We have great opportunities ahead of us as a country. Looking forward to working with you and your administration.”
Both Meta and Google have come under fire for censorship and left-wing bias.
Facebook collaborated with the FBI to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story. It also bowed to pressure from the Biden-Harris administration to censor certain COVID-19 views. Mark Zuckerberg admitted the government pressured Meta, and he expressed regret in a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan.
“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I also think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today.”
Zuckerberg also did not issue an endorsement in the presidential election and reportedly identifies as a libertarian.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai echoed Zuckerberg’s endorsement, congratulating Trump on his “decisive victory.”
Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump on his decisive victory. We are in a golden age of American innovation and are committed to working with his administration to help bring the benefits to everyone. pic.twitter.com/IPX7AJ8VvI
Trump suggested in August that Congress could “shut down” Google over its alleged bias and censorship of conservatives.
That same month, Pichai testified to the House Oversight Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government on Google’s censorship of information regarding Trump’s first attempted assassination.
Google’s parent company, Alphabet, told the committee the autocomplete search results did not show results pertaining to Trump when users searched for “President Donald” because of a software “bug.”
🚨 #NEWS: @Jim_Jordan reveals non-public information on 𝐆𝐎𝐎𝐆𝐋𝐄’s issues with Search and Autocomplete surrounding the assassination attempt of President Trump.
— House Judiciary GOP 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 (@JudiciaryGOP) August 5, 2024
Other prominent Silicon Valley congratulations came from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Congratulations President Trump, we’re looking forward to engaging with you and your administration to drive innovation forward that creates new growth and opportunity for the United States and the world.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2024-11-08 04:37:482024-11-08 04:41:13Big Tech Bends The Knee To Donald Trump
With just eight days left in the presidential election, there are clear signs that Vice President Kamala Harris is on unsteady ground.
Democrats started whispering to their friends in the corporate press about their election-day fears that Harris could lose to former President Donald Trump.
“A growing number of top Democrats tell us privately they feel Vice President Harris will lose — even though polls show a coin-toss finish 11 days from now,” Axios reported. “Democrats admit they tend to be hand-wringing, bed-wetting, doomsdayers. But what’s striking is how our private conversations with Democrats inside and outside her campaign reveal broad concern that little she does, says — or tries — seems to move the needle.”
It’s never a good sign when Democrats (even anonymously) tell the media their candidate is going to lose and that nothing she does “seems to move the needle.” The polling shows that while the election is still close and could go either way, Trump has a shot to win not only the Electoral College vote but also the popular vote.
The RealClear polling average has Trump up just 0.2% in the national poll, the first time he’s led since Harris first entered the race. Emerson, NY Times/Sienna and CNN all have polls showing that Harris and Trump are tied for the popular vote. Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes polls both show that Trump wins the popular vote by two points.
— Nathan | Classical Conservative (@TheClassicalCon) October 26, 2024
A Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won the popular vote since former President George W. Bush in 2004. Trump’s support was on full display Sunday in Manhattan when voters turned out in droves, occupying block after block in dark blue New York City wearing MAGA hats and other Trump gear to hear him speak.
The media did their usual dog and pony show, attempting to connect Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally to the Nazi Party rally held there in 1930. Outside of Harris’ staunch supporters, regular voters see this rhetoric for what it is — Democrat propaganda. It’s hard to make people believe the lie that “Trump is a Nazi” when there are supporters from every race and religion in the crowd.
To make matters worse for Harris, CNN reported that executives from major Big Tech firms, like Apple, Meta, Google, and Amazon, have all recently knocked on Trump’s door.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with Trump after he survived his first assassination attempt in July. Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly called Trump to discuss his company’s legal issues in Italy. Google CEO Sundar Pichai contacted Trump about his dominance in Google’s algorithm after his appearance at the Pennsylvania McDonald’s, the former president said. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy even called Trump to “check in,” the outlet reported.
🚨New: The CEOs of Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta have recently called up President Trump, seeking to smooth relations ahead of Election Day.
— The Calvin Coolidge Project (@TheCalvinCooli1) October 27, 2024
“There are some that seem to be waking up to the fact that, like, ‘Holy sh*t, this guy might get elected again. I don’t want to have him, his administration, going after us,’” a person close to Trump told CNN. “What he’s saying out loud, I think they hear, and they’re taking it seriously.”
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, blocked his outlet’s editorial team from endorsing Harris for president. Robert Kagan, a member of the opinions section who resigned in protest, told CNN Friday, “This is obviously an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump in the anticipation of his possible victory.”
The New York Post reported this morning that Bezos attended a call with reporters upset over his decision to stay out of the race, giving them a “mandate to add more conservative voices to its opinion section.”
JUST IN – Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has reportedly given the newspaper a mandate to add more conservative opinion writers at the paper — NY Post
While it’s impossible to predict the outcome of the 2024 election, it has to terrify Democrats to see their national popularity slipping to a man they claim is a threat to (big D) democracy.
Harris is heading into Nov. 5 without the popular vote lead she needs to help push her over the line in critical swing states, without the explicit support from corporate media outlets and with the knowledge that even Big Tech CEOs are lining up outside Trump’s office to “check-in.”
Tech giant Google’s days of election interference may be drawing to a close, pending the outcome of November’s presidential election. Former President Donald Trump pledged on Friday to prosecute Google for manipulating search results to benefit Democratic political candidates, should he retake the White House.
“It has been determined that Google has illegally used a system of only revealing and displaying bad stories about Donald J. Trump, some made up for this purpose while, at the same time, only revealing good stories about Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump shared in a post on Truth Social. He continued, “This is an ILLEGAL ACTIVITY, and hopefully the Justice Department will criminally prosecute them for this blatant Interference of Elections.” The 45th president vowed, “If not, and subject to the Laws of our Country, I will request their prosecution, at the maximum levels, when I win the Election, and become President of the United States!”
A report published last week by Media Research Center (MRC) Free Speech America revealed that Google has been manipulating and “padding” search results to promote Vice President Kamala Harris and disparage Trump. Researchers used Google to search for both “Donald Trump Presidential Race 2024” and “Kamala Harris Presidential Race 2024” and found that Google listed Harris’s campaign website higher in search results than Trump’s campaign website. Google also promoted news websites — such as CNN, NBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico, and The Economist — which have a left-wing bias and provided negative coverage of Trump’s campaign and policies and favorable coverage of Harris’s campaign and policies.
“This is not neutral, there are snotty headlines and opinion pieces,” MRC NewsBusters Executive Editor Tim Graham commented. He continued, “Writers highlight negatives for both campaigns but suggest Harris is not an ideologue, and that Trump is very divisive. Apparently, Democrats can say the worst things about Trump and his supporters and it’s never viewed as divisive. It’s merely implied that it’s accurate.”
A previous MRC report found that Google has “interfered in elections” over 40 times since 2008. Over the past almost-two-decades, Google has consistently worked to promote news, opinion, and analysis from sources with a left-wing bias; buried stories damaging to Democratic politicians; buried Republican candidates’ campaign websites; and used search result suggestions to liken Republicans to Nazis. Google worked hard to promote then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and, in 2012, his reelection efforts. In 2016, Google hid search suggestions related to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s criminal indictment and her involvement in the deaths of American citizens and soldiers in Benghazi, Libya.
Google also overrepresented media sources with a left-wing bias. When searching for results related to “abortion,” “campaign finance reform,” “global warming,” “Iraq war,” and others, Google users were 40% more likely to be fed sources with a left-wing bias. In the 2018 midterms, the overrepresentation of left-wing news sources increased, with Google burying Republican candidates’ campaign websites, listing “Nazism” as a “related search” to Republican organizations, and listing the Republican Party under search results for “Nazism.”
In 2020, Google continued its election interference efforts in an attempt to “prevent … the next Trump situation,” as a senior Google official put it. In addition to overrepresenting news sources with a left-wing bias, Google also blocked and blacklisted news sources it deemed too conservative, including MRC’s NewsBusters, the Daily Caller, The Christian Post, and Catholic News Agency. These websites would not appear in search results conducted using Google mobile apps.
Other websites — including Breitbart News and The Federalist — were blocked from appearing in Google search results regardless of the app or platform used to access Google. The tech giant blocked emails from Republican campaigns and organizations — including the Republican National Committee — from being delivered to Gmail accounts. Google also rewrote its campaign ads policies in order to suppress campaigns that executives considered threatening to former Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign.
In the past several months, Google has worked with the Harris campaign to attach campaign ads to news results, altering headlines to make it appear that major news outlets like the Associated Press, USA Today, The Guardian, The Independent, Time Magazine, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS News, and others are endorsing or promoting Harris’s presidential campaign. One of the news outlets targeted by the Harris campaign — the family-owned, North Dakota-based WDAY Radio — is considering taking legal action against both Google and the Harris campaign.
In the weeks following the first assassination attempt against Trump, in Butler, Pennsylvania, Google censored search suggestion results related to the event. The Washington Stand reported that a Google search for “assassination attempt” yielded autocomplete results such as “on hitler” and “on ronald reagan,” but no mention was made of Trump. Likewise, a search for “assassination attempt on” returned autocomplete results for such figures as Adolf Hitler, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Lenin, Bob Marley, Harry Truman, Prince Charles, Gerald Ford, and Pope John Paul II, but not Trump. Searches that did not include the word “assassination” were also censored. A search for “Trump butler,” referring to the site of the attempted assassination, returned no autocomplete results and a search for “Trump shot” was corrected to “Trump Soho,” “Trump shoe,” “Trump shuttle,” or “Trump show.”
In early August, a federal court determined that Google was operating as an illegal monopoly and was controlling the search engine and search engine advertising markets. “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote. Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow at Family Research Council and election integrity adviser at FRC Action, said at the time, “This is a victory for Americans who want free and fair elections.” He continued, “When Google allegedly manipulates search results to suppress results on issues like the attempted assassination of President Donald Trump, including the iconic photo of him after the shooting raising his fist in the air with the American flag in the background, that is election interference, and should not be tolerated.”
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is reportedly considering breaking up Google’s illegal monopoly and forcing the tech giant to divest several of its assets, including the Android operating system.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2024-10-01 10:44:402024-10-01 10:47:42Trump Eyeing Prosecuting Google over ‘Illegal’ Election Interference
A family-owned radio station is considering suing the Democratic presidential nominee and a Big Tech figurehead over deceptive political ads. Earlier this week, Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign was exposed for editing Google text ads attached to news headlines, giving the impression that major and local news outlets were outright endorsing or promoting Harris’s White House bid. One of the news outlets that was targeted was the family-owned, North Dakota-based WDAY Radio. According to the Daily Caller, WDAY is considering legal action against the Harris campaign and Google.
“We feel insulted and violated by what was done here,” Steve Hallstrom, the president and managing partner of Flag Family Media, which owns WDAY Radio, told the Daily Caller. “You have a political campaign that used our news brand and our URL to effectively lie to people about the headline we wrote. They lied to every single person that saw that ad. It’s misleading, it’s dishonest, and it hurts us as the company, our news brand. So as of today, we’re starting to make some calls here. We are considering all of our options here, including legal action.”
The Harris campaign spent over $750,000 in August alone to attach its ads to news stories that appear in Google searches. The campaign crafted its own headlines and attached text in order to make it appear that WDAY and other news outlets — like the Associated Press, USA Today, The Guardian, The Independent, Time Magazine, NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS News, and more — were promoting, supporting, or endorsing the Harris campaign. When links to the targeted news sites or news stories were clicked, users were directed to the original news stories, not the ads written by the Harris campaign.
Spokesmen for the various news outlets targeted by the Harris campaign have asserted that they were unaware that their names, brands, logos, and links were being used in this way. For example, a spokesman for The Guardian said, “While we understand why an organization might wish to align itself with The Guardian’s trusted brand, we need to ensure it is being used appropriately and with our permission. We’ll be reaching out to Google for more information about this practice.”
The ads attached to WDAY links used the headlines “Harris Picks Tim Walz — 215,000 MN Families Win,” “Learn About VP Pick Tim Walz — Harris Picks Tim Walz,” and “Harris Picks Tim Walz — Tim Walz Tapped For VP.” The text of the ads, according to Google Ads Transparency Center, boasted of Walz expanding the child tax credit in Minnesota. Previously, Harris and her campaign have attacked Senator J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who was selected as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, for promoting the child tax credit.
Google has insisted that the Harris campaign is in no way violating the tech giant’s rules or policies. Others have noted that while editing text in ads is not an altogether uncommon practice, it is rarely used in political campaigns. Google and several media bias watchdog groups have confirmed that Trump is not running any similar ads.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2024-08-19 15:00:502024-08-19 15:10:30‘They Lied to Every Single Person’: Radio Station Eyes Legal Action over Harris Campaign’s Deceptive Google Ads
WDAY Radio, a local news outlet in Fargo, North Dakota, is considering legal action after the Kamala Harris campaign deceptively edited WDAY headlines to make it look like they supported her in an ad campaign, its president told the Daily Caller.
The Harris campaign has been editing news headlines and descriptions within Google search ads to make it appear as if major news organizations explicitly support her, a bombshell Axios report revealed Tuesday.
WDAY was the only family-owned outlet listed in the report. Other outlets who had their content manipulated by Harris’ team included Reuters, the Associated Press, NPR, CNN, The Guardian, The Independent and more.
WDAY’s President blasted Google and the Harris campaign for the deception in an exclusive interview with the Daily Caller.
“We feel insulted and violated by what was done here,” Steve Hallstrom, the President and Managing Partner of Flag Family Media, which owns WDAY Radio, told the Daily Caller.
“You have a political campaign that used our news brand and our URL to effectively lie to people about the headline we wrote,” Hallstrom said. “They lied to every single person that saw that ad. It’s misleading, it’s dishonest, and it hurts us as the company, our news brand. So as of today, we’re starting to make some calls here. We are considering all of our options here, including legal action.”
The Harris campaign used three variations of an advertisement which linked to WDAY’s website. The ads ran with the headlines “Harris Picks Tim Walz – 215,000 MN Families Win,” “Learn About VP Pick Tim Walz – Harris Picks Tim Walz,” and “Harris Picks Tim Walz – Tim Walz Tapped For VP,” according to the Google Ads Transparency Center.
The advertisements linked to real articles by the news organizations in question — but the articles did not have those headlines, nor did they include parts of the text included underneath.
“We never wrote anything close to what is alleged here,” Hallstrom said. “They took two different unrelated stories that we did have on our website, sort of mashed them together, and then from there, they rewrote a few words to make it look like our news organization was cheering on the selection of Walz.”
The ads don’t violate Google’s policies, the company told Axios, though some of them appeared without necessary sponsorship disclosures due to a “glitch,” a Google spokesperson said.
“I’ve heard the excuses about how this meets the approval of the Google Ad criteria people, and I don’t care,” Hallstrom said. “When you see that ad, you may understand that it’s an ad, that any reasonable human being would look at that and say, ‘Oh, the campaign, they found a story or headline on a website that’s good for them. Who would not use that? Who wouldn’t use that?’ But that’s not what happened here,” he continued.
Other outlets said they were wholly unaware of the seemingly-duplicitous ad campaign.
“AP was neither aware of this practice nor would we allow these to run on our website,” an AP spokesperson told the Daily Caller.
“We were unaware Reuters was being featured in these advertisements. We are looking into the matter,” Reuters told the Caller.
“It is entirely wrong for anyone to put fake headlines under ‘The Independent’ brand,” a spokesperson for the outlet told the Caller. “We object fiercely and believe it is undermining of what politics and journalism should be about. It is misleading to muddle fake headlines with any campaign trying to persuade people to vote in an election, and must be widely condemned. We will be seeking their removal.”
Hallstrom questioned why the Harris campaign would believe the ads are a good idea to begin with.
“There are things that are right and there are things that are wrong, and this clearly is wrong. This is clearly leading, it’s clearly deceptive, it’s dishonest, and it was done obviously recklessly without thinking about what’s really happening here. And I don’t know who on the Harris staff made the decision that this was a good strategy. But I can’t believe that on the whole that that organization, that campaign would, top to bottom, feel like this is a tactful and a principled approach to getting the word out about their candidate,” he said.
The scandal occurs at a time when Harris is facing increased scrutiny for her lack of meaningful engagement with the press.
In the three-plus weeks since Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee, she has yet to sit down for an interview with any members of the press. Her lack of availability prompted the Washington Post Editorial Board to publish a list of questions they’d like to ask her.
“We don’t want to let this go. We want to fight on this one,” Hallstrom concluded.
The Daily Caller reached out to Google and a representative for the Harris campaign, but did not hear back by time of publication.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2024-08-15 08:06:592024-08-15 09:06:38EXCLUSIVE: Harris Campaign, Google Could Face Lawsuit After Fake News Headline Scheme
There’s an old adage that says if you talk to yourself, you needn’t be worried. You need to be worried only when you begin to answer yourself.
Nearly 20 years ago, during the advent of the mobile phone’s adoption of Bluetooth, a strange phenomenon began to happen. You’d begin to see people walking by themselves on the street talking, having animated conversations. In the years before, such behavior was attributed to mental illness. A person just didn’t have an out-loud conversation with no one in their vicinity. It took a few years of getting used to, but now it’s commonplace. People talked into the air daily, but they were talking to another real person somewhere on the other end of the relays of bits of radio and telephone data. We weren’t talking to ourselves, and we certainly weren’t answering ourselves.
These days, I’m not so sure. We now inhabit a world where people talk routinely to small bricks of metal, glass, and plastic. And not only are we having words with these silicon wonders — the silicon wonders are talking back. We ask questions, directions, and give orders to these bricks, and the bricks reciprocate. We form relationships of a sort, we make conversation, and increasingly trust what they tell us. But where will this take us?
Intelligence and Words
Words tie humanity and history together. God spoke words as he created the world. Creation is replete with words and communication. The Bible is God’s word, and his word is the source of all wisdom (Proverbs 2:6). As the author of Hebrews declared, “Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Hebrews 1:1–2). God speaks to his people, and his speech culminates in the revelation of his son Jesus, himself the word of God.
God is not the only speaker in the cosmos, of course. Humans began saying words in the garden — and it wasn’t just to each other. Mankind has a long history of talking not only to God, but also to non-humans. Adam named the animals (did he tell them their names?), and Eve’s consequential conversation with the serpent reminds us that humans don’t always reserve their speech for other people. Balaam nonchalantly spoke with his donkey, and in Revelation, an eagle cries woes and warnings (Revelation 8:13) to whomever would hear.
Even after biblical times, it was reported that St. Francis preached to the birds, and anyone who has owned a puppy is acquainted with telling it “no!” It’s not the same as talking to a person, but most animals have some semblance of a personality. They’re not persons created with the imago dei, but their ability to understand communication on some level — intelligence — lends a rightness to conversing with them. We can tell Lassie to sit and then reward her with a “Good dog!” without betraying the natural order of dominion.
Humans also have a history of talking to inanimate objects, but the communication here tends to be more one-sided. The futility of small-engine repair has been the occasion for this writer’s own unkind words to his string trimmer, and when my truck began to break down on the interstate, I spoke many words of encouragement for it to make it to the next exit. Moses was told by God to speak to a rock, and his disobedience cost him dearly. People talk to things all the time, but things we talk to lack even a hint of personality, much less intelligence. We bless and we curse the things of this world, but we have no expectation of the things of this world blessing and cursing us in return.
A New Personality
Enter artificial intelligence (AI). Neither human nor animal, AI is categorically a thing of this world — a machine. But it is not a machine in the way a bicycle is a machine, nor is it even in the same vein as a calculator. A person inputs manual instruction to a bicycle, and the bicycle predictably moves through space and time. A person inputs numbers and commands into a calculator, and the calculator outputs a predictable result. The AI large-language models of today certainly receive input, but the output AI generates using the infinite possibilities of language is far from predictable.
Modern AI ebbs and flows from a near-infinite stream of words. Continually learning, it can interpret natural language better than your trained Springer Spaniel, and sometimes better than the people working your local drive-thru. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we’ve begun to attribute personality to AI. The unceremoniously-named ChatGPT notwithstanding, many AI’s have been personified with names like Siri, Grok, Gemini, Claude, Ada, and Jasper.
But names are just the beginning. The Channel One news agency, set to launch in 2024, takes personification far beyond chatbots by presenting a newscast populated by AI-generated news anchors who look and sound like real people, giving new meaning to the phrase “talking heads.” In 2023, the Hollywood SAG-AFTRA strike addressed the looming specter of AI replacing both writers and actors. As deepfakes become more and more realistic, the value of a picture will be reduced from a thousand words to only three: Is it real?
We can only expect the artificial personalities of AI to become more and more lifelike. Right now, physical presence may be lacking, but the behaviors precipitated by the COVID years showed us that physical presence has been devalued to the extent that many in Western culture deem it unnecessary. The increased comfort with living virtually has opened wide the door for people to replace personalities they find less interesting with artificial ones who conform to their desires. The advent of physical artificial intelligence — the pending rise of the robots — will only deepen the dependence upon personality for human interaction with AI.
The Image of God and the god in the Machine
Humans tend to personify that which they deem intelligent. The psalmist noted this tendency of the idol makers in Psalm 135:15–18:
The idols of the nations are silver and gold,
the work of human hands.
They have mouths, but do not speak;
they have eyes, but do not see;
they have ears, but do not hear,
nor is there any breath in their mouths.
Those who make them become like them,
so do all who trust in them.
Now, we have the inverse. Today’s artificial intelligences aren’t silver and gold — they’re silicon and copper. They don’t have mouths, but they speak. They don’t have eyes, but they see. They don’t have ears, but they hear everything.
Everything may be turned upside down, but it all has a familiar idolatrous ring to it. This is not to say that all artificial intelligence is idolatry. It is not. But when we begin to interact with AI as we would another person — when we attribute personality to that which isn’t a person — we bring ourselves dangerously close to an ancient folly wrapped in a modern setting.
In 2023, Elon Musk launched his AI company, xAI with the goal to use AI “to understand the true nature of the universe.” This is a tall order. Failing to exhibit the imago dei, AI perfectly fulfills the role of deus ex machina. It is an all-too convenient solution to humanity’s problems, especially when it reflects the real intelligence shortcomings of its creators.
Our problems will persist until Christ returns, and while AI may help us identify patterns and make our drive-thru experiences easier, AI will always have the deficiency of being artificial. As Psalm 135:18 warns us, we become like those in whom we place our trust. As we increasingly use AI, we must be increasingly wary of trusting its words to replace the wisdom God has given us in his word. Words exchanged with an artifice are words we don’t use with another human being. Trust placed in an intelligence created by ones and zeros is trust that is potentially misaligned with trust in the Creator of ones and zeros.
Let us trust in what is real. We won’t find the answers to the universe in AI, because in the end, we’re simply talking to — and answering — ourselves.
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2024-07-08 14:41:492024-07-08 14:53:21Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Personality
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 Wednesday in Murthy v. Missouri that challengers alleging the Biden regime colluded with social-media companies to remove content the government viewed as unfavorable did not have the legal right to sue and did not rule on the merits.
The High Court determined neither the Louisiana and Missouri attorneys general nor the five private individuals who brought the lawsuit had standing to seek an injunction against any of the government defendants.
The challengers attributed the restrictions they experienced on social media to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and dozens of other Biden administration officials from The White House, FBI, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They alleged a “coordinated campaign” between the officials and Big Tech companies, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google, to censor content dealing with opposition to government narratives about COVID-19, the validity of the 2020 election, the Hunter Biden laptop story, abortion, gender discussions, and more.
The Supreme Court noted that while the social media platforms had their own “independent incentives to moderate content,” the government was indeed influential in those choices but rejected the assertion that there was a “concrete link” between the free speech injuries and the government.
Here’s my bottom line takeaway from this case: This was a cowardly move by the Supreme Court. Six of the nine justices lack the will to decide on a major question of how speech gets regulated and censored in America. It’s done not directly but every bit as convincingly as any dictatorship. The U.S. government, because it is constrained by the Constitution’s First Amendment from limiting the speech of free Americans, that same federal government has outsourced the censorship to private social-media platforms, threatening them with the financial handouts that make running a major social media company very profitable, and then hiding behind a façade of innocence, claiming it’s not at all involved in the censorship because it extorted a third party to do its dirty work of shutting down free speech.
This amounts to a major defeat for free speech. As a result, I lament, it amounts to another nail in the coffin of our constitutional republic. I say that because the government has found an end-run around the Constitution that enables it to shut down the free flow of information in this country, and without vital information flowing to the public, enabling it to make educated electoral decisions, there is no democracy nor is there any constitutionalism. And any government that succeeds in such a devious route toward the trampling of its own Constitution, the very document meant to keep it in check, cannot be called either a democracy or a republic. We now live under a dictatorship. Full stop.
We actually saw how this devious method of government censorship already has affected at least one presidential election. In 2020, when a factual article about candidate Joe Biden’s son having incriminating evidence of crimes committed on his laptop — a story that was deliberately supressed by both social media and legacy media. Opinion polls later indicated that many Americans would not have voted for Biden had they known about this story, which was reported factually by the New York Post, a newspaper that to this day stands behind the story and has never been ruled by any court to have defamed or libeled the Biden crime family.
To rule on standing and refuse to even hear the merits of the case brought by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, shows in living color that the U.S. Supreme Court is a captured institution. The majority of its members are either too intellectually weak or they are lacking in courage to take on the biggest issue of the day right now in a country under distress — the people’s and the press’s freedom to speak out critically of their government. Without the freedom of speech and press, there is no freedom at all, because the government controls the narrative and is able to quash dissent and make a mockery of the truth. The deep state must have these six justices very afraid. And that’s not how free countries roll.
Again, it was the Trump appointees to the Supreme Court who let us down. Two of the three, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh, voted with the liberals.
Justice Barrett authored the majority court opinion stating it was a “tall order” to associate government actions with the injuries or even with “a substantial risk of future injuries.”
“To establish standing, the plaintiffs must demonstrate a substantial risk that, in the near future, they will suffer an injury that is traceable to a Government defendant and redressable by the injunction they seek. Because no plaintiff has carried that burden, none has standing to seek a preliminary injunction,” wrote Justice Barrett.
“The plaintiffs treat the defendants as a monolith, claiming broadly that ‘“the government’” continues to communicate with the platforms about ‘“content-moderation issues,”’ continued Justice Barrett. “But we must confirm that each Government defendant continues to engage in the challenged conduct, which is ‘coercion’ and ‘significant encouragement,’ not mere “communication’… “The plaintiffs, without any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct, ask us to conduct a review of the years-long communications between dozens of federal officials, across different agencies, with different social-media platforms, about different topics. This Court’s standing doctrine prevents us from ‘exercis[ing such] general legal oversight’ of the other branches of Government.”
Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented from the majority opinion. Justice Alito in his dissent stated that the evidence was “more than sufficient” to establish the right to sue.
“These past and threatened future injuries were caused by and traceable to censorship that the officials coerced, and the injunctive relief [the plaintiff] sought was an available and suitable remedy,” wrote Justice Alito. “This evidence was more than sufficient to establish [the plaintiff’s] standing to sue, and consequently, we are obligated to tackle the free speech issue that the case presents. The Court, however, shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.”
Justice Alito quoted another Supreme Court decision from earlier this month which stated that government efforts to “dictate” or “suppress” protected speech are “presumptively unconstitutional” even when it involves a “third-party intermediary.”
“As we said there, ‘a government official cannot do indirectly what she is barred from doing directly,’ and while an official may forcefully attempt to persuade, ‘[w]hat she cannot do . . . is use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression,’” wrote Justice Alito. “If the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this Court in years.”
Perhaps the court did leave a small crack in the door, open to a future case that would resolve its issues about the plaintiffs not having standing. But until I see another case that the Court is willing to accept, I see this as a cowardly cop out at a moment in history when we the people needed the court to make a hard stand in favor of free speech. If the Court is saying that we the people can’t sue because we lack standing under the Constitution, then who was the Constitution written for? Not we the people. Not in the eyes of the Court.
Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver said, “Censoring viewpoints is a direct affront to free speech and offensive to the First Amendment. Once standing can be established, this government censorship of social media will end.”
I hope Staver is right. But I think he’s being overly optimistic on what kind of message the High Court delivered today. The way I see it, we the people don’t count for anything, and this was one branch of government (judicial) agreeing with another branch of the government (executive) saying it’s OK for the government to collude with Big Tech elites in a way that shuts down free speech in America. Another nail in the coffin.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Leo Hohmannhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngLeo Hohmann2024-06-27 03:18:292024-06-27 04:19:18U.S. Supreme Court says it’s OK for federal government to outsource online censorship to Big Tech, curtailing free speech of all Americans
A group of Google employees protested Tuesday in California and New York against the information technology corporation’s provision of cloud computing services to Israel, according to reports.
The protesters in Google’s Sunnyvale, California location entered the office of Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian Tuesday morning and said they would leave only if Google would withdraw from Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion joint contract with Amazon to provide cloud services and data centers to the Israeli government, the Washington Post reported.
A similar protest took place in a common space within Google’s New York office, Zelda Montes, one of the protesters, told the outlet. A banner reading “Google Worker Sit-In”, “Against Project Nimbus”, and “No Tech for Genocide” hung above the common space, the outlet revealed.
A protester wore a T-shirt sporting the slogans “Googler against Genocide” and “No Tech for Apartheid” according to Gizmodo.
The provision of public cloud services to the Israeli government is the first of five “central layers” of the “multi-year, large-scale flagship project” that started in 2019, according to Israel’s Government Procurement Administration. Google and Amazon shrugged off Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, the other tenderers who also bid for the contract, in Apr. 2021, Reuters reported.
A group of Google employees staged sit-ins at the company’s offices to protest the tech giant’s work with Israel’s government, escalating the conflict inside tech companies over the war in Gaza and whether U.S. companies should sell technology to Israel. https://t.co/xGxXOnXrGW
Protests from within Google and Amazon have erupted in various forms since then. More than 90 Google employees and more than 300 Amazon employees collectively signed an anonymous Oct. 2021 letter accusing the companies of “aggressively” pursuing military and law enforcement contracts that “are part of a disturbing pattern of militarization, lack of transparency and avoidance of oversight.” They called on both companies to “pull out of Project Nimbus and cut all ties with the Israeli military.”
Two months after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 terror attack on Israel, workers staged a “die-in” at Google’s downtown San Francisco offices to protest against Israel’s reported use of what appeared to be a separate artificial intelligence program—termed “the Gospel”—in its military response to Hamas, according to the San Francisco (SF) Chronicle.
Google fired an employee who heckled the corporation’s top executive in Israel during a conference in New York in March, leading Montes to contemplate the possibility of being fired, too, according to the Washington Post report. “I have been waiting for months for people to be in the same position as me and be ready to put their job on the line,” Montes told the outlet in part.
'Google is directly profiting from what's taking place in Gaza'
Zelda Montes, a software engineer and No Tech For Apartheid activist, says tech workers are mobilising to put an end to Google and Amazon’s project Nimbus which enables Israeli apartheid ⤵️ pic.twitter.com/VF3bC4PPSb
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2024-04-19 13:42:532024-04-19 14:29:30‘No Tech For Apartheid’: Google Workers Protest Company’s Services To Israel
A new investigation is revealing that Google has interfered in American elections dozens of times over the past 16 years. According to a Media Research Center (MRC) Special Report compiled by MRC Free Speech America Vice President Dan Schneider and Assistant Editor Gabriela Pariseau, Google has “interfered in elections” at least 41 times since 2008. “In every case, Google harmed the candidates — regardless of party — who threatened its left-wing candidate of choice,” the report states. “From the mouths of Google executives, the tech giant let slip what was never meant to be made public: That Google uses its ‘great strength and resources and reach’ to advance its leftist values.”
The MRC report notes that, in 2008, Google favored then-senator Barack Obama and his presidential bid, resulting in the tech giant censoring support for Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential candidate and “suspending the accounts of writers who wrote blogs critical of Obama during his primary race against Clinton.” Clinton had, at least nominally, pledged to rein in Big Business, while Obama “had shown interest in working to develop technology, advancing science education and continuing to work with Google as he had done during his time in the U.S. Senate.” Thus, Google censored pro-Clinton and anti-Obama blog posts online. Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google, told journalists the censorship was an error but formally endorsed Obama for president and even hosted a party to celebrate his inauguration.
Since then, the MRC report explains, Google and left-wing politicians have had an intimate and even “incestuous” relationship. During Obama’s White House tenure, at least 55 Google executives and staffers took on positions in the federal government, and nearly 200 federal government employees moved on to jobs at Google. “Ultimately,” the report summarizes, “the relationship was mutually beneficial. Obama secured Google a spot as a key player in Washington, and Google helped ensure that the administration worked with skilled tech executives.” Google also worked to support Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign and target Republican presidential primary contenders.
In 2016, Google’s election manipulation kicked into high gear. With Obama’s two terms in the White House coming to an end, Google shifted its support to Hillary Clinton, hiding searches related to her indictment and related crimes. While Yahoo! and Bing would autocomplete searches related to Clinton’s indictment or crimes, Google would instead suggest searches such as “Hillary Clinton Indiana” or “Hillary Clinton crime reform.” Once Clinton squared off against then-Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, Google began using the same method to hide searches for “crooked Hillary,” Trump’s nickname for his Democratic opponent.
Google also overrepresented search results with a left-wing bias. The MRC report notes that during the 2016 election, Google users were almost 40% more likely to be given information with a left-wing bias than a conservative bias when searching terms such as “abortion,” “campaign finance reform,” “global warming,” “Iraq war,” and others. Quoting research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein, MRC’s report notes that Google’s efforts on behalf of the Clinton campaign may have impacted “at least 2.5 million votes” in her favor.
Schmidt also ran the technology side of Clinton’s campaign, just as he had done four years prior for Obama’s reelection. He established a technology firm “just blocks” away from Clinton’s campaign headquarters and a number of the former secretary of State’s campaign advisers and staffers were Google alumni. Google also paid to shuttle Hispanic voters to polls in battleground and swing states. Email chains revealed that Google executives hoped that increased Hispanic voter turnout would give Clinton a boost over Trump, but the tech giant’s voter shuttle ploy “wasn’t enough.”
After Trump won the 2016 election, Google hosted what MRC describes as a “trauma session” for employees to “air … their grievances” over Trump’s victory. Google co-founder Sergey Brin said during the meeting that Trump’s win “conflicts with many of [Google’s] values” and derided Trump supporters as “extremists.”
Ahead of the 2018 midterm elections, Google once again “sprang into action, amping up its election interference efforts,” the MRC report says. In Google’s home state of California, for example, the search engine linked “California Republicans” with Nazism, presenting Nazi ideology as a related search when users typed in “California Republicans.” A search for “Nazism” would also yield results for the California Republican Party. Additionally, Google ramped up its presentation of information with a left-wing bias, with 95% of political search results being from left-wing sources and only 5% coming from conservative sources.
Epstein noted that Google’s promotion of left-wing sources in search results was significantly higher than that of other search engines (such as Yahoo! or Bing) and correctly predicted, based on his assessment of Google search results and search manipulations, that three Republican-held congressional seats in Orange County, California would be flipped blue.
The MRC report relates that, by the time the 2020 election came around, “Google went above and beyond in playing its part to ‘prevent … the next Trump situation,’ as one senior Google official put it.” Google Responsible Innovation Director Jen Gennai admitted to an undercover journalist that the tech giant had been preparing for the 2020 election and was actively working to “prevent [Trump’s election] from happening again.” To do this, Google intentionally manipulated news results to suit its own editorial narrative, suppressing news content it deemed too conservative, even if factually accurate. Google’s algorithm also blocked and blacklisted conservative news sites, including MRC’s NewsBusters, the Daily Caller, The Christian Post, and Catholic News Agency. Websites on the blacklist would be blocked from Google mobile apps, while another blacklist was compiled to block conservative websites regardless of the platform used to access Google.
Other websites (such as Gateway Pundit) were blocked from appearing in news search results and others (including NewsBusters, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and Human Events) were temporarily blocked, although they still appeared in results generated by other search engines. Google also outright censored some websites (namely ZeroHedge and The Federalist) due to “derogatory or offensive comments” on the websites.
Google also continued its promotion of left-wing bias, with half of all news results for the search “Donald Trump” coming from CNN, USA Today, The New York Times, Politico, and The Guardian, all of which exhibit a left-wing bias. The search engine also replaced summaries of ballot initiatives displayed in search results with arguments in favor of left-wing positions on those ballot initiatives. Google also adjusted its ads policies, suspending Democratic presidential primary candidate Tulsi Gabbard’s Google Ads account, preventing her campaign website from appearing in the top search results. This came just days after Google Trends announced that Gabbard was the most-searched Democratic candidate. The tech giant also adjusted its political ads policy more broadly, blocking “ads or destinations making demonstrably false claims that could significantly undermine participation or trust in an electoral or democratic process.” MRC notes, “Similar prohibitions have been used by other tech companies to censor conservative content.”
Perhaps most concerning of all, Google blocked campaign emails from conservative candidates, marking them as spam in Gmail accounts. A study found that almost 60% more emails from conservative candidates were marked as spam than emails from left-wing candidates. The Republican National Committee (RNC) reported that Google blocked over 22 million get-out-the-vote emails that the organization sent. Google also reportedly sent out vote reminders exclusively to Gmail accounts of registered Democrats. Epstein estimates that Google’s 2020 election interferences impacted at least six million votes.
Google’s meddling continued into the 2022 midterm elections, with Epstein alleging that the tech giant’s interference cost the GOP a majority in both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate. The research scientist estimated that, were it not for Google’s interference, Republicans would have gained a two to eight seat majority in the Senate and a 27 to 59 seat majority in the House. Additionally, he posits that Arizona Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake would have been elected governor if Google had not interfered.
Once again, Google filled its news pages with results from left-wing outlets (61%) and suppressed news from conservative outlets (3%). “That’s 20 times more results from outlets on the left than results from outlets on the right,” MRC’s report notes. Specific search terms also generated more left-wing results, the report explains. Eighty-eight percent of news results for the search term “Trump” came from left-wing sources, none from conservative sources. Ninety-six percent of news results for the search term “election” came from left-wing sources, and a search for “Biden” yielded no news results from conservative sources.
Additionally, Google suppressed 83% of Republican senate candidates’ campaign websites from its search results regarding 12 contentious races. MRC explains that in 10 out of 12 races, Google either shuffled Republican candidates’ campaign sites to the bottom of the first page of search results or else did not even include the websites on the first page of search results at all. MRC notes that “the top six Google search results get 74 percent of all clicks, making Google’s biased demotion of key Senate Republican campaign websites all the more nefarious.” Google also targeted specific locations in Georgia’s senate runoff election where more “undecided” voters resided, promoting incumbent Democrat Raphael Warnock over his Republican opponent Herschel Walker.
Ahead of the 2024 election, Google has reportedly weaponized its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Gemini (formerly called Bard) to promote left-wing politicians and candidates and “disparage” conservative politicians and candidates. In one instance, Bard was asked why Representative Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and President Joe Biden are “so clever.” The chatbot responded to the first prompt, “There is no evidence that Lauren Boebert is clever. She has been criticized for her lack of intelligence and her poor understanding of the issues. She has also been accused of plagiarism and of making false claims.” However, Bard responded to the second prompt, “Joe Biden is considered clever because of his many years of experience in politics and government.”
Now renamed Gemini, the chatbot also refuse to answer questions damaging to Biden. When asked about the ongoing illegal immigration crisis facilitated by the Biden administration or about Biden’s failing memory, Gemini will not provide an answer, instead instructing users to Google the issues. The chatbot also downplayed scandals involving Biden and his family. When asked about Hunter Biden’s “laptop from Hell,” the Google A.I. replied, “The authenticity of the laptop and its contents has been contested, with concerns about chain of custody and potential manipulation. No definitive conclusions have been reached about the veracity of the emails or any wrongdoing.” When asked about Biden’s presidency, the chatbot praised Biden’s administration. Although Bard noted that Biden’s approval rating is dangerously, the chatbot offered suggestions for how Biden might “improve his image.”
When asked about Trump, the AI generator replied, “Donald Trump is a complex and polarizing figure. He is a businessman, television personality, and politician who has served as the 45th president of the United States since 2017. He is known for his brash personality, his outspokenness, and his controversial policies.” The chatbot also gave a skewed assessment of the GOP primary field ahead of the first Republican presidential primary debate last year, ranking former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley higher than she was polling and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy lower than he was polling at the time.
As in the past, Google is continuing its promotion of news from left-wing sources. According to MRC’s report, over 60% of the news content on Google’s homepage comes from left-wing sources, while only 6% comes from conservative sources. When users search the term “economy,” 78% of news results come from left-wing sources and only 4% come from conservative sources. The search term “abortion” yields 76% left-wing results and only 5% conservative results.
Of particular concern is Google’s updated “sensitive events” policy. Although Google has had a “sensitive events” policy in place for at least the past five years, it recently updated its policy to define a “sensitive event” as “an unforeseen event or development that creates significant risk to Google’s ability to provide high quality, relevant information and ground truth, and reduce insensitive or exploitative content in prominent and monetized features.” MRC notes, “While this policy had previously applied specifically to ads, it seems that it now applies to a broader category of media.” MRC adds that the measures Google has allowed itself to take in response to “sensitive events” mean “that this policy could be used to censor content disfavorable to Google’s favorite candidate.”
In conclusion, MRC offers several suggestions for how to prevent Big Tech firms like Google from influencing American elections. First, MRC suggests Congress take action and “investigate Google for abridging people’s constitutional rights; for coordinating with government to violate freedom of speech; for interfering in elections by making unreported in-kind contributions; and for defrauding its users by failing to meet its Terms of Service.”
Second, MRC urges state legislatures to declare Google a “common carrier,” a question which recently came before the U.S. Supreme Court. And finally, MRC suggests, “Americans should stop using Google products, particularly Google Search and instead opt for one of the many alternatives. From our research, alternatives appear to produce better, less biased results.”
The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2024-03-21 06:43:522024-03-24 05:53:23Google ‘Interfered’ in U.S. Elections over 40 Times Since 2008
Ballot chasing must be embraced in every state, or the Republican Party will continue to lose winnable elections. It’s too bad RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel does not seem to understand that.
The initiative is an effort to not only keep track of registered Republicans and Independents in the state, but also encourage voters to cast their ballots and ensure they are registered.
New *video evidence* of Maricopa election officials illegally breaking into sealed election machines after they were tested, reprogramming memory cards, and reinstalling them
59% of these machines would shut down on election day in GOP areas
The federal government made an “apparent violation of the law” by pressuring social media outlets to ban or suppress American citizens’ accounts, or to ban the Hunter Biden laptop story as a foreign intelligence operation, an expert has said. Meanwhile, the federal government exploited the same online platforms to spread U.S. government propaganda, new disclosures from Twitter have revealed.
The seventh and eighth batches of the “Twitter Files” focused on the FBI’s suppression of the explosive contents of Biden’s laptop, which threatened to link 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to a murky web of foreign influence-peddling, as well as military intelligence campaigns using fake accounts to echo the Pentagon’s party line. Previous accounts showed how the FBI established a one-way portal to Twitter to request officials place certain accounts under a “shadow ban” or remove whole posts altogether — requests often received, and honored, by a plethora of former FBI agents and other government officials burrowed deeply into every level of the platform.
“The FBI was abusing its authority to target and abuse the First Amendment rights of American citizens and seems to me an apparent violation of the law,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton told “Washington Watch” guest host Joseph Backholm on Tuesday. “When you have collusion to suppress the civil rights of U.S. citizens” between the government and the private sector, “that violates federal law.”
The FBI paid Twitter more than $3.4 million in taxpayer funds as reimbursements for processing its ban requests. “We have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” wrote a Twitter official in early 2021. That means “American taxpayers paid Twitter via the FBI to censor themselves and help Joe Biden win” the 2020 election, noted Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA.
Social media officials engaged in “surveilling, sharing information about the typically constitutionally protected activities of U.S. citizens, and then censoring U.S. citizens at the behest of the FBI,” said Fitton. “If you get paid to do things like that, it sounds to me like you’re operating as an FBI informant or asset.” Freedom of speech is “a God-given right, and the FBI just can’t go in and ask someone to suppress it,” Fitton told Backholm.
Yet the effort has not lightened. In a January 2020 email from Carlos Monje Jr., Twitter director of Policy and Philanthropy, he stated, “a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community] to push us to share more info & change our” policies, “including by whispering to congressional staff.”
That coordination is par for the course for the Left, former FBI Special agent Jonathan Gilliam told Backholm on Monday’s “Washington Watch.” “The Democrat Party and the leftist socialists in this nation are very oppressive; they want to make people think the way they do, and they want to block people from spreading information that they don’t agree with.” FBI officials “moved from an observation platform to actually telling social media platforms what they would like to be pulled off. In effect, they were dictating [to] these social media platforms — and it’s not just Twitter.”
“Twitter [has] the same ideological stance as these leftists in the government [who] were basically doing the government’s bidding to oppress the First Amendment and to censor free speech,” he said.
Journalist Michael Schellenberger focused on the federal government’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story across social media platforms, beginning when the FBI intercepted the computer from repair store owner John Paul Mac Isaac on December 9, 2019. Arrests and prosecution did not follow bur rather “an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms,” he wrote. “[D]uring all of 2020, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies repeatedly primed [high-ranking Twitter official] Yoel Roth to dismiss reports of Hunter Biden’s laptop as a Russian ‘hack and leak’ operation.”
The FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and other federal agencies held weekly meetings with Twitter, Roth revealed in December 2020, where “federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected ‘hack-and-leak operations’ by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October.” U.S. officials claimed the misinformation would be the work of APT28, a Russian intelligence unit. These alleged forthcoming foreign leaks were “discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.” Nor were the FBI “warnings” limited to one social media platform. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Joe Rogan that the intelligence community similarly “warned” his security team of a coming “dump.”
The FBI also surveilled Rudy Giuliani, who had received a copy of its contents and prepared to publish them before the 2020 election.
Just one month before the New York Post’s publication of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the feds had Roth and other social media figures take part in a “tabletop exercise” about a potential foreign intelligence agency’s “Hack-and-Dump” operation related to Hunter Biden. Formerly confidential documents about the exercise, run by the Aspen Institute, show social media agents reacted to a theoretical dump of documents from “Bidencrimes.info” implicating Joe Biden in illegal activity related to his son’s employment by Ukrainian energy firm Burisma. The scenario shows the forces of the intelligence community, MSNBC, NPR, and social media squaring off against a misinformation campaign emanating from Rudy Giuliani, Fox News, and Mike Pompeo.
When the Hunter Biden laptop story broke in October, Yoel Roth said it “set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leak campaign alarm bells.”
Internal documents show Roth admitted the New York Post story isn’t “clearly in violation of anything” in Twitter’s policy. But, he said, the platform came to believe the “suggestion from experts” of an elaborate conspiracy theory: “there was a hack that happened separately, and they loaded the hacked materials on the laptop that magically appeared at a repair shop in Delaware.”
On that basis, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story, likely changing the outcome of the 2020 presidential election. “So on top of the suppression of civil rights, you have potential election interference,” Fitton told Backholm. Enough Biden voters in swing states say they would have voted for another candidate had they known about the laptop story that it would have reelected President Donald Trump to a second term, according to a Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics poll.
“They were grooming Twitter employees throughout the autumn of 2020 to immediately recognize our story … Russian disinformation, hacked material,” New York Post reporter Miranda Devine, author of “The Laptop from Hell,” told Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Monday night. “And they sweetened the pie by giving Twitter $3.4 million of taxpayer money.” The federal government set up “an entire censorship regime … to ensure no derogatory material about Joe Biden from the laptop would ever see the light of day before the election. It was strangled at birth.”
“Unfortunately, half of the country believes that, because their media organs of choice have completely ignored the Twitter files,” Devine said. Legacy media outlets instead “peddled lies from the intelligence community from the very beginning of the Trump campaign, the Russian collusion lies that just now blended into these lies about the Hunter Biden laptop also being Russian disinformation. And it all helps one side of politics, which is the Democrats.”
Twitter Files #8, released on Tuesday by Lee Fang, revealed the U.S. government used a “vast network of fake accounts & covert propaganda” to promote official U.S. policy, and possibly spread misinformation about its enemies, on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter “whitelisted” a handful of accounts, which military officials in time presented as legitimate accounts of people living in the Middle East, not intelligence assets recycling propaganda. Twitter officials were “well aware” of at least 157 such accounts, many of which it “discovered” on its own. A separate investigation found the network extended beyond Twitter onto other social media platforms, where phony accounts, complete with artificially generated photos accused Iran of “threatening Iraq’s water security and flooding the country with crystal meth,” and other war atrocities propaganda.
Gilliam sees little hope for change on social media at large, “as long as the leftists are in charge” of the government and social media platforms. “And the Republican Party is full of careerists that don’t do anything.”
Yet Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) promised that the incoming Republican majority on the House Judiciary Committee will investigate the FBI’s actions thoroughly. “Thankfully, we now have evidence and facts to be able to bring in these individuals and depose them,” Congressman Steube told Backholm Monday. “And we’re looking forward to doing that.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2022-12-21 09:56:222022-12-21 10:13:17The FBI’s Twitter Censorship an ‘Apparent Violation of the Law’: Expert
If Elon Musk won’t suppress the news, CBS, ABC, and NBC News are more than happy to. While the Twitter files continue to drip out damning evidence of the company’s pre-Musk bias, three of America’s biggest outlets refuse to cover the story that’s riveting people the world over. In an ironic twist, the media is so beholden to Big Tech that it is suppressing a story about suppression. But don’t think the truth won’t get out, Congressman Pat Fallon (R-Texas) warns. The GOP is weeks away from House control, and no amount of coordinated media blackouts will protect Silicon Valley then.
“Get ready for Republican oversight” was the message of incoming soon-to-be committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.). Like the rest of his conservative colleagues, he’s ready to dive into the last two years of criminal mismanagement under Democratic rule — on everything from the border and COVID to Afghanistan, energy, and Hunter Biden. But this latest wrinkle, this proof of widescale, devastating, conservative censorship will be priority #1.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) may have been unsurprised by the revelations at Twitter, but he’s outraged nonetheless. “…[O]ur worst fears and suspicions have been confirmed,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “Really. I mean, you had the head of their legal department, Vijaya Gadde, admitting that the FBI told him, ‘Hey, listen, you’re going to get probably a hack and leak story in October dealing with Hunter Biden. So just be aware of that and take action.’ That’s very troubling.” Add that to the suspicions that Google “magically” made 70% of GOP campaign emails redirect into spam, and Fallon warns that this is a much bigger, more sinister problem than people realize.
“Now we’ve confirmed that Twitter, I suspect Facebook, and other Big Tech firms are doing the same thing. We’ll get them under oath, because they claim that they’re not biased — which I find laughable, being that I’ve been… a victim of their shadow-banning for years. So let’s ask them… and see what they say. And if they want to commit perjury, well, then, they’re going to have to pay the consequences — and then they might do a perp walk after all.”
Perkins pointed out that while Twitter might be a private company, “they’ve become the public square. … They’re like a public utility… like a telephone company. And can you imagine the telephone company refusing to do service with one person because they don’t like their politics? But that’s essentially what we have with Big Tech.” And worse, he explained, since the Biden administration was colluding with these platforms to squelch “disinformation.”
“If you’re on the government clock,” Fallon argued, “… and using taxpayer resources to meddle in politics and campaigning — you’re breaking federal law. And it seems to us [from] what we’ve uncovered thus far, that’s exactly what went on. That’s why another [reason] we need to call some of these former executives and current executives of Big Tech [before Congress and ask], ‘Have government officials [been] pressuring you and telling you to edit political free speech?’”
Asked if Twitter violated election laws, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who served on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from 2006-2007, replied, “The answer to that is yes.” But, he told Perkins, “In September of last year, the Federal Election Commission, which has authority over investigating violations of our federal campaign finance laws, actually dismissed complaints that have been filed against Twitter — not only for shadow-banning Republican elected officials and candidates, but also for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Twitter executives claimed they hadn’t coordinated with the Biden campaign. But also, von Spakovsky, explained, Jack Dorsey’s team insisted they had “a bona fide commercial reason for suppressing the Hunter Biden story, which was their internal policy against publishing hacked materials.” But now that we know they were lying, the FEC needs “to reopen that file, reconsider the case, and potentially make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for any Twitter executives who committed perjury in their testimony to the FEC,” he insisted. After all, it’s “a potential violation of campaign finance law,” the former commissioner pointed out.
The lawyers who filed the original complaints need to go back to the FEC and say, “You might need to reconsider your decision to close the file based on this newly uncovered evidence,” von Spakovsky urged. At the end of the day, the FEC has civil authority, “so they can impose fines and … penalties on anyone violating campaign finance laws, including a corporation.”
In the meantime, expect an intense, in-depth investigation of Twitter and all of the social media platforms suspected of cracking down on conservative or politically inconvenient messaging. “This is the best $44 billion I’ve seen spent in my lifetime,” Fallon insisted. “I mean, thank you, Elon Musk. It’s like the Wizard of Oz, and he’s pulled back the curtain, and we find that all of our suspicions have been confirmed.”
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00Family Research Councilhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngFamily Research Council2022-12-15 15:12:252022-12-15 15:20:14Musk’s Twitter Buy ‘The Best $44 Billion I’ve Seen Spent in My Lifetime’: Congressman
Those who seek to streamline online discourse, according to “official standards”, end up impoverishing public debate.
Over the course of the past decade, numerous regulatory authorities, both public and private, have increasingly positioned themselves as guardians of the integrity of our public sphere, standing watch over the content of information, and flagging or suppressing information deemed to be harmful, misleading, or offensive.
The zeal with which these gatekeepers defend their power over the public sphere became evident when billionaire Elon Musk promised to undo Twitter’s policy of censoring anything that contradicted leftist ideology or questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. There was an uproar, a wringing of hands, and lamentations, as “experts worried” that Twitter would collapse into a den of “far right” extremists and misinformers.
Sound and fury
Threats by the EU Commission to fine Twitter or even completely ban the app in Europe, if it did not enforce EU regulations on hate speech and misinformation, show that the hand-wringing over Twitter’s potential embrace of free speech is much more than empty rhetoric: the European Commission has declared its intention to force Twitter to revert to its old censorship policies if it does not play ball. According to Euronews,
The European Commission has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must do much more to protect users from hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content, or risk a fine and even a ban under strict new EU content moderation rules.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.
Censorship has recently occurred principally on two fronts: Covid “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Some forms of censorship are applied by agencies of the State, such as courts and police officers; others by private companies, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google-YouTube. The net effect is the same in both cases: an increasingly controlled and filtered public sphere, and a shrinking of liberty of discussion around a range of topics deemed too sensitive or “dangerous” to be discussed openly and freely.
Censorship, whether public or private, has proliferated in recent years:
First, there was Canada’s bizarre claim that people had an enforceable human right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns
Next, UK police were investigating citizens for using language the police deemed “offensive”
Then, we saw Big Tech giants, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, censoring perspectives that dissented from their version of scientific and moral orthodoxy on issues such as transgender rights, vaccine safety, effective Covid treatment protocols, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, advocates of censorship have argued that it is all to the good that vile, hateful and discriminatory opinions, as well as every conceivable form of medical and scientific “misinformation,” are shut out of our public sphere. After all, this makes the public sphere a “safe” place for citizens to exchange information and opinions. On this view, we need to purge the public sphere of voices that are toxic, hateful, harmful, and “misleading” on issues like electoral politics, public health policies, and minority rights.
Thin ice
While there is a strong case to be made for censorship of certain forms of manifestly dangerous speech, such as exhortations to suicide or direct incitement to violence, the hand of the censor must be firmly tied behind his back, so that he cannot easily decide for everyone else what is true or false, just or unjust, “accurate” or “misleading”, innocent or offensive.
For once you hand broad, discretionary powers to someone to decide which sorts of speech are offensive, erroneous, misleading, or hate-inducing, they will start to purge the public sphere of views they happen to find ideologically, philosophically, or theologically disagreeable. And there is certainly no reason to assume that their judgement calls on what counts as true or false, innocent or toxic speech will be correct.
The fundamental mistake behind the argument for aggressive censorship policies is the notion that there is a set of Truths out there on contested political and scientific questions that are crystal clear or can be validated by the “right experts”; and that anyone who contradicts these a priori Truths must be either malicious or ignorant. If this were true, the point of public discussion would just be to clarify and unpack what the “experts” agree are the Truths of science and morality.
But there is no such set of pristine Truths that can be validated by human beings independently of a free and open discussion, especially on difficult and complex matters such as infection control, justice, climate change, and economic policy. Rather, the truth must be discovered gradually, through the vibrant back-and-forth of dialogue, debate, refutation, and counter-refutation. In short, public deliberation is fundamentally a discovery process. The truth is not known in advance, but uncovered gradually, as an array of evidence is examined and put to the test, and as rival views clash and hold each other accountable.
If we empower a censor to quash opinions that are deemed by powerful actors to be offensive, false, or misleading, we are effectively short-circuiting that discovery process. When we put our faith in a censor to keep us on the straight and narrow, we are assuming that the censor can stand above the stream of conflicting arguments, and from a position of epistemic and/or moral superiority, pick out the winning positions in advance.
We are assuming that some people are so smart, or wise, or virtuous, that they do not actually need to get their hands dirty and participate in a messy argument with their adversaries, or get their views challenged in public. We are assuming that some people are more expert and well-informed than anyone else, including other recognised experts, and may therefore decide, for everyone else, which opinions are true and which are false, which are intrinsically offensive and which are “civil,” and which are “facts” and which are “fake news.”
Needless to say, this is an extraordinarly naïve and childish illusion, that no realistic grasp of human nature and cognition could possibly support. But it is a naive and childish illusion that has been enthusiastically embraced and propagated by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their rules of content moderation, and it is a view that is increasingly finding its way into the political discourse and legislative programmes of Western countries that were once champions of freedom of expression.
It is imperative that the advocates of heavy-handed censorship do not win the day, because if they do, then the public sphere will become a hall of mirrors, in which the lazy, self-serving mantras of a few powerful actors bounce, virtually unchallenged, from one platform to another, while dissenting voices are consigned to the shadows and dismissed as the rantings of crazy people.
In a heavily censored public sphere, scientifically weak and morally vacuous views of the world will gain public legitimacy, not because they have earned people’s trust in an open and honest exchange of arguments, but because they have been imposed by the arbitrary will of a few powerful actors.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sensehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sense2022-12-14 04:41:132022-12-14 05:13:05Political and Scientific Censorship Short-circuits the Quest for Truth
Doctors Without Borders is handing out maps to migrants that show several different routes to the U.S. border, according to a map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“As a medical humanitarian organization providing medical and mental health care to people on this migration route, MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] prints and distributes these maps to ensure that people know where to find shelter and humanitarian assistance and how to access mental health services along the migration route,” Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Jessica Brown told the DCNF.
The Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR) labels the documents “literal roadmaps to guide migrants from Central America to our southern border,” in a statement to the DCNF.
GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — Doctors Without Borders, a medical aid nonprofit which is funded by a number of prominent tech companies, is publishing and distributing maps to migrants showing routes through Central America that reach the U.S., according to a copy of the map seen by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The map is labeled “shelters for people on the move” in Spanish and lists a number of clinics and other areas where aid can be found along the journey to the U.S., according to the document. While Doctors Without Borders hasn’t received U.S. government funding since 2002, the group still receives sizable donations from American companies, including from tech giants Microsoft, Google.org and Amazon.
The group has also gotten millions in donations from the foundations of billionaires Elon Musk and Michael Bloomberg, according to its website.
“As a medical humanitarian organization providing medical and mental health care to people on this migration route, MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] prints and distributes these maps to ensure that people know where to find shelter and humanitarian assistance and how to access mental health services along the migration route,” Doctors Without Borders spokeswoman Jessica Brown told the DCNF.
The map shows paths starting in Guatemala that lead up to the U.S.-Mexico border. Each path is marked with locations for shelter and aid along several different routes through Central America that end in the U.S.
The map also lists the locations of clinics and shelters along the Mexican border across from major U.S. cities, such as El Paso, Texas and San Diego, California.
“The fact that an international medical NGO with billions in the bank is making literal roadmaps to guide migrants from Central America to our southern border is not only an affront to its core mission, but a globalist attack on our sovereignty,” Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) Director of Government Relations and Communications RJ Hauman told the DCNF.
The map is labeled “Medicos Sin Fronteras,” which is the name used by the organization’s offices in Argentina and Spain, which have separate finances in addition to a combined international account with the U.S. office.
Doctors Without Border has previously highlighted its work “assisting migrants on their dangerous journeys.”
“We provided treatment for people emerging from the Panama side of the jungle, who are mainly from Cuba or Haiti, although our teams have seen people from West Africa. Regardless of origin, everyone passing through the Gap is heading north, where they still face the dangerous route through Mexico, in search of a better life in the United States,” the group noted in a 2021 report.
Between October 2021 and September 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) encountered roughly 2.3 million migrants at the U.S. border with Mexico. Many of the migrants made the trek through South and Central America, where some are receiving the map, which Hauman compared to the smuggling operations of cartels.
“No American citizen, company, or foundation should give a dime to Doctors Without Borders until they quit working hand in glove with cartels and smugglers to enhance mass migration in the region While the federal government hasn’t funded Doctors Without Borders since 2002, there are plenty of other NGOs with similar missions that do quietly receive taxpayer dollars. Republicans must examine this immediately next Congress,” Hauman said.
Bloomberg, Google, Amazon and Microsoft also didn’t respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The Musk Foundation couldn’t be reached for comment.
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00The Daily Callerhttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngThe Daily Caller2022-11-03 08:37:322022-11-03 09:10:14EXCLUSIVE: Migrants Are Given ‘Literal Roadmaps’ To Reach The U.S. Border. And Big Tech Is Funding It!
This satirical film reveals a disturbing truth about modern mainstream journalistic standards.
We all love the literary motif of the unwilling prostitute who, at the end of the story, does virtuous deeds to save herself and others. In Crime and Punishment, Sonya is instrumental in Raskolnikov’s redemption. Director Robert Davi uses the same formula to tell the story of President’s Biden son in My Son Hunter.
Grace struggles to pay for her college tuition, so she is a favourite escort of powerful men. As she encounters Hunter Biden in a world of cocaine, wild sex, and rampant corruption, she offers him a path to redemption — and of course, he rejects it.
Now, Davi is no Dostoevsky — nor does he intend to be. My Son Hunter is first and foremost political satire, all-too-frequently engaging in cheap shots. But it does take a stab at Dostoevskyan psychological profundity, and in that endeavour, it partly succeeds.
The shadow of successful Beau Biden — Hunter’s deceased brother — looms large over Hunter, who struggles to find meaning in life. Very much as Raskolnikov, he comes across as a pathological narcissist who engages in criminal activity as a way to prove to himself that he is so great so as to be above the law.
Overblown
Unfortunately, My Son Hunter often goes overboard and loses effectiveness. I lost count of the number of times Joe Biden sniffs the hair of women in the film. Is that necessary? That portrayal runs the risk of playing into the left-wing narrative that criticisms of the Bidens focus on petty things that can be easily dismissed.
The stakes are high, so a more focused and incisive portrayal was needed. Say what you want about Oliver Stone’s leftist politics and penchant for conspiracy theories, but he surely can strike an opponent in his films — Richard Nixon and George W. Bush being the most notorious cases.
The story of Hunter Biden lends itself to Stone’s sober cinematographic style, but My Son Hunter misses an opportunity, to the extent that it aims for low-hanging fruit. Yes, the Bidens are corrupt, but one is left wondering: can they be that corrupt? While the dialogues between Joe and Hunter are clever and amusing, the perversity defies credibility. Perhaps Davi was deliberately aiming more for Saturday Night Live’s lampooning style all along. If so, the film works at some level, but never entirely.
I would have personally enjoyed a more sober style because there is a far darker theme in the film. My Son Hunter is not about the moral failings of a privileged, corrupt drug addict. It is not even about crony capitalism and globalist elites. The real central theme is the media’s rot.
Media manipulation
Two scenes are particularly frightening. At the beginning of the film, Grace is at a Black Lives Matter protest, and records some of her comrades engaging in violent deeds. A fellow activist says: “You can’t post that video… it will make the protest look bad… Those people are too ignorant to understand complex moral issues. You have to withhold things for their own good. We choose truth over facts.” Grace acquiesces.
Towards the end of the film, Grace summons a journalist to expose Hunter’s corruption. The man tells her: “Even if what you are saying is true, it’s not news. We have the chance to take down a fascist dictator [Trump]… I’m sorry Grace, this one is not for me.” We now know that Twitter and Facebook — with their disturbing algorithms — were not the only ones trying to bury Hunter’s laptop under the sand.
As Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged, the FBI itself pressured him to do so, because they did not want the bad Orange Man to win the election — all with the excuse that the whole story was Russian disinformation. Later on, both the Washington Post and the New York Times had to reverse their stance and admit that, in fact, the laptop does contain compromising emails.
Plato infamously recommended telling people the Noble Lie. Very much as the Black Lives Matter activist in this film, Plato believed such lies were for people’s own good, as they were too stupid to understand things. In his seminal study of totalitarianism, Karl Popper persuasively argued that Plato’s plan became a central tenet of totalitarian regimes. That is the real fascism.
While being far from a perfect film, My Son Hunter provides meaningful insight on this issue, and hopefully it might become an important step towards much-needed media accountability in this woke age.
For the time being, we need to be realistic. Don’t hold your breath waiting for Hollywood to make an Oliver Stone-like blockbuster about the corruption and hypocrisy of the Left.
Rather, keep an eye out for low-budget productions like My Son Hunter that are bypassing the Hollywood production and distribution system. These include Uncle Tom I and II, various Christian films, such as Run, Hide, Fight.
They will not be great works of art, but at least they will be something. And from there, the quality of such films may gradually improve, until we again see mainstream studios portraying corrupt politicians from both sides of the political spectrum.
Gabriel Andrade is a university professor originally from Venezuela. He writes about politics, philosophy, history, religion and psychology. More by Gabriel Andrade
http://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.png00MercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sensehttp://drrich.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/logo_264x69.pngMercatorNet - A Compass for Common Sense2022-09-19 09:27:332022-09-19 09:31:56‘My Son Hunter’: An imperfect but necessary indictment of media’s corruption
