Posted on 06/03/2019 7:31:29 AM PDT by EyesOfTX
Today’s Campaign Update (Because The Campaign Never Ends)
Meanwhile, in news that actually matters to Americans… – While everyone else is focused on President Donald Trump’s first state visit to the future Islamic Republic of England, paying tribute to a monarchy that is doomed to fall within a generation, I thought I’d focus on something of actual substance.
If you perused the Drudge Report this morning – which I still do despite his lurch off into leftist paranoia over the past year – you would find the following links at the right side of the landing page:
PLANET TECH ROCKED: AMAZON PRIMED FOR ANTITRUST…
GOOGLE Dominance No Longer Sure Thing…
Scrutiny by Justice Dept Has Been Building…
Few political allies, history of complaints…
WIRE: Big Tech Should Be Afraid. Very Afraid…
Europe’s record offers cautions for battle…
I’ve been wondering how long it would take us to arrive at this specific point in our nation’s history, when the trust-busting ghost of Teddy Roosevelt would ride back onto the stage in the person of Donald J. Trump and a Justice Department led by a real, fully-functional Attorney General named William Barr. Well, folks here we are.
Regular readers of The Campaign Update might recall that way back on August 7, 2018, I predicted this day would arrive and that when it did, President Trump would unleash the full force and fury of the Justice Department, the IRS, the SEC and every other government agency in his arsenal – including the Federal Elections Commission – to rein in the big tech giants who have been busily undermining the very foundations of our individual liberties by denying freedom of unpopular speech to an entire class of right-wing pundits.
I wrote that August 7 piece right after several of the tech giants had banded together in clearly anti-trust fashion to de-platform radio talk show host Alex Jones and his various enterprises. Here is part of what I wrote at that time: ====================================
The leaders of Apple, Facebook, YouTube, Spotify and Pinterest all got together and decided – at the persistent urging of CNN and various leading Democrats – to remove radio talk show host and conspiracy promoter Alex Jones from their platforms permanently. The same kind of monopolistic action denying an American citizen access to their platforms and the commerce he derives from them on the same day. Classic corporate trust behavior.
Now, it doesn’t matter if you like these giant corporations or hate these giant corporations; it doesn’t matter if you like Alex Jones or hate Alex Jones. These companies are publicly-traded corporations who cannot by law band together for the purpose of restraint of trade or denial of access to any class of people, and that’s exactly what they did to Mr. Jones on Monday. And it’s what these huge corporations, along with their sister social media platform, Twitter, have been doing to conservative users of their products for years now. This is why, whenever they get caught denying access to conservatives, they always blame the issue on some sort of “glitch.”
And it’s not just trust behavior that they are executing here. They’re also in blatant violation of campaign finance laws. In a very real way, their actions amount to massive in-kind political contributions to the Democrat Party. They apparently believe they are above the law, and if Jeff Sessions turns out to be the worthless swamp skunk many believe him to be, they could be right, at least for the time being.
But if the elections go the wrong way this November, President Trump will likely be looking for ways to keep on #Winning on domestic policy during his second two years in office. Playing a Teddy Rooseveltian Trust Buster to the foil of these increasingly radicalized and abusive Big Tech corporations might have a real appeal to him, and could end up being just the ticket to taking the congress back in 2020 and winning a second term in office. ================================
You can read all of those pieces to which Drudge is linking this morning, and you should. They do a fine job of laying out part of the rough road that lies ahead for the social media tools of the Democrat Party. If you only have time to read one, read the Bloomberg piece by Shira Ovide titled “Google Should Be Afraid, Very Afraid.” Ovide lays out the DOJ investigation into Google’s obviously Democrat-tilted practices, but you can bet that similar investigations are ongoing right now into the equally-blatant anti-conservative practices taking place on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Spotify, Pinterest and all the rest.
Because they have all been blatantly engaged in a coordinated assault on the ability of a specific class of people to engage in interstate commerce, no different than the practices by Standard Oil and all the other trusts that Teddy Roosevelt busted during the early years of the 20th century.
President Trump has yet to really focus on this topic personally, other than an occasional tweet or press statement slamming one tech giant or another. But the existence of this many reports at a single point in time by a variety of media outlets tells you that the wheels of justice within these government agencies have been turning steadily behind the scenes and stuff is about to get real publicly pretty soon. Coordinated media reporting like this does not take place by accident. It happens because people involved are feeding reporters information in order to set the stage for the next steps to come.
The President will turn his focus to the subject at a strategic point in time that is most advantageous to him politically, because the politics of all of this are very strong for him. That could happen as early as his return from the G20 Summit in late June, or months from now at a key point in the presidential campaign.
One thing we can be sure of is that the modern-day version of Teddy Roosevelt will be coming at some point, and when he does, hell is coming with him.
That is all.
Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon
Youtuber Law brought up an even better legal angle against them - collusion.
The coordinated deplatforming of people is a violation of their rights AND anti-business.
Losing your account on Facebook hurts you, but being banned on Linkedin and every other site simultaneously shows systematic oppression of ‘targets’. That’s a sign the businesses are working together though they are supposed to be rivals.
Another way they’ve been violating the law is in the way they’ve colluded to cut off funding for creators. Patreon went woke. Subscribestar said we’re open - Big Tech colluded with payment processors like Paypal to shut it down if they didn’t comply. Freestartr didn’t go along with liberal bullies. They were killed by payment processors withdrawing and Big Tech censoring them. HELLO, ANTI-TRUST!
We have another case to use to prove the anti-trust angle, too. Google has a business relationship with Twitter, privileging their content in search results. Google and other Big Tech companies colluded to kill Gab.AI, a Twitter rival. Citing hate speech and they hurt people’s feelings is the excuse they use.
This has to happen ASAP - Google and Facebook have become more powerful than many countries and are recklessly abusing that power.
Maybe Trump does want to get re-elected in 2020?
The tech folks asking for trouble.
“The tech folks asking for trouble.”
I say we give them a bellyful.
L
Good!
Can’t happen soon enough.
It is not the favorite of Rinos, Corportists, and Globalists. Leftists hate the laws because they encourage competition in a reasonably regulated free market, a policy of a more classical Conservatism.
Amazing coincidence how speculation started on trust busting late in the week and google had a major outage over the weekend.
Methinks they messed up trying to unwind/rejigger some of the censoring measures they had in place. Oh the tangled webs we weave.
A number of jobs WANT to see your linkedin page when you apply.
Others will unofficially go looking or your page and if you do not have one, you are a step behind the others.
I’m serving a 30 day term for posting a meme to a private group on FB that I found on FB.
Facebk, Goo, Twit, Amaz, Microsoft (which sounds like a performance complaint of an under-endowed male).....
.. YES! effective monopolies all...
How can we Citizens help to get All of their Numbers up to 16???
The sentencing of individuals and organizations convicted of antitrust offenses under
section 1 of the Sherman Act is guided by §2R1.1 (Bid-rigging, Price-Fixing or Market-
Allocation Agreements Among Competitors) of the United States Sentencing
Commission Guidelines Manual.5 The antitrust guideline recommends for the imprisonment component of the sentence, a base offense level of 12, with an increase of
1 level for bid-rigging6 and increases in two-level increments of up to 16 additional
levels, depending upon the volume of commerce in goods or services affected by the
violation. For example, if the volume of affected commerce is more than $1,000,000 and
less than $10,000,000, the offense level is adjusted by an additional 2 levels; a volume of
affected commerce of more than $1.5 billion results in the maximum increase of 16
offense levels. Accordingly, the recommended imprisonment range for an individual with
no prior criminal history or other adjustments,7 at the base offense level of 12 is 10-16
months. By contrast, if the increases for bid-rigging and the highest volume of commerce
are applied to a similarly situated individual (with no prior criminal history or other
adjustments), the imprisonment range is 87-108 months, which is close to the statutory
maximum of 10 years imprisonment.
Really hope these cases are almost ready to file in court. They take years to work through the legal system and the colluders will do enormous damage in the 2020 election while DOJ moves slowly forward.
What a scary photo!
Almost makes those involved in Spygate look puny.
The simplest thing I can think of to punish the big Techs the big social media companies is to revoke all the intellectual property rights. Allow competition.
Excellent! I’ve been waiting for this for a while. Alphabet and Amazon are the most dangerous followed by Facebook and Twitter. Then come Apple and the rest. Some of them should be broken up. All should be forced to agree not to in any way discriminate against anything but clearly illegal speech. No bans, shadow bans, suspensions, demonetizing, deplatforming etc.
There is 100x justification for anti-trust action against these big tech companies than there ever was for busting up Standard Oil.
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