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This war is real — and getting worse:

Can conservatives sometimes use words like ‘tyranny,’ ‘fascism,’ and ‘totalitarianism’ too often and too easily? Yes. Are they right to be using them now, especially in light of the Tech Giants’ war on conservatives and Christians? Absolutely.

What we have been witnessing in just the past few days should shock every single one of us — even if you are a leftist. When even the President of the United States and others have their ability to speak freely ripped away from them by the likes of Facebook or Apple or Twitter or Google or YouTube, then you know the dark cloud of tyranny and fascism has indeed descended upon America and the West.

Of course many of us have been warning about this for years now, but our concerns mainly fell on deaf ears. Now that millions of people are experiencing firsthand these cases of censorship and bigotry from the Tech Tyrants, hopefully many more will wake up.

As I wrote in an article yesterday:

Google and Apple are banning Parler, a newish social media site which conservatives and Christians have been flocking to in order to avoid all the censorship and bigotry of Facebook and Twitter, etc.

Many folks are now rightly warning that a Democrat-controlled Presidency, Congress and Senate will mean a major crackdown on all of us dissidents. See these four new pieces for starters…

Let me here quote from some of those articles, plus a few others. The ban of free speech for a sitting President certainly shocked many folks. As the former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said in a tweet,

An article from an Australian commentator begins this way:

Beneath the noise of America’s Capitol Hill protests lurks the silent rise of Silicon Valley. Tens of thousands of social media users have vanished from the online discussion — snuffed out in the last twenty-four hours without acknowledgement by the platforms involved. It is the erasure of political opposition to create the illusion of consensus. What was once a playground of ideas has become a digital ‘yes-man’ for those with delusions of power.

Purging is customary at the beginning of a cultural revolution. When emotionally insecure political movements take power, their first course of action is to expunge criticism. Historically, this was achieved through murder and expulsion of populations from a region. In 2020, civilisation’s ideological landscape is digital and the eviction is via an account suspension.

One American journalist concludes her piece as follows:

It would take just one inconvenient ‘leak’ to turn the public against any Luddite savior attempting to pry Big Tech’s boot off American necks. These firms’ control of the media is so airtight that a manufactured ‘scandal’ could be cooked up and launched into cyberspace in a matter of hours. Such retaliation would serve the dual purpose of destroying the political crusader’s career and reminding other would-be do-gooders not to do anything foolish — like fighting to defend one’s own country against the megacorporations holding it hostage.

By blocking Trump from even posting on Twitter and Facebook and live-streaming platform Twitch — Big Tech has made it clear they’re no longer satisfied with a mere monopoly over one of the few profitable industries left in the US. They won’t stop accumulating power until they run politics, from the presidency to the smallest local election. With Wednesday’s riots, the carefully-choreographed dance between tech execs and the politicians who do their bidding has been given the green light to ascend to the next level.

Deplatforming Trump is only the beginning of a megalomaniacal crusade against all those who would question a government by the algorithms, of the algorithms, and for the algorithms.

Tucker Carlson, as always, is on the ball with what is happening:

We told you Thursday that the crackdown on America’s civil liberties is coming, and it didn’t take long to arrive. It is unprecedented and it will have consequences.

Days after Donald Trump called for breaking up the Big Tech monopolies in order to preserve democracy, they have silenced him. Friday evening, Twitter announced that the sitting president had been banned from the platform that is his primary means of public communication. Of course, they waited until the Democratic Party took power to shut it down. Silicon Valley oligarchs are more powerful than the president of the United States, and they want you to know it.

Like most actions taken to suppress extremism, this will cause more of it.

The assault on speech accelerates, and we at “Tucker Carlson Tonight” are not immune. Friday morning, CNN announced that it is working to force the Fox News Channel off the air and run this company out of business. A number of prominent Democrats, including officeholders, support that effort. CNN staffers have already contacted the six major cable carriers in this country, the companies that carry our signal into your home, and pressured them to drop Fox News.

An English commentator asks, “Why is Twitter censoring Trump, but not the CCP?” He says:

The problem with Big Tech censorship is not its inconsistency, although that itself is certainly a concern. It is the censorship itself. The simple fact that social-media firms have the power and inclination to silence people at will — including people as powerful as the US president — is a dangerous threat to free expression. And the idea that this is the most effective response to authoritarianism is absurd.

Speaking of how American Tech Giants are happy to run with the Chinese Communists, the satire site Babylon Bee nails it:

Donald Trump was permanently banned from Twitter today, being a crazy fringe extremist who also happens to be the president of the United States. But the ever-clever Trump, always known as the smartest man in the room, has managed to get back on the social network by disguising himself as one Chongald Xrump, PR specialist for the Chinese Communist Party.

Trump is reportedly attempting to build a following by tweeting about how good Uighur concentration camps are and how nice the Chinese government is, since those things are not banned under Twitter’s terms of service. Once he has enough followers, he’ll remove his Asian rice hat and false Fu Manchu mustache and begin tweeting about the rigged election once again.

One more quote:

Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin would be so envious. Totalitarian government could be so much easier to pull off today than it was back in their days in Russia. These days it wouldn’t take much; nearly all the pieces are in place here now. They had to do it the hard way: guns and gulags, KGB and secret police; black police vans carting pastors and dissidents off at midnight, to disappear where guards and fences and dogs would keep them in line and out of sight.

It was all so very complicated, making dissenters disappear that way. Tyrants today need only send them to Twitter jail. Or shadow-ban them. Or even let algorithms do the dirty work, so they can claim a clean and respectable distance from it all. And that’s only the beginning of all they can do, easily, cleanly, with a mere nod of the head and a click of the mouse.

And as I also mentioned in yesterday’s piece, an important new book on these very troubling tech tyrants that was due to be released has just been pulled by a major American publisher. See the story here.

Oh, and let me offer one comment to those who would argue that these are private companies so they can do what they want and censor who they want. Really? That was never the view of the left when it came to other private companies. As one meme making the rounds rightly asks: “If a private company can refuse to serve a President, can a baker refuse to make a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding?”

For decades the lefties have been telling us that small conservative businesses have NO right to decide for themselves how and who they serve. Now they are telling us that large monolithic and monopolistic leftist tech giants have every right to decide for themselves how and who they serve. Hypocrisy much? But the radical left would struggle to exist and succeed were it not for non-stop double standards.

Let me finish with the words of my friend and American commentator Katy Faust. As she put it on social media:

I was not afraid when Biden won the presidency. I was concerned when the Democrats took the Senate. But the BigTech purge and censorship that has taken place in the last 24 hours has me terrified. Twitter is purging conservative accounts. Apple is threatening to ban Parlor if they don’t align with woke speech codes. And while the Chinese Communist Party and the Ayatollah of Iran are free to tweet whatever they like, Twitter has banned the President of the United States.

That three unelected men, Jack and Zuckerberg and Cook, get to dictate what is spoken and what is heard in this country should terrify every one of you too. Even if you hate Trump you should be smart enough to recognize that censoring and silencing speech you don’t like is the hallmark of totalitarianism. Big tech is even more powerful and dangerous than Big government.

Do you think you are safe? You are not. Controlling speech is a necessary part of totalitarianism because if you can control what people say and hear, you can control what they think. And then you can lead them anywhere you want.

Quite right Katy. As each week seems to get worse than the last, I have to keep repeating a line I have been saying for a while now: ‘In nearly seven decades of life, I have never witnessed anything this frightening, this worrying, and this dangerous. Where will it all end?’

And it goes without saying that if you soon find me missing from the social media, or if you are no longer able to find my CultureWatch website, you will know exactly why that is.

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Originally published at CultureWatch.
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