The Night of the Tech Long Knives - The Lords of Silicon Valley make their move.

The Night of the Tech Long Knives

The Lords of Silicon Valley make their move.

January 10, 2021
By Clarice Feldman

In 1934 Hitler executed members of his paramilitary organization (the SA – Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers) to consolidate his power, claiming it was to prevent a planned coup. In like fashion, using the incursion into the Capitol building, the Lords of Silicon Valley used this is a cover to muzzle those whose views with which they disagree.
Roger L. Simon details the events:

Not only has Donald Trump -- still the president of the United States -- been permanently banned from Twitter, its rapidly growing, open-to-all substitute Parler has almost simultaneously been de-platformed by Google.
You can’t get their app for Android anymore.

Apple threatens to be next, demanding Parler kowtow (by Saturday!) to Cupertino’s vision of what the world should be.
I suppose that’s a social-justicey-politically-correct totalitarianism led by left-leaning… or so they want us to believe… tech billionaires. [snip]
Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book… on Big Tech, no less… is “canceled” by Simon & Schuster. Senator Hawley had been among the most outspoken about investigating the possibility of election fraud.
Twitter permanently blocks General Flynn. I guess they don’t think he has had enough already.
Twitter permanently blocks Lin Wood, the well-known attorney working to unmask possible fraud. Ditto for the courageous Sidney Powell.
Not to be outdone, Facebook blocks President Trump’s account. (Not sure who was first -- Facebook or Twitter -- not that it matters.)
More insidiously, Facebook starts to delete groups or forums of people who publicly stepped away from the Democratic Party because of its scandals.
(Elsewhere it’s revealed that Facebook banned accounts at the behest of Hunter Biden.)
YouTube announces it will no longer distribute videos investigating election fraud and that producers of such videos will be punished if they do.
All this in a couple of days, the excuse being, in almost all cases, that the conservatives involved were instigating violence, the “outrage” that occurred at the Capitol.

One observer, noting that Twitter still allows the Ayatollah to post his anti-American screeds there suggests a way out for him:
Trump Sneaks Back On Twitter By Disguising Self As <acronym title="Google Page Ranking"><acronym title="Google Page Ranking">PR</acronym></acronym> Rep For Chinese Communist Party
The purge took place after Michelle Obama chimed in for them to do just that:

Jeremy Carl
@jeremycarl4
If you call yourself conservative you'd better decide quickly whether you side with Michelle Obama or @realDonaldTrump.
NBC News @NBCNews
JUST IN: Former first lady Michelle Obama calls on tech companies to permanently ban President Trump from their platforms and put policies in place “to prevent their technology from being used by the nation’s leaders to fuel insurrection.”

People are abandoning Twitter in droves. By Friday night Twitter stock dropped 4% in after-hour trading.
The Speech They Claim Caused an Insurrection
The President, before a group described as mostly law-abiding people from all over the country with no plan or desire to cause damage, reiterated his belief that the election was tampered with, and said:

We’re going to have to fight much harder and Mike Pence is going to have to come through for us. If he doesn’t, that will be a sad day for our country because you’re sworn to uphold our Constitution. Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. After this, we’re going to walk down and I’ll be there with you. We’re going to walk down. We’re going to walk down any one you want, but I think right here. We’re going walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators, and congressmen and women. We’re probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.
We have come to demand that Congress do the right thing and only count the electors who have been lawfully slated, lawfully slated. I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard. Today we will see whether Republicans stand strong for integrity of our elections, but whether or not they stand strong for our country, our country. Our country has been under siege for a long time, far longer than this four-year period. We’ve set it on a much straighter course.... [emphasis added]

His detractors characterize this as a reflection of his narcissism. My friend Jeffrey Satinover, a psychiatrist who knows a bit about such things, has a different view “I don’t think we know to what extent it is personal pride and to what extent principle based on background information that most of us lack. His detractors of course are incapable of thinking his actions anything but base.” And in support of this view, I note the long-delayed and underreported Ratcliffe assessment of foreign influence on the election was tardy because of members of the intelligence community feared it would assist the President:

Politicization problems exist in U.S. spy agency assessments on foreign influence in the 2020 U.S. election, including analysts who appeared to hold back information on Chinese meddling efforts because they disagreed with the Trump administration's policies, according to an intelligence community inspector.
Barry Zulauf, an analytic ombudsman and longtime intelligence official, issued a 14-page report obtained by the Washington Examiner to the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, revealing his investigation was “conducted in response to IC complaints regarding the election threat issue." In addition, he lamented the “polarized atmosphere has threatened to undermine the foundations of our Republic, penetrating even into the Intelligence Community.”
The intelligence community’s classified assessment on foreign influence in the 2020 election, which will not focus on claims of mail-in fraud or unfounded allegations of voting machines flipping millions of votes, was also submitted to Congress on Thursday. Expected in December, the assessment was delayed as senior intelligence officials clashed over the role played by China, and as director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe sought to include more viewpoints in the final analysis.
“Given analytic differences in the way Russia and China analysts examined their targets, China analysts appeared hesitant to assess Chinese actions as undue influence or interference. The analysts appeared reluctant to have their analysis on China brought forward because they tend to disagree with the administration’s policies, saying in effect, I don’t want our intelligence used to support those policies,” Zulauf concluded, saying this behavior violated analytic standards requiring independence from political considerations. [emphasis added]

The objections to the electoral votes are hardly uncommon either. As Congressman Matt Gaetz noted, its aptness is contemplated in the Constitution and “Not since 1985 has a Republican president been sworn in absent some Democrat effort to object to the electors, but when we do it, it’s the new violation of all norms. When those things are said people get angry.”
The attacks on the President’s speech to the crowd are of a piece with the descriptions of the events which followed.
Is the Capitol Building Always Sacred Ground?
Just two years ago, during the hearings on Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the media and left thought otherwise as his detractors swarmed the halls and sought to deny him confirmation.

Women's March
@womensmarch
Oct 4, 2018
We were planning to shut down the Capitol Building but the authorities were so scared of this #WomensWave that they shut it down for us.
1000 -- women, survivors, and allies have gathered in the Hart Senate Building.
Every hallway. Every floor.
#CancelKanavaugh #BelieveSurvivors

(That was when “believe all women” was the demand, a demand which seems to appear and disappear like the Cheshire Cat at the convenience of the media and Democratic women depending on who the accused is.)
In any event the Capitol has been the scene of worse.
It was set afire by the British in 1812. In 1915 a Harvard professor planted dynamite near the Senate Reception Room which went off as “an exclamation point in my appeal for peace.” In March 1954 four Puerto Rican nationalists in the visitors’ galley shot and wounded five members of Congress. President Carter later pardoned them. In March of 1971 the Weather Underground set off a bomb in the Senate side of the Capitol causing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. (Bill Ayers was the leader of the group. He was a Chicago colleague of Barack Obama and is widely believed to have ghostwritten Dreams of My Father, improbably attributed to Barack. Ayers's wife Bernardine Dohrn, also a member of the group, is a retired professor of law at Northwestern University. The son of two other members of the group whom they raised while his mother was in prison, Chesa Boudin, is a George Soros-funded district attorney of San Francisco, where he’s been successful in adopting policies causing significant increases in crime.) Twelve years after the Weather Underground bombing, a leftist group set off a bomb which blew off the door of Senator Byrd’s office.
In contrast to those events, videos show the Capitol police removing the barriers to the building and ushering through the mostly obedient and respectful crowd. (A crowd which in such a multitude usually includes a number of attention seekers and ne’er-do-wells like this nonaffiliated man photographed with Pelosi’s lectern.
The Capitol demonstration was far more peaceful than the ones outside the White House last summer, when Secret Service men were injured protecting the White House during the BLM/leftist rioting:

The attacks near the White House were more violent than the one at the Capitol, which did not involve most of the forms of assault described above. Yet, media and Democrat outrage over these attacks was muted at best. At worst, it was directed at those like William Barr who tried to ensure the safety of the area.

Crowds often attract outliers who use them as a cover for theft and mayhem, the reason I avoid large groups even at things like Black Friday at Walmart.
Along with an election they believe was stolen without an adequate opportunity to prove it, the crowd was also rightly infuriated by our two-tier System of Justice. So far not a single member of the soft coup Russian Collusion plotters has been sentenced, to give but one example.
Contrast the impassioned but not violence-inducing language of the President with just a few examples of these calls for violence by Democratic leaders.
Just last year Congresswoman Ayanna Presley called for unrest in the streets: Maxine Waters regularly does. Indeed, there are 26 times the media and Democrats excused or endorsed violence committed by left-wing activists.
Not only did they endorse and excuse the violence, Democratic supporters and donors paid to bail out any who were arrested.
Mark Steyn details the outrageous double legal standards involving protests and protestors. He wonders why we should be surprised when a mass protest tactic which proved useful for one side is used by the other.
Other resentments were at the boil as well.
In the Wall Street Journal, Edward Luttwak also makes the point of the double standard:

Given all these exclusions, only one description remains: a venting of accumulated resentments. Those who voted for President Trump saw his electoral victory denied in 2016 by numerous loud voices calling for “resistance” as if the president-elect were an invading foreign army. These voices were eagerly relayed and magnified by mass media, emphatically including pro-Trump media.
Then they saw his victory sullied by constantly repeated accusations of collusion with Russia from chairmen of intelligence committees and ex-intelligence chiefs who habitually accused Mr. Trump of being Vladimir Putin’s agent, claiming they had secret information, which, alas, they could not disclose. They deplored Mr. Trump’s “subservience” to Mr. Putin weekly for four years while refusing to entertain the possibility that in a confrontation with China, it might be a good idea to overlook Mr. Putin’s sins, as Nixon embraced Mao to counter the Soviet Union.

It amused me to see the photograph in the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman’s article urging the president to attend the inauguration. As you can see Trump is shaking the hand of Biden while the Obamas look on, barely hiding sneers. Both Biden and Obama had just the day before set off the Russian Collusion soft coup to tie up Trump’s candidacy.
As the Intelligence Community works to cover for China and the Silicon Billionaires strip dissenting voices from their platforms, leading Democrats join the overreach. Omar tweets she’s drawing up articles of impeachment; Chuck Schumer, our new Senate Majority Leader, tweets “This president must not hold office one day longer.” Assistant House Speaker Katherine Clark says that if the Vice President and Cabinet don’t remove him they will vote to impeach him by the middle of next week. Congresswoman Diana DeGette supports impeachment, tweeting, “He is a real danger to our country. He must be removed from office immediately and barred from ever holding an elected office again.” (Someone should explain the Bill of Attainder to these people.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went so far as to call the Pentagon Chief of Staff, ostensibly worried that he'll set up a nuclear war on his way out. Who’s unhinged? James Freeman continues:

Mr. Trump also ranted and raved at length claiming the election was fraudulent, and for this reason many Americans will be happy to see him depart on Jan. 20. But if the speaker wants to make an incitement case on political grounds and Mr. Trump is permitted to mount a defense, he will likely be able to cite plenty of quotations in which the impeachers made similarly inflammatory remarks.
If on the other hand Mrs. Pelosi wants to argue the legal merits, just like last time she will have trouble defining how exactly Mr. Trump broke the law. He has First Amendment rights just like everybody else, and no doubt the manner in which he exercises them is a big reason why so many people voted against him in November. But did he meet the legal standard of incitement? UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh thinks not.

The very brilliant Daniel Greenfield details why this trend of shutting off the views of about half the country is likely to become even more complete and onerous.
I’m old fashioned. From the days before -- to paraphrase one wag -- the party of JFK became the party of Lee Harvey Oswald. So old fashioned, I think the best way to determine policy and to understand events is open dialogue. Without it, it’s a thugs' and idiots’ paradise. So I’ll keep writing online until my doubleplusungood thoughts get cancelled. I’m too old to pass the exam for a ham radio license, but I’m sure we'll figure out something.


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The Night of the Tech Long Knives - American Thinker