In 1924 Commerce Secretary (later President of the United States)
Herbert Hoover, a Republican, warned against the concentration of
corporate power in Radio, which at the time was a fledgling medium
and a new industry: "We cannot allow any single person or group to
place themselves in a position where they can censor the material
which shall be broadcasted to the public." Here in 2021, this very
danger Hoover warned about and inveighed against has come to pass.
The Tech companies in California's Silicon Valley have become the
censors for the government. The medium in which this horror is
taking place is not radio but the Internet. Now, it is a fact that the
First Amendment ordinarily applies to the government rather than
private companies. But the tech giants' censorship, the blocking of
conservatives and their posts, denying them use of the tech firms'
platforms, claiming that the conservatives were engaged in "hate
speech" of racist or other varieties have convinced attorneys
representing their aggrieved clients that the tech giants should be
treated as state actors and are in violation of the First Amendment,
having engaged in selective political censorship. Since the govern-
ment granted them immunity from legal liability, these tech big
shots have been able to bully those parties which posted thoughts
and statements which the tech titans vehemently disagree with and
strenuously oppose with impunity.
The Supreme Court has several times held that federal immunity
pre-empting state law "can transform a private party's conduct into
state action, therefore making said conduct subject to state action
subject to constitutional scrutiny," stated Vivek Ramaswamy in
a recent guest editorial piece in the Wall Street Journal on this
legal matter. Ramaswary, the author of "Woke, Inc.: Inside
Corporate America's Social Justice Scam" has been researching
these actions for quite some time, and is quite knowledgeable on
the legal ramifications. So the government, with the Democrats
in charge of both chambers of Congress and holding the White
House, does not have to censor political opposition online;
they don't have to. All they need do is rely on their slavish
devotees in Silicon Valley, who also write them gargantuan
checks each election season. Social-media companies are privately
owned, therefore are solidly in the private sector, but when they
team up with officials to squelch content which makes them
uncomfortable they are thus serving as the government's censors
and therefore answerable to the First Amendment. Big Tech has
immense power to restrict speech, make no mistake. Twitter has
even banned President Trump, closing his account! No American
company has so silenced elected officials, let alone the topmost
official, or prevented them from freely communicating with
citizens.
This sort of thing has, in some form or another, occurred in Russia,
China, North Korea, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Venezuela to name
but a few countries taken over by totalitarian regimes. If our United
States fails to stop this from taking place here, then the Constitution
beginning with the First Amendment will become meaningless and
our country will become another totalitarian wasteland like the
aforementioned countries.
MEM
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