For All to See: Corporations Acting as Wilful Tools of Government Threaten the Republic

Elon Musk has exposed what we long suspected—but it's even worse than we thought

FBI Agent Who Pushed False Trump-Russia Collusion Narrative Later Shut Down Hunter Biden Investigation | Truth Over News. The Epoch Times

Commentary

Before he died, Reagan-era Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who gave virtually his entire life to public service, lamented Americans’ loss of faith in governmental institutions.

Given the recent revelations about how partisan interests have infested those institutions—whether it be the IRS, the FBI, the CIA, or even the CDC—and how the media colluded with those agencies to lie to the American people, I can’t help but think that Volcker would be as angry as I am at what has become of those once-respected institutions, as well as the media, that the Founders intended to be the peoples’ advocates and protectors.

The Danger of Governmental, Corporate Cooperation

“National Socialism,” the ideology that drove the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazis, was never really “socialist“ in the technical sense. While the Nazis melded a toxic stew of anti-Semitism, totalitarianism, and fascism, the Nazis never took public ownership of German companies and the means of production, a fundamental element of socialism.

Instead, obsequious German corporations and their leaders willingly did the bidding of the Nazis, right down to denaturing the offensive odor of a popular cyanide-based rat poison, Zyklon. The denatured counterpart, Zyklon B, produced deadly hydrogen-cyanide fumes that the Nazis used in the faux “showers” to murder millions of Jews, communists, Roma, disabled, political opponents, and others the Nazis deemed “undesirable.”

I raise the ugly history of Nazi Germany because it illustrates, in the extreme, the dangers of corporations willfully collaborating with governments when the governments pursue policies that are anathema to human rights. But we in America are seeing, more and more, that corporations will do the bidding of an often overreaching government that’s intent on restricting personal freedoms.

Fundamental Rights

The Constitution delineates certain enumerated rights, like the right to free speech, the right to keep and bear arms, and the right to trial by jury. The Ninth Amendment, often overlooked, says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” So your right to borrow money, engage in business, protect your family, or to sue or defend yourself in a lawsuit—to name only a few rights protected by, but not enumerated in, the Constitution should be clear.

But government keeps encroaching on even enumerated rights, using corporations as their agents. Consider these examples where government, using obsequious corporate agents, has encroached on the right to bear arms, the right to trial by jury, and the right to free speech:

• Left-leaning state pension fund managers such as New York City’s Brad Lander, for example, have pressured Visa, MasterCard, and American Express to create specific sales codes for firearms and ammunition to distinguish them from something like sporting goods. The credit card companies have acceded to the progressive demands to effectively create what can be a national gun registry of recently purchased firearms that governments could subpoena. Only cash purchases of firearms and ammunition would be excluded.
• Young Kyle Rittenhouse, who was acquitted of murder by a jury for killing two and shooting another during the George Floyd protests in what the jury determined was self-defense, was charged by a politically ambitious Democrat prosecutor who was cheered on by the media. The biased coverage against Rittenhouse was so pervasive that it could’ve poisoned the jury pool, denying him a right to trial by jury. Even after he was acquitted, Rittenhouse reportedly said he was called a “murderer“ by one well-known daytime talk TV host.
• Joe Rogan, a sometimes controversial podcast host, and his guest, Dr. Robert Malone, challenged the government’s narrative on COVID-19 and vaccinations against it, to the consternation of public health authorities like Dr. Anthony Fauci. Rogan said, among other things that young people need not get vaccinated. Malone had himself been banned from Twitter. Within weeks, someone described as a “misinformation researcher,” was cited by NPR as saying “scrutiny of podcasts is overdue.” Rogan subsequently offered an apology of sorts so his podcast platform, Spotify, would allow him to continue on the platform.

Enter Musk and Twitter

Elon Musk took over Twitter on Oct. 28 and chaos seems to have reigned since. People have been fired and then rehired; legal counsel was ignored and then followed and then fired. All takeovers involve some level of administrative chaos, particularly when the corporate culture changes. In the Musk takeover, the culture clash was stark.

A new owner who said, “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” in a press release announcing the acquisition, clashed radically with Twitter’s mercurial and left-leaning executive team and its “moderators.”

That executive team, after all, had banned people, including the President of the United States and Republican members of Congress, for reasons known only to themselves but purportedly for violations of Twitter’s Terms of Service that prohibited hate speech. Meanwhile, hate-filled and anti-Semitic tweets purporting to be for Iran’s Supreme Leader, with nearly a million followers, that called for the “annihilation” of Israel, continued unfettered for years.

Exit America’s Fortune 500 From Twitter

Shortly after Musk’s takeover was announced, Yoel Roth, who “chose to leave” his position heading Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” department, penned an op-ed in The New York Times describing means by which advertisers, European regulators, and app stores such as Google and Apple, could continue to bully Musk into adhering to the former management’s standards of “trust and safety.”

The Fortune 500 acquiesced within days. General Motors, the carmaker who has pledged to produce “only” electric cars by 2030 and the very existence of which can be attributed to President Barack Obama’s government bailout, soon toed the line and withdrew its advertising on the platform. It’s arguable GM, as a direct competitor with Musk’s Tesla, might want to enrich a successor—akin to Pepsi advertising on the Coca-Cola 600 NASCAR race—although that seems secondary, at first glance, to GM’s adhering to a government political agenda.

But others, without any discernible reasons, simply fell in line. CBS News, for example, dropped its Twitter account, then reinstated it. Others, like Chipotle, told Bloomberg they were dropping their ads on Twitter to “gain a better understanding on the direction of the platform under its new leadership.”

Scores of other well-known brand names like Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, Dell, Nestle, and Whole Foods have stopped their ad buys, too, according to a review by Media Matters.

Why It’s Dangerous

Revelations by Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss in recent days show that Twitter (and most mainstream media) were complicit with an attempt by the FBI and Democratic Party officials to bury the Hunter Biden laptop story and to influence the outcome of the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden’s favor.

The Bureau had maintained surveillance on Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani’s iPhone under a counterintelligence warrant, perhaps going back as far as 2019. That surveillance would’ve given the FBI a “heads up” that Giuliani was working with New York Post columnist Miranda Devine to expose the story of the nefarious contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop well before Devine’s story went to press.

The FBI then used that knowledge to warn Twitter (and presumably other social media companies) to expect a dump of “Russian disinformation” that should be ignored. The social media companies dutifully blocked the story from being viewed by tens of millions of users after it was published. When the story did break in the New York Post, 51 retired intelligence officials issued a public statement to say Hunter Biden’s hard drive had “all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.”

With the imprimatur of the FBI and the support of retired intelligence community officials, corporate media like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and all the broadcast TV networks deemed the New York Post story “false.” No further need to investigate, no follow-up, and no independent assessment. Corporate media told its readers, viewers, and listeners that the content of Hunter Biden’s hard drive was “Russian disinformation.” Candidate Joe Biden personally reiterated the FBI–corporate media lie in his debate with President Donald Trump before hundreds of millions of viewers. Not only did Biden lie to the people, but he continued the slander that Trump was a “Russian asset”—a long-standing lie promulgated by Trump’s opponents because of the fake “dossier” that Hillary Clinton’s campaign had concocted in the 2016 presidential race.

A Need to Restore Faith

Institutions deserve our faith and confidence only if, and to the extent, they live up to their public charters. As is clear to all who observe, the administrators of numerous Federal institutions have betrayed their charters and the people of the United States. The new Congress should defund all of them until there’s a house-cleaning of the leadership who misuse the institutions to pursue partisan political agendas.

Only if we restore the public faith in once sacrosanct governmental institutions and the media and place at their heads American patriots who will live up to the Constitution can we ensure the safety of the republic.