Op-Ed: The Danger of Corporate and Media Monopolies Cannot be Ignored

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It has come as no surprise to middle America that in the days leading up to the election and immediately following it that corporate giants, media conglomerates, and Tech Barons have come together in an unholy alliance to suppress news, to silence conservative voices, and, effectively, to run Biden’s campaign for him. Conservatives, entrenched in Reaganite ideology, have neutered themselves against any response to this great danger.

 Under the guise of hiding so-called “misinformation,” social media giant Twitter suppressed Alexander Hamilton’s New York Post for reporting on alleged corruption in Joe Biden’s entanglement with his son’s Ukrainian business dealings. NYP, like all media outlets, is not protected from libel or slander suits under Sec. 230 of the Communications Decency Act; thus, a fairly high standard of factual basis is expected for all reporting. For the NYP to publish the story, they must have had some such basis. Unabashedly partisan, Twitter and Facebook locked the Post’s account and blocked the article from being shared on the platform. Google, one of the largest companies in the world, has had similarly partisan agendas that the platform has maintained rigorously. An exposé by Project Veritas in the summer of 2019 found that Google executive Jen Gennai had expressed sentiments that Google’s algorithm had contributed to the election’s outcome and that it would have to be adjusted to “prevent it from happening again.” Research later proved that Gennai’s claims of the effect Google could have on elections were true. Dr. Robert Epstein, who received his PhD in psychology from Harvard University, found disquieting results testifying to Google’s power: “Our research leaves a little doubt about whether Google has the ability to control voters. In laboratory and online experiments conducted in the United States, we were able to boost the proportion of people who favored any candidates by between 37 and 63 percent after just one search session.” For all of liberals’ claims recently about the importance of electoral integrity and democracy, they seem little concerned by Google’s massive effect on the electorate driven by clear, admitted political bias. Likewise, they are not concerned about Facebook and Twitter silencing even credible claims as in the case of NYP’s report.

Meanwhile, other major media outlets that discussed the story at all either obfuscated or tried to debunk it altogether. Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post,ironically bearing the subtitle “Democracy dies in darkness” under its website header, engaged in pure Orwellian Doublespeak. An article posted by Thomas Rid on the website said that “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation — even if they probably aren’t.” Otherwise stated, these leaks cannot be allowed into the public mind right before an election that the media class has decided that Joe Biden must win. Politico meanwhile reported on October 19 that the Hunter Biden story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, according to several former intelligence officials. Further down the sensationally-titled article, Politico reported that though these officials gave no evidence to substantiate their claims, they were “deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.” This suspicion-turned-allegation was denied the next day by Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe. After this announcement, cries of disinformation largely stopped, along with any other reporting of the story. Unable to obfuscate the story in a way palatable to the liberal gentry who consume and trust mainstream media, mainstream media simply stopped talking about it and hoped that it would go away. Though the NYP and Tucker Carlson continued to report on it, media outlets showed that they had enough power to successfully suppress a story from a credible media outlet identified as legitimate by U.S. National Intelligence. At the same time, these media outlets insisted for years that Trump was only elected because of Russian collusion, a narrative that they maintain despite no evidence being found after a multi-million dollar investigation by Robert Mueller. 
Conservatives intentionally impede themselves in the exercise of power, entangled, in the words of Burke, “in the mazes of metaphysic[al] sophistry,” considering fear of power to be the basis of government; though this may have its merits as an abstract concept, it also puts conservatives into a perpetual defensive stance. Liberals, meanwhile, have shown that they are willing and able to use all the tools at their disposal to win. Over the summer, the Left organized and sanctioned destructive riots that caused chaos, division, and fear; they are unafraid to ignite the worst passions in the populace if it helps them win; they are capable of and willing to use their extremely powerful monopolies on search engines and social media to advance their own end; they have no reservations to using their conglomeration of mainstream media to lie, obfuscate, and ignore their way into power; they will cheerfully commit any degree of voting fraud to take Trump out of the White House. Conservatives take a higher ground than this–– commendable for their integrity, but also self-destructive. Perhaps seeing this threat, conservatives have recently rallied against the Corporate Tech Giants, at least temporarily. On October 20 of this year, the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google. In the wake of the Hunter Biden fiasco, the Senate subpoenaed all three Tech Barons to testify before Congress. While this is a good start, it is one that Republicans must build on; the threat of this alliance between media and corporate conglomerates is so great that anything less will deal irreparable harm. American Revolutionaries, to bring forth a nation conceived in liberty, first had to resort to desperate measures; to reach Yorktown George Washington first had to seize goods and crops from American citizens during the long winter at Valley Forge. A principle which cannot sustain itself in the most desperate times is nothing more or less than a principle of suicide. The window on repairing this harm is closing fast, and perhaps is already closed. If Republicans continue to refuse to budge from libertarian principles in order to face this Goliath, the conservative movement will not endure even to 2030; and with the increasing radicalism of the Left, the country itself would not endure much longer after that point.

Opinions expressed within are the property of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of any other member or the paper itself. 

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