Commentary
Former U.S. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley denounced widespread censorship of President Donald Trump and other conservative figures in a tweet on Friday saying that silencing voices are what happens in Communist China, not in America.
Haley, who served as Governor of South Carolina from 2010 to 2017 before resigning to take on the role of Ambassador, was referring to Trump being permanently banned from Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, Instagram and Snapchat in the last several days as Big Tech has used the opportunity of the Jan. 6 Capitol building riots as a pretext to implement Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-style censorship in the name of preventing “incitement of violence”.
The former ambassador said in a follow-up tweet 18 hours later, “There are no excuses or defense for this moment. There is only one way forward. Those who broke the law must be punished. We must condemn those responsible. We must recommit ourselves to upholding our American ideals. And we must all promise: We will never let this happen again.”
Haley did not follow the trend of blaming Donald Trump for what transpired.
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U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo echoed Haley’s concerns on Jan. 9, posting from his personal Twitter account, saying “We cannot let them silence 75M Americans. This isn’t the CCP.”
Learning from the Chinese Communist Party
Twitter cited two Jan. 8 Tweets by the President as justification for censorship.
The first, “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” and the second, “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter has truly taken a page out of the Communist propagandist playbook, using what they call their “Glorification of Violence” policy to twist Trump’s tweet about not attending the Jan. 20 inauguration into an instruction for his voters to attack the inauguration because he will not be present.
Twitter further claims the term “American Patriots” is to be “interpreted as support for those committing violent acts at the US Capitol.”
The social media giant also conflates Trump’s remarks that his nearly 75 million voters, a record turnout for an incumbent President, will have a “GIANT VOICE long into the future,” is “being interpreted” by Twitter that “President Trump does not plan to facilitate an ‘orderly transition’ and instead that he plans to continue to support, empower, and shield those who believe he won the election.”
The United States Census Bureau, the Current Population Survey found 153.1 million eligible voters. According to the vote results reported by Associated Press, 157,373,102 votes were cast between Biden, Trump, and Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgenson.
In criticizing Trump’s support for the 75 million people who voted for him, Twitter has effectively alienated nearly 50 percent of the nation’s eligible voters.
But Twitter goes one step further, claiming that further violence is already being organized by Trump supporters, “Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.”
No evidence is provided and no connection to Trump is offered by Twitter in this accusation.
By contrast, Twitter has never taken any action against Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian for his Nov. 29 Tweet of a photoshopped propaganda piece depicting an Australian soldier holding a bloodied knife to the throat of an Afghani child, despite enormous pushback from all levels of the Australian government.
Twitter also does not censor dictators from Iran, Venezuela, or any of the CCP’s official accounts.
On May 11, Twitter imported Beijing influence when they appointed Dr. Li Feifei to the Board of Directors. Li was former Vice President and Chief Artificial Intelligence scientist at Google Cloud. She tied Google with Tsinghua University, China’s top AI institute and was named by CCP thinktank Center for China and Globalization as “among the 50 most successful Chinese who have studied abroad”.
Tsinghua’s AI operation received over 100 million yuan from the CCP’s Science and Technology Committee of China’s Central Military Commission.
A week after Li was appointed, Chinese Twitter user Caijinglenyan was removed under allegations that they posted under multiple accounts. One of the user’s posts before removal was “Li Fei-Fei is coming, I have to run.”
Twitter’s actions seem to be cut from the same cloth as Beijing’s campaign to silence voices in its own country. In October, leaked documents showed the CCP using a targeted campaign to silence social media influencers on Chinese platforms who dissented against the Party’s official narrative as part of a campaign to “crackdown” on internet rumors”.
The ‘virulent strain’ of Chinese communist censorship
Last July, on the 99th anniversary of the CCP’s founding, Pompeo spoke of the Party’s attempts to spread a “virulent strain of communism” worldwide. Today, the outgoing state secretary’s words are proving more prophetic than most would have expected.
It’s not enough for Twitter to drive users off its platform. After all, there are alternatives.
Like in the Eastern communist dictatorships, the aim of this brave new world of censorship appears to be to crush all dissenting voices. Apple and Google have flexed the might of their monopolies on the mobile app market by requiring Twitter competitor Parler to self-censor and enact policies and ideologies on freedom of speech the twin tech giants approve of, unless Parler wishes to be removed from the App Store and Google Play permanently.
Parler is currently unavailable through the Play Store, affecting all Android users. Parler was also removed from the Apple App Store on Saturday for not complying with censorship demands, while Amazon has denied Parler service effective midnight Jan. 10.
“We were too successful too fast. You can expect the war on competition and free speech to continue, but don’t count us out,” said CEO John Matze in a statement.
Yet, the problem with the entire argument justifying censorship is simply that there is no basis in reality that Donald Trump incited violence during the Jan. 6 Joint Session.
Mark Zuckerberg virtue-signaled in a self righteous monologue that “[Trump]’s decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building” had supposedly “rightly disturbed” people.
But what Trump said in a video after the rioting broke out is entirely different from the spin Zuckerberg is selling, “We have to have peace. We have to have law and order and we have to respect our great people in law and order. We don’t want anybody hurt.”
But according to “Zuck” when it comes to a President the left couldn’t possibly be more biased towards, what Trump actually said doesn’t matter because “we judged that their effect — and likely their intent [emphasis added] — would be to provoke further violence.”
Zuckerberg’s statements constitute an opinion, and perhaps more accurately, a conjecture. This is the same Mark Zuckerberg who “donated” $500 million to election officials, more than the federal government itself contributed to the 2020 Election, through his charity the Centre for Tech and Civic Life to run the 2020 Presidential Election in the way that he liked.
The donations were provided under contract with explicit “clawback” provisions requiring the cities who received money from the charity to pay back all of what was given unless stipulations on how elections were conducted were followed.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) Tweeted on Friday that he is “more determined than ever to strip Section 230 protections from Big Tech (Twitter) that let them be immune from lawsuits.”
Hollow pretexts
Moreover, the rioting at the Capitol building not only is much more consistent with agents provocateurs than Trump’s demographic, but the Associated Press revealed that D.C. Police rejected the National Guard’s assistance on Jan. 3 and the FBI’s assistance on Jan. 6.
Donald Trump himself ordered the National Guard to the Capitol, and shortly before curfew was enacted at 6:00 p.m, a contingent of the National Guard arrived on the scene, formed a phalanx of tower riot shields, and pushed the protestors away from the Capitol building.
The violence, which Big Tech condemns with such sanctimonious conviction, appears to have not only been instigated by leftists, but was allowed by Capitol Police. The only thing that supposedly made the rioters Donald Trump’s supporters is that they put on MAGA hats and were present among the nearly half a million other people who attended the protest.
Whatever the exact circumstances of what happened in the afternoon at the Capitol, responsibility for the lives of the four rioters and one police officer who were killed during the event lies with those who orchestrated and allowed the riots to happen, rather than with Donald Trump.
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