Long before, “In Soviet Russia, television watch you” became a staple of Cold War comedy routines, George Orwell’s 1984 novel had telescreens that broadcast propaganda and watched their citizens. Behind the satire is the core question of the struggle against Big Tech today.

Is technology going to be a tool of individual choice or social control?

Facebook and Twitter’s desperate attempts to block a damaging story about Joe and Hunter Biden is the culmination of four years of work to transform social media into the media. Under the guise of false claims about disinformation, foreign election interference, bots, networks, deepfakes, public health risks, and assorted tech paranoia, free speech died on the internet.


The moment when the White House Press Secretary had her account locked for tweeting a damaging news story about Joe Biden brought home the Big Tech reality to most Republicans.

Just like the media, Big Tech is the Democrat Party, and the Democrat Party is Big Tech. But, unlike the media, Big Tech controls the marketplace of ideas to an unprecedented degree.

Facebook controls 80% of social media and Google controls 80% of internet search traffic.

And that’s bad news because Democrats see the internet in the same terms as Xi, Putin, or your average dictator just about anywhere in the world, as a dangerous system spouting disinformation, damaging social ideas, and disruptive political rhetoric that must be controlled using a combination of economic and social pressures, along with government regulation.

Republicans and Democrats are both unhappy with the internet. Republicans are upset because there’s too much censorship and Democrats are upset because there isn’t enough censorship.

That Democrats, who once championed a free internet, now view it the same way all totalitarians do, speaks volumes not only about the death of liberalism but also about the transformation of the internet from a vox populi to a walled garden controlled by a handful of Big Tech monopolies whose cultural views and politics closely align with those of the Democrats.

‘Bigness’ has its own political and economic gravity. Big cities are more likely to have big governments and their inhabitants are more likely to vote for big government policies. They’re also more likely to use and generate the core companies and cultures that make up Big Tech.

The old political alignments based on questions of philosophy are being tossed aside and replaced with a new alignment based on the primevally simple questions of size and power.

The struggle is less defined by abstractions, than by the question of how much power you have.

In the Trump era, the more proximity to power you have, the more likely you are to be a Democrat, and the less proximity to power you have, the more likely you are to be a Republican.

The most striking thing about the Never Trumpers and the Rust Belt and Southern Democrats voting for Trump is how much power the former have and how little power the latter do.

Politics is being reduced to naked power.

Democrats shifted their stance on the internet because they gained control of core national institutions, in no small part through the growing fortunes pouring out of Silicon Valley which have tilted elections, financed political movements, and transformed public perspectives on social issues. And they are using their newfound power to do what the powerful always do, dismantle the safeguards of an open society so that there are no more threats to their power.

They’re doing this under the guise of fighting for equality and justice, and of waging a revolution for the oppressed, but so did most modern tyrants from Stalin to Hitler to Mao.

The Democrats are no longer interested in a free internet, for the same reason that they’ve tossed away free speech, the filibuster, or any institution or procedure that isn’t serving their interests this very minute. This isn’t due to a new progressive enlightenment, Republican obstinacy, grave new threats to democracy, or any of the other talking points they serve up.

The simple answer is that they won.

The Democrats of the 90s who welcomed an open internet were waging an uphill struggle against the open institutions of a generally conservative country. The country is now much less conservative, the institutions are much less open, and every major institutional force, from the biggest companies to the media, is unreservedly and uncritically backing them every step of the way, while suppressing any suggestion that they shouldn’t rule unopposed for all eternity.

All that’s left is collecting their winnings by shutting down the opposition.

Support for free speech is a matter of principle and practical politics. America was built on principle, but the Founding Fathers had a common-sense assessment of human nature. Free societies may be built on principles, but they survive through a balance of power. Every major faction must go on believing that it is in its interest to maintain free speech, checks and balances, and other protections against tyranny because it might end up needing them.

The Democrats have accumulated enough power that they no longer think that they need firewalls because if they play their cards right, the future, the right side of history, is their own.

That’s the fundamental development that explains the current crisis, not only of free speech, but of free elections, and a free country. The internet, like any society’s marketplace of ideas, is a symptom. Free countries have a robust marketplace of ideas. Unfree ones are obsessed with censoring speech and monitoring their citizens, all the while spinning paranoid fantasies about foreign interference, the threat of dangerous ideas, and the risk to political stability from speech.

Anyone who came out of a coma and spent an afternoon listening to CNN (owned by AT&T), reading the Washington Post (owned by the CEO of Amazon), and perusing the latest round of Democrat complaints about election interference and disinformation would know what we are.

The problem isn’t simply radicalism. It’s power.

Democrat radicalism isn’t being driven by the powerless, but by the powerful. That’s why Democrats with PhDs are more radical than those with a high school diploma. The problem of Big Tech can’t be separated from the problem of a political movement with too much power.

The culture of political censorship isn’t merely radical, it’s powerful. Cancel culture by college students or Big Tech censorship aren’t disparate phenomena, they’re the same phenomenon, often practiced on the same platforms by members of the same inbred ruling class.

America has been reconstructed to favor some classes at the expense of others. This new machine combining political institutions, activist groups, and corporations controls public life.

Conservatives can combat it or, like Soviet citizens, make jokes, and wait for it to collapse.

Big Tech is at the nexus of the political, economic, and cultural power of this new machine. That’s why breaking its power must be the objective of any winning conservative movement.

The massive monopolies control political discourse and as they tighten the noose around conservatives, political speech on the internet will consist of media narratives, a few tame conservatives, and little else. Imagine the high point of media dominance with no talk radio or cable conservative news. That’s the future. And it’s not going to arrive a year from now, it may already be here by Election Day. And if not, certainly when the next presidential election arrives.

But Big Tech also holds the key to the radical money machine. AOC and the Squad wouldn’t exist without a founding engineer from Stripe. The founder of eBay is responsible for everything from The Intercept to The Bulwark, the former is the media arm of the Sanders campaign and the latter of the Never Trumpers. The Washington Post was transformed from a fussy government paper into a den of furious radicals by the CEO of Amazon. Google money financed the Bernie Sanders campaign. Big Tech has poured a massive fortune into Black Lives Matter, from Steve Jobs’ widow, to Jeff Bezos’ ex-wife, to Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter.

And that’s the tip of the iceberg considering Facebook’s Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

The cultural power of Big Tech is even vaster. Google and Facebook determine what most people see on the internet. Amazon and Netflix are swallowing the entertainment industry. In a decade, a handful of vast, mostly, tech companies, Apple, Amazon, AT&T, Disney, Google, Netflix, and Verizon will control the culture far more than the old entertainment industry ever did.

By then it will be much too late to do anything except huddle in a few dark web outposts and mutter hate speech like the controversial words of the First Amendment.

If conservatives don’t fight Big Tech now, they will lose. And they will lose everything.

Big Tech’s power is growing exponentially, but it’s still vulnerable. The companies that will become immovable oligarchies in a decade can still be brought down and broken up. The internet and the marketplace of ideas can rise again from the ruins of those monopolies.

Now is the time. If we don’t fight Big Tech now, America has no future.

Between the pandemic, the lockdowns, and the crime rates, the country is a mess. And when the country is a mess, voters respond by kicking out whoever is in power.

In 2016, Republicans were running as insurgents. Now they're running as incumbents.

Election Day is coming up and Republicans need to make a better case than they have until now. The Republican case suffers from overcomplicated arguments, references to things that non-conservatives aren't familiar with, and mixed messaging on key areas like the pandemic and crime.

The core argument must be that the key crises are caused by Democrats and being managed by Republicans.

1. The pandemic's worst death tolls took place in blue states and cities like New York. Republicans have failed to seriously challenge Cuomo's record which is a huge mistake because, aside from Biden considering him for Attorney General, Cuomo is prepping for a potential future presidential run.

But the bigger issue is that Republicans have failed to properly place blame for the death toll.

Every time Democrats bring out that 200,000+ number, Republican messaging should have been that the death toll was caused by Democrats and based out of Democrat states and cities before it migrated.

If any particular element leads to a Republican defeat, it will be this one.

Republicans have done a better job of managing the pandemic than Democrats. And if Republicans at the national level don't attack Democrat mismanagement of the pandemic, they'll lose. If Republicans had devoted a fraction of the effort expended on Burisma to the death tolls, especially of nursing home patients in blue states, this election would be a cakewalk.

2. Democrats want to shift responsibility from local areas to the federal government to manage the pandemic and impose lockdowns, even though they've failed to manage the pandemic locally.

Just like in California or Oregon, areas that aren't in crisis will be forced into crisis mode. 

Every single place in the country will be forced to lobby Washington D.C. and follow its orders.

It's a simple message and yet Republicans seem incapable of communicating it at a national level.

3. Crime and violence are out of control because Democrats kicked off a wave of pro-crime decriminalization programs, freed prisoners, and supported race riots.

Republicans have done better on messaging here, but there are still too many mixed messages, especially when it comes to the 1994 crime bill. 

"Democrats support crime. Republicans fight crime."

It's a traditional, simple, and effective message. Why aren't we hearing it? 

4. The last time Biden was in charge of a recovery, the country spent eight years in a recession.

Republicans have done better on economy messaging, and President Trump, in particular, came out strong at the last debate, but there's still often a lack of a simple, coherent message. 

The public's core concerns on the pandemic, the economy, and crime, three leading issues, are going to decide the election.

Scandals, like Hunter Biden's laptop, can help, but most people are going to vote based on their own interests. And people's interests are raw and close to the surface now. All the stuff that makes for good social media churn, adds value, but people worried about their jobs, their businesses, and their lives are only going to care so much about it. 

The Democrats trashed the country. Digging up their dirt weakens them, but it's not going to stop them.

Republicans are being held back by internal conflicts, especially when it comes to the pandemic, but these conflicts can't get in the way of delivering a straight and simple message to undecided voters.

Internal conflicts should stay internal. When they spill over into mixed messaging, then Republicans sound incoherent or untrustworthy. You don't win elections by dismissing people's concerns, ask Hillary how well that worked in 2016, but by tapping into them and offering an answer. 

There's only so much time left for deploying focused, coherent messages. 

Finally...

5. If Democrats take the Senate and the White House, they're not just going to pack the Supreme Court, but the House and Senate by adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states. And then they're going to Californicate the country and transform it into a one-party state run out of D.C., San Fran and New York. 

In light of that, losing the Senate should be unacceptable for anyone who doesn't like that scenario. 

It doesn't matter how bad some Republican Senate candidates are. Anyone who counsels having Democrats take the Senate as a valid "conservative" option is no different than the Never Trumpers who insist that "principle" demands that President Trump lose so the Republican party can be rebuilt.

The cost of Republicans losing the White House and/or the Senate is the end of America.

No Republican Senate member, no matter how awful of a RINO he might be, is worse than that.

Last year, Amazon was forced to shut down its marketplace business in the People’s Republic of China. Amazon’s defeat followed that of a long line of Big Tech players who had tried to make a go of it in China and failed miserably. China’s economy is built to boost domestic businesses and foreign exports, with some needed imports, by companies linked to the Communist Party.

And no matter how politically correct Amazon may try to be, it can never join that club.

But Amazon’s business in China isn’t done. To a large degree, Amazon’s business is China. Behind the smiling logo, the massive array of businesses covering everything from running the CIA’s cloud to spending $500 million to make a Lord of the Rings streaming series, are a bunch of grim offices, apartments, and warehouses in Chinese cities that make up its real business.

Three years ago, third-party sellers topped Amazon's own sales. They now make up 58%. Who are they? If, like most Americans, you shop at the giant dot com retail monopoly, you’ve already waded through a stream of random shop names, fake misspelled reviews, and counterfeit products while searching for just about anything. What happened? China happened.

Between 40% to 48% of top third-party sellers on Amazon are operating out of China. The massive growth in Chinese third-party sellers has been fairly recent and transformative.

What Amazon Prime members are really buying is membership in a club that helps third-party sellers from China push counterfeit and imitation products to Americans. Amazon acts as a middle man, charging Chinese sellers and American customers for handling listing, shipping and sales..

The trade war between America and China began a year before Amazon shut down its local sales, but not its cross-border business. And that cross-border business is Amazon’s lifeline.

In 2013, Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Bezos, at the time, lived in the other Washington. He wouldn’t add a D.C. home to his collection until 2016, and didn’t show it off until this year at a party attended by Bill Gates and Mitt Romney. Many wondered why Bezos had bought a D.C. government paper. Follow the money.

In 2014, the CIA announced a $600 million cloud contract with Amazon. Considering Amazon’s dependency on China, granting it that kind of access was an absurdly terrible idea. And yet, Amazon then went on to win a $10 billion military cloud contract that it has since fortunately lost.

Amazon’s federal contract revenues rose from $200 million in 2014 to $2 billion now. Much of that money flows to Amazon from that entity its boss’ paper calls the intelligence community.

Few have noted the curious triangle between the money flowing from the intelligence community to Amazon, and the Washington Post’s role in pushing supposed material from the intelligence community against President Trump, his trade war, and Amazon’s China business.

This doesn’t have to add up to some grand conspiracy, but the Washington Post’s owner has a vital economic interest in ousting Trump, and the paper has been doing that by serving up material from a branch of the government that its owner’s company does a lot business with.

Amazon is hardly alone among Big Tech companies in benefiting from Trump’s defeat.

It’s no coincidence that the Democrat nominee is a doddering hack best known for inappropriately touching women and building close relationships between certain American industries and the People’s Republic of China. The biggest Big Tech companies are driven by outsized stock prices and a high cash burn rate that can only be fixed by massive growth.

And that growth is dependent on China and on American trade policies.

Facebook is officially banned in China, but, much like Amazon, its business comes through the Communist dictatorship.

China is Facebook's second largest revenue source after America with $5 billion a year in ad revenue. And the social media monopoly which controls 80% of the social media market in America, keeps pleading and begging to be allowed back into China.

Why are Chinese companies advertising on a service that Chinese users are blocked from accessing through the Great Firewall? Some, like TikTok, which built its business through Facebook, are trying to reach American customers and then build their own ad business.

China is racing to build its own machine for directly reaching American customers. And once it has that, it won’t need Amazon, Facebook, or the rest of the tech traitors anymore. To paraphrase Lenin, the rope will have been sold and all that will be left are the hangings.

Like Amazon, Facebook is a one-way system for allowing Chinese businesses to take advantage of Americans. While US companies may not be allowed to do business in China, they’re happy to help Chinese companies do business in America. Or, as Facebook put it, it's "committed to becoming the best marketing platform for Chinese companies going abroad".

But it’s not just Chinese businesses using Facebook for ads: it’s also China’s regime.

Chinese state broadcasters like Xinhua spend a lot of money advertising their propaganda on Facebook. Some of that propaganda aimed at Americans explicitly attacked President Trump.

But China doesn’t need to resort to the crude measures of Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Facebook, like most of Big Tech, understands that its future rests with China’s Communist Party. Its growth potential and a sizable amount of its revenues are tied to better relations with China. And for that to happen, Hunter Biden’s dad has to win and President Trump has to lose. And so the social media monopoly led the way in censoring a damaging story about Hunter Biden.

Like Facebook, Twitter is blocked in China. And, like its much bigger social media brother, Twitter makes a lot of the ad revenue for its shaky business model from China.

"Helping Chinese companies expand their visibility overseas has been one of the fastest-growing businesses for Twitter," a China Twitter executive claimed.

The so-called China Export Market has been driving Twitter’s ad revenues.

And, also like Facebook, it’s not just products that are being exported. During the Communist dictatorship’s crackdown on Hong Kong, Xinhua ran ads on Twitter defending the repression.

This wasn’t too surprising considering that Twitter’s first China boss had worked for the People's Liberation Army and then on a joint venture with the Ministry of Public Security.

After Twitter was shamed into pulling the ads, the Communist dictatorship threatened to cut off its ad revenues. The message was clear. China was in control of Twitter’s cash flow.

That’s why Big Tech companies can be banned in China and still be at its mercy.

The Communist regime controls a huge portion of their revenues and their future. A Big Tech company with no pathway to expanding in China won’t attract the investors to grow. That’s how China can make or break any of the Big Tech businesses it keeps dangling on its little finger.

The real foreign election interference is coming from China. Big Tech companies are just doing the dirty work of the Communist dictatorship. China’s Communist leaders don’t even need to say anything. The message is clear. The only way forward for them is through Joe Biden.

That’s why Big Tech is far more driven to defeat President Trump and elect Joe Biden and its election interference has become much more blatant than it was in the previous election.

It’s not just about the politics, it’s also about the money.

Big Tech companies are selling out our election to China the way they have our jobs. And their election interference is reaching unprecedented heights as they function like a cartel.

Twitter not only banned a story about Hunter Biden’s China ties, it ruthlessly suspended, blocked, and shut down accounts belonging to government officials and journalists, even as it promoted a counter-story from the Washington Post: a paper owned by Amazon CEO Bezos.

The names of small children don't often appear on monuments, but Edward Baumler's name is there among those of many other children who were murdered in the massacre at Milford.

Edward was only 3 years old when he was shot to death by Dakota raiders. His brother, Heinrich, who died alongside him, killed with a tomahawk, was 7 years old.

Their baby sister was murdered with an arrow.

The Baumler children were among a dozen other children, and twice as many women, killed by the tribal child murderers and rapists who assaulted the immigrant German township of Milford.

Now a statue of President Lincoln was toppled in Portland and the University of Wisconsin-Madison student government voted to remove his statue because he punished the killers of Milford’s children and the killers of the other seventy children under 10 years old.

The massacre at Milford was not unique. Entire communities were wiped out by bands of Indians pretending they had come asking for water. Women and girls as young as twelve years old were raped, mutilated, and murdered. Little boys were beaten to death. Survivors hid in piles of corpses, awaiting death while surrounded by the dead bodies of their loved ones.

Minnesota settlements in the 1860s were a haven for German, Norwegian, and other immigrants who had fled political oppression and limited opportunities to come to America. They had little to do with the causes of the conflict between the Dakota and the United States.

The Dakota massacres were so easily accomplished because the German and Norwegian settlers, unlike the English settlers of another era, were unarmed and weren’t ready to fight. That’s why the “warriors” initially avoided attacking the local fort and instead went after them.

When Little Crow’s War ended, trials were held and 303 fighters were sentenced to be hanged.

President Lincoln was uncomfortable with the speedy trials and the large number of tribal fighters who would have been executed. Despite heavy political pressure from survivors and Minesottans, he personally decided to review the trial records for every single case.

Lincoln had been a talented lawyer, but he was in the middle of the Civil War, and there were 303 cases. The Union depended on the support of Minnesota, and of the German immigrant community, who played a major role in the fighting, to pursue and win the war with the South.

Nevertheless, Lincoln personally reviewed the trial records for each case, and commuted the sentences of 88% of the convicted tribal fighters, agreeing to hang only 39 of them.

The men whose hanging Lincoln approved were both the worst of the lot and those whose guilt he believed absolutely proven. He discarded those who had participated in the general fighting and selected those who had attacked small farms and committed atrocities against individuals, especially women and children. In this, he relied on the testimony of survivors and other fighters because the perpetrators had boasted of the crimes committed against women and children.

As he told the Senate, he had first ordered “the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females” and then those “proven to have participated in massacres”.

Even though Lincoln had been as liberal as he could possibly be and more, the hangings still weighed on him. He offered a last minute pardon to another of the condemned men, issued a special warning not to hang yet another man, and warned that the other prisoners should not be subjected to “unlawful violence”. And in the end, only 38 of the convicted were hanged.

Lincoln’s liberal approach met with outrage in Minnesota. 1862 was an election year and Republicans paid the price. Told that the election would have gone better without his pardons and commutations, he retorted, “I would not hang men for votes.”

Now in Portland, leftist rioters declared an “Indigenous Day of Rage" for Columbus Day and tore down a statue of President Lincoln, along with one of President Theodore Roosevelt, and smashed up the Oregon Historical Society.

They spray painted "Dakota 38" on the Lincoln statue in support of the child-killers and rapists.

A member of the University of Wisconsin-Madison's student government has claimed that President Lincoln's statue should be removed because "he ordered the largest execution on American soil: 38 Dakota peoples."

In truth, Lincoln limited the scope of the executions as much as possible. He resisted political pressure from survivors, the military, abolitionists, his own party, and the entire state. In the middle of the most decisive war the country had ever known, he personally spent time poring over transcripts of court records and commuted and pardoned every one he could.

But no amount of liberalism is ever enough for the radicals and racists who hate America.

The campaign against Lincoln isn’t new.

Even before the Emancipation Monument had been taken down in Boston, the 38 rapists and child killers had been used by leftists to attack Lincoln’s legacy. Black Lives Matter racists had vandalized statues of Lincoln in Buffalo, New York, Sioux City, Iowa, and other Democrat cities.

This isn’t about litigating a conflict that took place over a century and a half ago.

Little Crow’s War was typical of many such conflicts, the familiar factors, greed, rage, and radically different worldviews, were all there and led to deadly results. Lincoln, in equally familiar fashion, deplored the violence, but had trouble grappling with the reality of the military conflicts he was repeatedly thrust into, and unable to make the reforms that had caused him to run for public office, substituting for them with speeches and gestures that were both grand and hollow.

That was the tragedy of his career and of the entire awful era that claimed so many lives.

Lincoln was morally serious in the granular, but incapable of bringing that moral seriousness to bear on the tactics and resolution of the Civil War. The Dakota trials was typical of Lincoln at his most morally granular, weighing the lives of the accused men heavily while so many died elsewhere. But, looking at those court records, Lincoln felt a sense of control. In a massive conflict that was raging beyond any control, he could do justice to these particular lives.

The Lincoln statue vandals claim that they want “justice”. But that would include justice for Edward Baumler, his brother and his baby sister. And the many other children killed then.

It would include justice for a young mother who carried the decomposing corpse of her child for over two months, for children who watched their brothers and sisters beaten to death before their eyes, and for every horror and atrocity committed in Little Crow’s War.

Nearly entire families, many of them immigrant, were wiped out through treachery. Others left behind descendants that are keeping their stories and their fight for justice alive today.

History is complex. There was a great deal of unfairness in the collision between the settlers from the east and the west who had both crossed an ocean and found a bountiful new land.

The simplistic narrative pitting “indigenous people” against “settlers” is wrong and was always so. The German settlers massacred in Minnesota were the same sort of immigrants that leftists claim to advocate for today, and their killers were sometimes not even Indian, but like so many “Indians” today, descendants of settlers, slaves, and immigrants who could pass for Indian.

Unarmed immigrants, many of them fleeing persecution, came to the door for Indians asking for water. And then the butchery began. Men who called themselves warriors beat little boys to death, the bodies of little girls were found stripped naked, and that is what the Left celebrates.

That is what the toppling of Abraham Lincoln’s statues is about.

The topplers claim that President Lincoln represents injustice. They would rather not discuss the sort of justice they have in mind. The fallen children can speak to that as well as the fallen statues. They want to tear down Lincoln, and put up 38 rapists and child killers in his place.

The problem isn’t just the China Virus. It’s that we adopted the China Model to fight it.

Public health experts adopted China’s draconian lockdowns without knowing how well they really worked and in a country that, fortunately, lacks the power to truly enforce them.

China’s deceptiveness and lack of transparency meant that we did not know how well anything that the Communist dictatorship did to battle the virus that it spawned actually worked. Despite that, our public health experts, and those of most free countries, adopted the China Model.

We don’t know how well the China Model worked for the People’s Republic of China, but it failed in every free country that tried it. Lockdowns eventually gave way to reopenings and new waves of infection. This was always going to happen because not even the more socialist European countries have the police state or the compliant populations of a Communist dictatorship.

Desperate, the public health experts adopted China’s compulsive mask wearing, a cultural practice that predates the virus, as if wearing a few flimsy scraps of fiber would fix everything.

It hadn’t and it didn’t.

But by then the public health experts and the media that had touted them were moving fully into the scapegoat portion of the crisis. The China Model had failed, all that was left was shifting the blame to more conservative and traditional populations, and away from the cultural elites.

In New York City that meant falsely blaming Chassidic Jews for the second wave. From Maine to San Francisco, Democrat leaders and their media blamed conservative Christian gatherings. Their national counterparts loudly blamed President Trump for not wearing a mask all the time.

A New York Times headline captured the cynical broad spectrum cultural scapegoating with, "N.Y.C. Threatens Orthodox Jewish Areas on Virus, but Trump’s Impact Is Seen."

The uncomfortable truth was that the lockdowns had failed economically, socially, and medically.

Even blue states and cities were no longer able to carry the impossible economic burden much longer. The Black Lives Matter riots and the onset of summer broke the #StayHome taboos, and medically, the lockdowns had been useless efforts to meet a fake crisis of hospital overflows.

America, like too many other countries, put the experts in charge and they failed. Miserably.

Democrats claimed that they were superior because they were “listening to the science”. They weren’t listening to the science, which is not an oracle and does not give interviews. Instead, they were obeying a class of officials, some of them whom weren’t even medical professionals, who impressed elected officials and the public with statistical sleight of hand. And little else.

The entire lockdown to testing to reopening pipeline that we adopted wholesale was a typical bureaucratic and corporate exercise, complete with the illusion of metrics and goals, that suffered from all the typical problems of bureaucracy, academia, and corporate culture.

The system that determines reopenings and closings is an echo chamber that measures its own functioning while having little to do with the real world. Testing has become a cargo cult exercise that confuses the map with the world, and the virus with the spreadsheet. It gamifies fighting the pandemic while dragging entire countries into an imaginary world based on its invented rules.

When the media reports a rise or decrease in positive tests, it’s treated as if it’s an assessment of the virus, rather than an incomplete data point that measures its own measurements.

The daily coronavirus reports have become the equivalent of Soviet harvest reports. They sound impressive, mean absolutely nothing, and are the pet obsession of a bureaucracy that not only has no understanding of the problem, but its grip on power has made it the problem.

The smarter medical professionals understand that the theories have failed, while the administrators who put the theories into practice confused their system with science. The politicians listen to the administrators and when they tell us to trust the science, they mean the bureaucracy. The medical professionals can’t and won’t backtrack now. It’s too late.

The best and brightest spent the worst part of a year shuffling rationales like a gambler’s trick deck, wrecked the economy, and sent tens of thousands of infected patients into nursing homes to infect the residents, accounting for at least a third of the national coronavirus death toll.

Like most national leadership disasters, it was a combination of misjudgement, understandable mistakes, tragic errors, and acts of incomprehensible stupidity or unmitigated evil.

A lot of people are dead, a lot more are out of work, and the problem is far from solved. Someone will have to be blamed and they certainly don’t want it to be themselves.

The lockdown and the rule of the public health experts has become too big to fail.

Mistakes were made, as the saying goes. Projections were built based on bad and incomplete data. Everyone followed the path of least resistance by doing what China had done. And everyone in the system, from the experts to the administrators to the politicians to the media, is complicit. That makes the massive error the world has been living under too big to fail.

There are only two choices left. Admit the magnitude of the mistake or find someone to blame.

The establishment that touted the experts is blaming its political and cultural enemies, the people it has been priming the public to see as strange, selfish, irrational, and dangerous. And also the very people who have been the loudest opponents of lockdown culture.

Given a choice between admitting the system was wrong or blaming the system’s failure on its critics, the establishment has followed the same pattern as every authoritarian leftist regime.

The lockdowns didn’t fail, they were failed by conservative Christians and Jews, by President Trump, by people who were too selfish to give up their lives, businesses, and religion for the greater good. And if only they had, the coronavirus would be gone and everything would be fine.

The China Model promised something that its proponents quickly knew it couldn’t deliver. Everything since then has been a scam to cover up the original quackery and hackery. The louder they blame critics and dissenters for the failure, the more obvious the coverup becomes.

Lockdown culture needs patsies to take the fall for why it didn’t work. Like every leftist social and economic experiment, its defenders are left to argue that it was never properly tried. If only it weren’t for Trump, and for the dissenters, for the Chassidic Jews in Brooklyn, for Christian weddings in San Francisco and Maine, for gyms, bars, and beaches, it would have worked.

Yet the simple truth is that the China Model hasn’t worked in any country that isn’t China.

It doesn’t matter who the leader or the ruling party are, whether the public wore or didn’t wear masks, the resurgence is not a political phenomenon, science doesn’t speak, and the virus doesn’t listen. But of all the countries in the world, America was especially ill-fitted to adopt an authoritarian public health model. The sheer size, openness, and diversity of the country makes us unique and should have made it abundantly obvious that no such system would work.

Anyone but an expert or administrator would have understood that these plans were doomed.

But what the system failed to accomplish in battling the virus, it made up for by providing the leadership that had enacted it with a wonderful opportunity to settle its political scores.

The lockdowns don’t exist anymore as a prophylactic policy, but as a political vendetta. The more people die, the more businesses are ruined, the more everyone suffers, the more vicious the vendetta grows as it hunts for scapegoats, political and religious, for the great error of terror.

Leftist regimes turn to political terror as their policies fail. When the idealism dies, and the theories fall apart, the organizers pursue misery for the sake of misery, using fear, deprivation, and hate to maintain their grip on power while crushing the political threats to their rule.

The rule of the experts isn’t fighting the virus. It has become the virus.

Every year, Shiite Muslims in Flushing, Queens conduct the Arbaeen, a procession in honor of Mohammed's grandson whose death at the hands of a Sunni caliph marked the pivotal break between Shiites and Sunnis, slapping their faces and chests for their beheaded Imam Hussein.

Queens now has a large Muslim population, and regular fall processions of wailing crowds.

Black Lives Matter 757, a Virginia ally of the national racist hate group, has spent four months trying to send a black man to jail.

Even though the racist organization had demanded the dismantling of the Virginia Beach Police and its judicial system, it had dedicated its Shut Down the Oceanfront 2.0 rally on Independence Day to demanding that the police, whom they wanted to eliminate, arrest Manny Wilder.

“We are calling for Hampton Police & Virginia Beach Police to get this menace off of the streets IMMEDIATELY!” the hate group had posted.

“I have to say to the Orthodox community tomorrow, ‘If you’re not willing to live with these rules, then I’m going to close the synagogues.’” Governor Andrew Cuomo told religious Jews.

His basis for the decree was a photo of mourners who weren’t practicing social distancing at a funeral. But the photo of a crowd of Orthodox Jews on Cuomo’s slide was from 2006.

It was a very different message than Cuomo’s condemnation of bigotry when he had insisted, “There is zero evidence that people of Asian descent bear any additional responsibility for the transmission of the coronavirus." The new message is, don’t blame the Asians, blame the Jews.

They did go to a funeral in 2006.

The media is dying. Its business model is defunct. Its bias has alienated most of the country. In the latest Pew survey, the only group that still trusts the media are Democrats.

And while so many millions are out of work, Democrats are bailing out the media.

The wave of consolidations and bankruptcies is sweeping like a fire through major papers. Cable news will be a casualty of demographics and the end of bundling. The end of network television is less than a decade away. Brand names like CNN and MSNBC will soon be where Time, Newsweek, and other news magazines ended up once subscriptions collapsed.

The media is dying, but it’s not about to die gracefully. It just needs to find money. Lots of it.

Big Tech billionaires have bought classic newspapers and magazines like Time, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, but those are vanity projects and even Jeff Bezos doesn’t have enough money to subsidize the entire ossified infrastructure of the media.

But the only people who have more money than the Amazon CEO are the American people.

The media’s Plan A has been sponging off Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook, pressuring them to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into its operations. Its Plan B is blurring the line between lefty activist non-profits and its newsrooms with organizations like Report for America being funded by Facebook and Google to embed activists into local newspapers.

Is that going to pay the media’s bills? No. That’s why there’s Plan C. And Plan C is you.

H.R. 7640: The Local Journalism Sustainability Act was introduced in Congress, backed by a coalition that includes Report for America and the National Newspaper Association, and would offer tax credits for newspaper subscriptions and tax credits for paying the salaries of the radical activists working there. There's also a $5,000 tax credit for advertising in newspapers.

At a time when millions of Americans are out of work, when families are faced with losing their homes and businesses, Democrats have decided that they should aggressively subsidize a dying industry at the expense of everyone else whose jobs are seen as “non-essential”.

The countless stores, gyms, bars, salons, and other small businesses going out of business in the epidemic of Democrat lockdowns and lootings could use this kind of bailout. But the Democrats insist that their media messaging operations are vital and should be subsidized.

While Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, who introduced the bill, claims that it will fund “local newspapers”, those local newspapers are largely owned by national operations and hedge funds. While actual local businesses go out of business, Democrats are proposing a bailout for media investors.

Rep. Kirkpatrick’s press release touts support from from the News Media Alliance whose board is stacked with the heads of McClatchy and USA Today, huge national chains with a combined thousands of papers, not to mention the CFO of the New York Times, and a VP at the Washington Post. Are these the local small businesses Democrats want to subsidize?

The Local Journalism Sustainability Act has over 40 Democrat sponsors and nearly 20 Republican sponsors. Democrat sponsors include some of the House's most extreme figures like Rep. Ted Lieu, Rep. Raul Grijalva, Rep. Eric Swalwell, and Rep. Andre Carson.

H.R. 7640 would be an outrage at any time, it’s a particular outrage when so many Americans are out of work and so many small businesses are going under that Democrats and some Republicans want to provide a $250 tax credit for newspaper subscriptions, a tax credit covering half of $50,000 salaries for media hacks, and $5,000 credits for advertising in newspapers.

Companies that own dozens, hundreds, and thousands of papers are lobbying Congress.

They keep claiming that the bill will help save “local journalism”. But how does the Local Journalism Sustainability Act define local journalism? Not based on the paper, but the readers. As long as 51% of the paper’s readers live in the same state, it’s considered a local paper. Even if the paper is a subsidiary of a national chain whose real headquarters is in New York or D.C.

Or alternatively, they live within 200 miles of each other. Depending on how you measure, Washington Post readers in New York and New York Times readers in D.C. would be “local”.

That’s some “local” journalism. And it’s no accident that it was written this way.

There’s nothing local about this bailout. It will mostly go to subsidize the huge newspaper chains that are lobbying for it, while bribing businesses and readers to fund their failed business model.

Even while Democrats are destroying businesses with viable business models, they’re trying to keep the media alive by exclusively offering tax credits for their political allies.

It’s sleazy, it’s slimy, and it’s just the beginning.

Democrat organizations like Acronym’s Courier Newsroom have been setting up fake local papers while Report for America has been hollowing out papers by embedding radical activists into newsrooms. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act is testing the business model for converting the media into a bunch of political non-profits backed by taxpayers and lefty donors.

Beyond media associations, backing for the Local Journalism Sustainability Act comes from Report for America, and the American Journalism Project, which is advocating the transformation of the media to a non-profit model. Report for America is an initiative of the GroundTruth Project which is backed by the Knight Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation is a leading backer of Black Lives Matter.

While these donors already back a network of radical messaging operations, proposals like the Local Journalism Sustainability Act allow the media to ease into the transition by having it both ways, maintaining corporate ownership, while having their operations subsidized by tax credits.

As the Left sets up new complex interplays between corporate media and its non-profits, the line between journalism and political advocacy blurs into a strange twilight zone in which non-profits subsidize media operations and taxpayers subsidize corporate chains as if they were non-profits, while creating something that looks very much like a state media operation.

The internet has been slowly digesting the separate parts of the media, and it doesn’t pay the bills. The ads and subscriptions that funded local newspapers were wiped out by the internet. Streaming dooms cable channels and local news, leaving behind a lot of online video. But even digital media is being crushed by social media. Vox, Vice, the Huffington Post, and all the digital lefty outlets were hit with layoffs after facing the impossibility of actually turning a profit.

The media can’t survive on its own terms. Its business model is defunct. Its shakedown strategies aimed at Google and Facebook have silenced countless conservative voices, while pushing social media to spam its content, but won’t preserve the media as a viable institution. The hedge funds and private equity firms that own the media will cut costs, consolidate, and dump. The tech and communications firms that come into possession of media outlets will shrink and then dispose of them. That doesn’t mean that the media will die. It will ‘Pravdaize’.

CNN, MSNBC, and the Huffington Post will be deemed “essential” forms of journalism that must be protected by subsidizing their operations, much as newspapers would be subsidized.

The media will become a public institution. Its funding will come from taxpayers in a thousand different ways and the Local Journalism Sustainability Act is the least of it. Media activists have been cooking up a large package of tax credits, subsidies, law changes, tax code restructurings, and assorted proposals to transform the media from corporate properties into state media.

Imagine PBS and NPR multiplied by a million.

Congress should not be bailing out media tycoons while Americans go hungry. If Americans want local papers, they can buy them. And if they aren’t, maybe it’s time that the big chains asked why they’re losing subscribers and why Americans aren’t buying what they’re selling.

A majority of Americans don’t like and don’t trust the media. They’ve divested from it. The Local Journalism Sustainability Act wants to bribe Americans to read the paper with their own money.

A better idea might be to have the media pay its taxes and let Americans keep their money.

In June, Speaker Pelosi called for a national mask mandate forcing everyone in the country to wear masks. That same month, she tweeted a photo of a Congressional meeting with the brother of George Floyd, the ex-con whose death after a struggle with police led to nationwide race riots, and numerous injuries and deaths, while her nose and mouth remained uncovered.

In July, she ordered that any member of the House not wearing a mask be forcibly removed.

The media had spent the summer touting her “fashionable” and fashionably pricey masks from a small boutique in Virginia using fabric imported from Venice as the makings of a “style icon”.

In September, Pelosi was caught in a salon that was supposed to be closed without a mask.

The biggest mask hypocrites wear masks. As long as they think the cameras are on and people are paying attention. The moment they’re not signaling their virtue, the masks come off.

"Why don’t the NYPD wear masks? What signal does that send?" Governor Cuomo ranted.

The New York governor, whose order forcing nursing homes to accept coronavirus patients may have killed as many as 11,000 seniors, had previously accused President Trump of being "a co-conspirator of COVID" for not wearing a mask.

Meanwhile, at the height of the pandemic in New York, Cuomo signed an anti-police bill, closely flanked by Al Sharpton and police opponents, with nobody wearing masks.

“If you leave home, you should wear a mask," Mayor Bowser announced. “This means, if you’re waiting for a bus, you must have on a mask. If you are ordering food at a restaurant, you must have on a mask. If you’re sitting in a cubicle in an open office, you must have on a mask.”

The only people exempted from the Washington D.C. mask mandate were children under 3 and government employees.

“It's simple: Wear a mask. Save lives. Stop the spread,” Bowser insisted. Except it wasn’t.

Even though Bowser’s order had exempted district and federal employees, she dispatched investigators to the Trump International Hotel over a photo of President Trump not wearing a mask.

Meanwhile Bowser could be seen at numerous press conferences not wearing a mask.

At a George Floyd rally, Bowser was closely surrounded by black nationalist activists wearing masks, while she had her mask down.

In Oregon, Governor Kate Brown rolled out a statewide mask mandate, declaring, “The choices every single one of us make in the coming days matter.” Then she warned, “If you want your local shops and restaurants to stay open, then wear a face covering when out in public.”

A few months later, she, her family, and her security detail were caught in public without masks.

Senator Dianne Feinstein had demanded that the FAA issue "mandatory mask requirements for all aviation employees and travelers". Some months later, she was photographed walking through an airport without a mask on.

Governor Northam implemented a statewide mask mandate in Virginia, and was photographed without a mask, and in close proximity to people, while at the beach.

“Hypocrisy has become the hallmark of Ralph Northam and his administration," Republican legislators stated in a press release.

The Democrat politician explained that he had left his mask in the car.

This sort of behavior by politicians has become so commonplace that it’s almost hardly worth commenting on. Politicians scold the public about wearing masks and then get unmasked.

The media has repeatedly been caught pulling the same stunt.

CNN's Jim Acosta complained that President Trump wasn't wearing a mask, only to be caught not wearing a mask. The same thing happened with CNN's White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins. An MSNBC reporter, pretending to be outraged that no one at Lake Geneva on Memorial Day was wearing masks, had his shot interrupted when a passerby noted that the cameraman and half the MSNBC crew weren't wearing them either.

Mask virtue signaling and outrage happens in front of the cameras. It’s easy to spot plenty of talking heads and their crews without masks when the cameras turn the other way.

Public health officials, from Dr. Fauci down to state officials have been caught at it too.

Masks are inconvenient and unpleasant. But they’ve also become a political and social symbol. Like most leftist social statements, it’s important to be seen practicing it, rather than to actually practice it. Masks, like going vegan, driving a Prius, or issuing a statement about this country’s structural racism, show that you are morally superior because you “care” about an issue.

And showing that you care means that you don’t actually have to care except when showing off.

Democrat governors imposed lockdowns on other people while they flagrantly violated them.

Governor Pritzker preached to Illinois residents about the importance of "staying home for the good of each other and the good of our state" while his family traveled to their horse farms and mansions in Florida and Wisconsin, and while workers from Chicago labored to construct his mansion in Wisconsin.

Why should the relationship of Democrat politicians to masks be any different than their behavior in getting haircuts and opening up the salons they closed, taking the vacations they banned for others, and eating at restaurants that people in their states aren’t allowed to do.

Governor Whitmer had banned just about everything in Michigan and then her husband wanted a boat for a Memorial Day jaunt, and inquired, "I am the husband to the governor; will this make a difference?"

Obviously.

People are used to political hypocrisy from politicians, but the politicization of everything has made political hypocrisy as ubiquitous as any other vice masquerading as a virtue. In a society that is losing its religion, politics offers identity and moral values to an irreligious country.

And the mask is one of the caring facades that the cult of correctness and awareness wears.

The difference between virtue and virtue signaling is the same as the contrast between a face and a mask. The former conveys the truth about a person, while the latter seeks to mask it.

In a society where virtue is what you wear, rather than what you are, the masks are everywhere.

Masks, like virtue signaling, can be put on and taken off again. They don’t require any meaningful commitment. Like the t-shirt with a slogan about the environment or a bumper sticker for a political cause, they can be easily removed once the virtue has been signaled.

Virtue is inconvenient to people who lack it. That’s why virtue signaling is better. And it’s also why those who preach about masks the loudest are the biggest mask hypocrites. Virtue signaling is for self-righteous hypocrites who want the facade of morality without the morals.

A virtue that they remove at will, that is visible, but can be taken off when no one who matters is looking, is the culmination of a morality that confuses caring with spreading awareness. Putting on a mask says that you care, when you really don’t, and it lets you take it off when the camera isn’t on you, when you’re among friends, and when the point that you care has been made.

Democrat politicians aren’t wearing masks because they care, but because they want to reduce caring to wearing a mask, so that no one asks uncomfortable questions about the thousands of elderly people who died in nursing homes that they forced to accept coronavirus patients.

When you peek behind the mask of caring, a murderous amorality is there looking back at you.

Saving lives is hard. Wearing a mask for the cameras is easy. The politicians and the people who spend the most time trying to confuse caring and masking don’t care about human life.

The tragic truth that the Greeks knew well is that the mask of virtue is no substitute for virtue.