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How The National Review Sold Its Soul to Google – by Emerald Robinson – Emerald Robinson’s The Right Way

Posted by M. C. on September 9, 2021

So to sum up Jonah’s defense: “first, it’s absurd to think that any money changed hands, but yes money did change hands, but nobody could possible think that such money influenced what we wrote!” The problem for Jonah Goldberg was that, actually, I did have an insider at his magazine who confirmed that National Review editors declined to publish anti-Google articles. I sent Jonah a note telling him that “the problem for you is that I do have evidence.” I added that my source would be happy to come forward and publicly identify himself if Goldberg or anyone else at the National Review wanted to continue denying the story.

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/how-the-national-review-sold-its

Emerald Robinson

There were rumors in the summer of 2018 that an audiotape was circulating that would send shockwaves through the think tanks of Washington and the conservative intellectual movement in particular. A top Google executive had been recorded telling his fellow employees that Google generously donated to conservative think tanks and magazines to dampen criticism of their anti-conservative bias. In essence, Google was buying off Conservatism Inc. and the GOP establishment to stay silent while Google monitored, harassed, and excluded Trump supporters. If true, the tape sounded like a smoking gun: incontrovertible evidence of the corruption and double-dealing of Conservatism Inc. that would permanently discredit it with Republican voters.

I was told that the tape had been offered as an exclusive to the Wall Street Journal. Months went by, and nothing happened. (There were rumors during that time that Big Tech lobbyists were trying very hard to get the Wall Street Journal to kill the story.) Then I began to get a series of messages from various anonymous sources that the organizations that were guilty of taking Google money to stay silent included: the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), the Cato Institute, CPAC, the Weekly Standard and the National Review. (A weak article appeared on September 27th by John McKinnon in the Wall Street Journal but it hardly mentioned the tape or its implications.) This was, needless to say, a huge story: was it possible that the entire conservative intellectual movement was being bought off by Big Tech companies?

Finally, I was approached by an insider at one of the think tanks who confirmed the main details. You could say I broke the story (since the Wall Street Journal piece had really buried it) on Twitter on October 30th, by saying:

BREAKING: Source tells me that NeverTrumper mags took cash from top Internet company to suppress stories of bias against conservatives & Trump supporters. Audio recording of top tech executive explaining strategy has leaked to major newspaper.

My hope was that it would shake the Wall Street Journal out of its lethargy: either publish the contents of the tape or let someone else use it. It would also sow panic among the guilty — who would want to get out ahead of the story in order to spin it. So it was not surprising that one of the first people to attack my story was Jonah Goldberg, one of the chief editors of the National Review. (It’s important to note that my tweet had not named his magazine as one of the guilty parties.) Goldberg was dismissive of my reporting on Twitter: “LOL. Love the idea you have sources.”

Jonah Goldberg had, once again, given himself up at the first sign of shooting.

On December 10th, Wired magazine ran a big piece describing the leaked Google audio tape and its significance:

The recording also offers candid insight into Google’s efforts to stop or water down two then-pending pieces of legislation, most notably a bill aimed at inhibiting sex trafficking that also removed some protections shielding internet companies from liability for the content on their platforms. “We’ve worked really hard behind the scenes for the last nine months to try to modify that bill, to slow it down,” said [Google Director of U.S. Policy] Kovacevich.

On December 13th, Allum Bokhari at Breitbart also ran a piece which did not mince words about what Google’s money had paid for:

Audio recordings obtained by Wired reveal that Google cooperates with and funds a range of establishment conservatives in D.C. that help it fend off scrutiny and oversight from politicians. The organizations named in Wired’s report are the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), and the Cato Institute. […]

One of the Google-funded think tanks had its pro-Google op-ed published by National Review. Now the story had legs. It was running on multiple outlets, and it was taking off. It also looked like none of the guilty organizations were going to acknowledge the story or issue a public statement about it. They were so high and mighty and corrupt that they were going to stay silent to weather the storm of bad publicity. So on December 14th, I ran another tweet to bait the line:

It looks like conservative mag National Review was taking Google cash too. To suppress conservative speech on social media. Was this something that @NRO donors & contributors knew was taking place? Let’s ask @JonahNRO @DavidAFrench & others today.

Do I even need to tell you who swallowed the hook and started screaming? On December 18th, Goldberg did another piece attacking me and the Google story. This article was called “Emerald Robinson’s Stupid Lies” and it opened with the usual “kill the messenger” non-denials:

One of the problems with the political moment we’re in is that there are powerful incentives for people to be stupid and dishonest. The ingredients of this imperfect storm include: a populist climate where nearly all institutions are distrusted, appeals to feelings of persecution will be richly rewarded, political principle for many people is measured by blind loyalty to (or hatred for) a particular personality, stirring controversy is valued regardless of whether there is sufficient evidence to support an allegation or clickbaity innuendo, and conspiracy is counted as courage. All of this leads to a kind of socially constructed garbage heap that will either attract flies, vermin, and other scavengers, or turn people into them.

This was the story of Milo before his self-immolation. This is the story of Infowars and Gateway Pundit. And it is the story of the failed-actress-turned-faux journalist Emerald Robinson.

Now, there are only two possibilities here: Either Robinson is an idiot or she thinks her fans are.

The sum total of her “evidence” that NR took Google cash to suppress conservative views comes from a Breitbart story about a Wired story. Here’s the gist: Google gave money to CEI, where Iain Murray works. Iain wrote a piece for us in which he disagreed with a New York Times writer who thinks the government should break up big tech firms, including Google. And . . . that’s it.

You see, dear reader, it’s not that the editors of the magazine got caught taking dirty money to hurt their fellow conservatives, it’s the crazy people who report this stuff! This opening amounted to almost a blanket denial that the National Review had actually taken any Google money at all. Realizing at some point that this was, in fact, not true, Goldberg slipped into the second to last paragraph the following confession:

I learned that Google gave some money to the National Review Institute for the Buckley Prize dinner only because I asked about it this week (something Robinson could have learned were she an actual reporter of some kind, rather than a MAGA infomercial hostess). But that just proves my point: No one is telling anyone what to write or not write. This is a joke.

So to sum up Jonah’s defense: “first, it’s absurd to think that any money changed hands, but yes money did change hands, but nobody could possible think that such money influenced what we wrote!” The problem for Jonah Goldberg was that, actually, I did have an insider at his magazine who confirmed that National Review editors declined to publish anti-Google articles. I sent Jonah a note telling him that “the problem for you is that I do have evidence.” I added that my source would be happy to come forward and publicly identify himself if Goldberg or anyone else at the National Review wanted to continue denying the story.

Guess how many people from the National Review contacted me to do so? Zero. Zilch. Nada.

So I had basically caught the editors of the National Review in bald-faced lies about taking money from Big Tech companies like Google to remain silent while those same Big Tech companies censored and de-platformed other conservatives. This was, of course, an unconscionable betrayal for The Flagship Conservative Magazine to commit against its own readers — but they did it anyway. Meanwhile, I was hearing from sources close to the National Review Board that the loss of donors and subscribers was so serious that drastic action would need to be taken. (The magazine had lost about half of its subscriber base in less than two years.) The board was also adamant that Jonah Goldberg and David French were the main culprits behind the astonishing collapse of the magazine’s influence, and that they needed to go. Everybody wanted them off the masthead in order to survive.

A month later, Hayes and Goldberg announced the launch of their nameless magazine with no investors by sending out tweets on their personal accounts that people could get “more info” by emailing them at HayesGoldberg2019@gmail.com. A few weeks later, they were soliciting strangers to give them $1,500 a year to get a newsletter.

In February 2019, Axios ran a story about “a new conservative media company” (that didn’t even have a name!) with the news that Jonah Goldberg would be “leaving the National Review in the coming months” to join forces with the recently fired Stephen Hayes. Axios added that Goldberg and Hayes were “seeking investors.” It also contained the curious reminder that he would remain at some offshoot called the National Review Institute. In other words, the National Review was happy to pay Goldberg from its sister organization for the privilege of not publishing him anymore at the National Review!

You just can’t quantify that kind of popularity.

Goldberg was very touchy about the idea that he had been removed from the magazine. He wanted people to know that it was his idea to leave the National Review to fax out a newsletter from his basement (with no name and no money) along with Stephen Hayes. The Drag Queen Story Hour enthusiast David French even tweeted: “There’s news. There’s fake news. Then there’s the absolute premium-grade BS I’m reading on MAGA Twitter and elsewhere claiming that Jonah Goldberg was pushed out of National Review. Completely, totally false.”

What made this so funny was that David French was himself removed from the magazine a few months later! Where did he go? Well, he went to work for Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes and their little newsletter of course. The three of them were now free to plummet into new depths of unpopularity together. The most intellectually bankrupt and vitriolic of the Never Trumpers had finally been thrown into the dustbin of history.

Did the editors of the National Review learn anything from this debacle? Of course not. The feckless Rich Lowry recently handed the magazine over to the world’s only living Evan McMullin voter Ramesh Ponnuru — who was absolutely nobody’s choice to steer the magazine back to popularity. (If anything, Ramesh Ponnuru represents an even greater slide into snide effeminacy than Lowry, and few thought that was possible.) Defeat seems to be the brand for these boys. In any culture war, Rich Lowry and the gang have always been the first to stand athwart history, crying: “We surrender first!” They’ve been so weak and defeatist during the Trump years that a year’s subscription to the magazine could be marketed as an estrogen supplement.

Meanwhile the funding of the magazine now relies even more heavily on Big Tech money: the back page of the June 1, 2021 issue was a full-page Facebook ad. Inside the same issue, in case you missed the point, there was a two-page ad from Google. The National Review didn’t bother trying to win back its old subscribers by becoming more conservative. Instead, it flipped them a giant middle finger. This final insult might lead us to think the unthinkable about the soy boys who sank Buckley’s flagship. The same feeble metrosexuals who attacked the Covington Catholic boys, and printed pro-Jeffrey Epstein articles, and tried to discredit Carter Page, and pushed the Russia Hoax might not actually be conservatives after all. Their role does not seem to be halting the Left. Their role seems to be: pretending to be conservative in order to persuade actual conservatives to lose gracefully to the Left.

Conservatives must finally recognize something that’s very depressing and very important: the conservative intellectual movement in America didn’t just fail. It aided and abetted the Left for money. The Left bought off the Right’s leading conservative intellectuals. And its think tanks. And its “flagship” magazines. This is not hyperbole or conjecture. I’ve got the receipts. Until conservatives understand the depth and breadth of that betrayal, they won’t have any chance of rebuilding that movement out of the ashes any time soon.

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Meet Jigsaw: Google’s Intelligence Agency – OffGuardian

Posted by M. C. on July 10, 2021

We cannot opt out of mass government surveillance. But we knowingly consent to most forms of “privatized” intelligence gathering.

Take the first step and revoke your consent.

https://off-guardian.org/2021/07/08/meet-jigsaw-googles-intelligence-agency/

It’s no secret that Google regularly collaborates with intelligence agencies. They are a known NSA subcontractor. They launched Google Earth using a CIA spy satellite network.

Their executive suite’s revolving door with DARPA is well known.

In the wake of the January 6th Capitol event, the FBI used Google location data to pwn attendants with nothing more than a valid Gmail address and smartphone login:

The police were then able to obtain an Instagram registration email, which turned out to be a Gmail address. With that in hand, investigators ordered Google to provide any location data they had on that Gmail user, which the tech giant duly provided after it identified a linked smartphone.

A stark reminder that carrying a tracking device with a Google login, even with the SIM card removed, can mean the difference between freedom and an orange jumpsuit in the Great Reset era.

But Google also operates its own internal intelligence agency – complete with foreign regime-change operations that are now being applied domestically.

And they’ve been doing so without repercussion for over a decade.

From Google Ideas to Google Regime Change

See the rest here

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How Facebook Turned its Market Success Into a Culture War on America | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on June 5, 2021

Those who dislike these companies don’t like to hear it, but this is the reality: Google, MLB, Facebook, et al. are powerful companies not simply because they are big and enjoy some regulatory advantages. They’re winning mostly because the general public either actively likes them or at least can’t be bothered with finding alternatives. 

https://mises.org/wire/how-facebook-turned-its-market-success-culture-war-america

Ryan McMaken

In twenty-first-century America, millions of Americans—Christians and social conservatives especially—are finding that the nation’s most influential institutions appear to be implacably hostile toward them.

These institutions include universities, public schools, the news media, and government bureaucracies. Moreover, corporate America has increasingly embraced a posture of hostility toward groups considered to be “right wing” or conservative.

Recent examples are numerous, to say the least. Major League Baseball, for instance, recently moved its all-star game out of the state of Georgia with the explicit purpose of punishing voters and policymakers who supported policies MLB didn’t like. These “objectionable” policies were mostly supported by conservatives. Meanwhile, YouTube—owned by Google—bans content creators who express opinions Google’s employees and leaders disagree with. These opinions are usually ones we would consider to be “conservative” or at least “anti-Leftist.” Twitter and Facebook employ a similar bias when actively intervening to ban users and opinions deemed unacceptable by corporate personnel.

In other words, corporate power is being used to wage ideological battles far beyond the usual issues of minimizing the firm’s tax burden or avoiding regulatory compliance costs. Corporate America has chosen a side in the culture war.

This evolution from market entrepreneur to exploitive plutocrat illustrates a problem with the interventionist state in a mixed economy: economic power tends to be converted into political power. Moreover, so long as consumers continue to pour resources into powerful firms through the marketplace, these firms’ exploitation of competitors, taxpayers, and ideological adversaries is likely to continue. 

Market Democracy: How Firms Get Rich in the Marketplace

Ludwig von Mises understood that in a market economy, the firms that are most successful are those that succeed in the “democracy” of the marketplace. Mises describes this “consumers’ democracy” in Socialism:

When we call a capitalist society a consumers’ democracy we mean that the power to dispose of the means of production, which belongs to the entrepreneurs and capitalists, can only be acquired by means of the consumers’ ballot, held daily in the marketplace.

In other words, the money goes where the consumers want it to go, as directed in their daily spending decisions in the marketplace. Those business owners who convince consumers to willingly hand over their money are the business owners who end up controlling the most resources.

This is a frequent theme in Mises’s writing. If we imagine the market economy as an immense seafaring ship, Mises notes, the capitalists are only the “steersmen” of the ship. If they wish to succeed, the capitalists must ultimately take orders from the consumers, who are the real captains of the ship.

This is generally the case with most of the firms which we today find are increasingly and openly political and ideological. Firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the like became megacompanies by delivering a product or service that a large number of people freely chose to use.

This doesn’t make these firms superior on a moral or philosophical level, of course. Just because a firm is good at delivering what the consumers want doesn’t mean it is spiritually edifying, or morally upright. These firms’ success merely means people like to use their products. The end. That’s it.

After all, we can point to plenty of successful enterprises that aren’t exactly laying the foundation for a virtuous and prosperous commonwealth. Pornographers, for instance, make boatloads of money. They’re very popular with consumers. At least with male ones. This doesn’t make pornographers national treasures. 

Corporate Welfare Is Only Part of the Picture

But it is hard to deny that firms like Google and Facebook got to where they are by winning “votes” in the “consumers’ democracy.” Nonetheless, some critics of today’s corporate jihad against ideological adversaries insist that these firms are only successful because they are “monopolies” or that they only gained so much market share by dirty tricks and corporate welfare schemes.

These claims are generally unconvincing. Certainly, these firms are today able to gain some advantages by manipulating the policy environment through lobbying and other political efforts. Yes, these firms have likely managed to increase profits and diminish competition through intellectual property laws, through tax breaks, and through regulations that favor large firms over small firms. These are bad things, and these firms increase the profitability of their companies at the expense of both competitors and taxpayers. 

[Read More: “The Plutocrats of Wall Street and Silicon Valley Are Scamming America“ by Ryan McMaken]

But the primary and most fundamental reasons that these firms became large and powerful in the first place is the fact they were skilled at the game of market democracy. Direct competitors to Google, Facebook, and Twitter exist. Few people choose to use them. There are plenty of things to watch on television other than Major League Baseball—many of which are a lot less boring than baseball. Yet countless consumers continue to watch MLB games anyway. 

Those who dislike these companies don’t like to hear it, but this is the reality: Google, MLB, Facebook, et al. are powerful companies not simply because they are big and enjoy some regulatory advantages. They’re winning mostly because the general public either actively likes them or at least can’t be bothered with finding alternatives. 

If we are upset with the fact that these companies command immense amounts of resources and can use these resources for political purposes, it’s easy to find who is most to blame: the American consumer. 

The Losing Side of Market Democracy

In a system of market democracy, the consumers chose the winners. But since we live in a mixed economy and under an interventionist regime, those winners are now using their resources to crush their ideological opponents. 

This is very frustrating to those on the receiving end of this corporate political aggression, of course. Perhaps even more discouraging is the fact that everywhere they look, conservatives and Christians see relatives and neighbors continue to voluntarily pour their own money and resources into the firms that are avowed enemies of anyone skeptical of today’s corporate ideological zeitgeist. No matter how hostile or condescending these firms and their leaders get, hundreds of millions of consumers of all ideological bents just keep slavishly logging in to Facebook and watching many hours of videos on YouTube.

What Can Be Done?

For those who keep losing to their ideological opponents in the marketplace, this raises a question: If a large number of consumers insist on supporting firms and CEOs who are openly hostile to a certain segment of the population, what can be done?

There are three possibilities:

  1. Use the regime’s coercive power punitively against one’s ideological opponents.
  2. Use regime power to strip opponents of any advantages they may enjoy in terms of monopoly power, regulatory favors, tax advantages, and political influence.
  3. Deprive these ideological opponents of resources by successfully competing against them in the democracy of the marketplace.

The first option is the most attractive to the average American playing a shortsighted game. It’s the usual political “solution”: I see a problem, so let’s pass new government regulations to “fix” things! In this case, we might envision laws designed to make social media companies be “fair.” Of course, we’ve seen attempts at making media be “fair” before. Federal regulators spent much of the twentieth century regulating “fairness” in media. To see the success of that effort, we need only look at most TV news. Regulation fails again and again. Moreover, it only paves the way for larger amounts of bureaucratic control over the lives of ordinary Americans. When the other side again gains control of the regime, these regulatory powers are then used against those who naïvely thought the regulations would fix anything.

The second option is more promising. It is always a good idea to seek out and destroy any regulations, statutes, or taxes that favor large firms over smaller firms and potential competitors. This means abolishing any tax “incentives” that can be accessed by large firms, but not by smaller firms. It means slashing the duration of patents and other forms of intellectual property. It means ending any special legal protections enjoyed by these firms—such as those in so-called Section 230. 

But even with all those legal advantages and tricks removed, these firms may continue to be successful and influential firms for many years to come. So long as these firms enjoy the votes of consumers in the “consumers’ democracy” the firms are likely to be profitable. The firms will consequently have access to immense amounts of resources, with which they can buy political influence and promote their own vision for American society. 

Only when these firms face real competition from successful competitors—or when consumers change their buying habits in other ways—will the situation change. That’s bound to happen eventually. But for those who fear the political clout of these corporate behemoths, it’s imperative to speed up the process. Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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3 Ways the Tech Oligarchs’ New Subsidy Is Ripping You Off | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2021

These companies want “robust funding”—provided by taxpayers, of course—for the Act’s programs which, the Coalition says, “would help America build … additional capacity” for semiconductor production.

In other words, America’s tech oligarchs want to buy subsidized semiconductors, and they think regular people should pay for it all while also subsidizing research.

https://mises.org/wire/3-ways-tech-oligarchs-new-subsidy-ripping-you

Ryan McMaken

Billionaire plutocrats at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and other tech companies don’t spend all their time deciding whether or not to boycott your state or lecture you on the “correct” voting laws.  No, sometimes they have time to plot ways to rip off the taxpayers to the tune of more than 50 billion dollars.

At least, that’s what a new coalition of tech companies wants in a new effort to lobby Congress for subsidies and other “incentives” for the production of semiconductors. According to Fox Business:

The Semiconductor in America Coalition, made up of chip buyers including Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google and Microsoft, and manufacturers like American Micro Devices, Intel, Nvidia and Texas Instruments, has asked Congress to provide funding for the CHIPS for America Act, which authorized domestic chip manufacturing incentives and research initiatives.

These companies want “robust funding”—provided by taxpayers, of course—for the Act’s programs which, the Coalition says, “would help America build … additional capacity” for semiconductor production.

This new demand for cash follows last year’s passage of the CHIPS for America act which included an initial payout of $10 billion for “a new federal grant program” and new tax credits, which, unless accompanied by reductions in spending, only amount to tax increases for everyone who doesn’t receive the credit.1 The coalition also expresses its dismay over the fact that Federal “investment”—i.e., government spending—on semiconductor research has “fallen flat” as a share of GDP.

In other words, America’s tech oligarchs want to buy subsidized semiconductors, and they think regular people should pay for it all while also subsidizing research.

And, of course, no attempt at ripping off the taxpayers would be complete without an appeal to patriotism and economic nationalism.

The coalition was careful to mention that the global share of semiconductors produced in the United States has fallen over the past thirty years. The implication is that sinister foreigners are catching up to the United States in terms of semiconductor production. In other words, the subsidies are “essential for …national security.”

This is just textbook special-interest politics: large, powerful business groups are lobbying the regime to subsidize their products or inputs. This lowers the cost to these businesses while raising the cost to taxpayers and competitors.

But it raises the cost to ordinary Americans in a variety of ways that aren’t just measured in dollars. Here are some of them:

One: Malinvestment

Every time a government extracts resources from private owners via taxation, it is redistributing wealth. But this redistribution doesn’t occur according to the wishes of consumers—i.e., market allocation. Rather, these resources are now doled out according to the wishes of government planners and pressure groups.

This redirection of resources away from market allocation inflates prices in some areas, while depressing prices in others. It creates bubbles in “demand” for certain products and services as generated by the arbitrary purchasing decisions of government bureaucrats.

In the case of the semiconductor subsidy scheme, labor and capital are redistributed by government planners to the semiconductor industry, even if a functioning marketplace would have put those resources elsewhere. The “seen” effect is that more semiconductors are built. The “unseen” is the countless important and in-demand products and services that won’t be provided in the marketplace. 

Two: Reduction in Consumer Choice

Politically, the entire scheme rests on the assumption that the consumers aren’t to be trusted with their own money, and their money must be spent in the “correct” places by government agents. That is, every subsidy, tariff, tax, or money-printing scheme requires that regular people hand over a portion of their own wealth to bureaucrats to put it in the “right” places.

In the case of the semi-conductor subsidy, the tech plutocrats worry that a “shortage” of semiconductors will cause the prices of various tech products and services to increase. As a result, it stands to reason that consumers may spend less money on those products and services. This could impact the tech sector’s revenue and profits. 

Consumers ought to be free to change their spending habits, of course, and they ought to be able to re-arrange their spending so as to fit their own personal budgets and desires.

But the oligarchs and bureaucrats don’t like that sort of thing, and they don’t like the consumer having the freedom to simply spend less in the tech sector. They found a way to protect their revenue and profits: simply force consumers to spend in the tech sector whether they want to or not. 

So, the regime forcibly redistributes’ the consumers resources. This represents a loss of consumer “welfare,” which we can define as the consumer engaging in voluntary market action to increase his own welfare according to his own individual valuations. The oligarchs want to reduce this welfare in order to increase the oligarchs’ welfare. It’s as simple as that.

Three: Reduced Competitiveness for Other Sectors and Businesses

The situation is more complex than just a transfer of cash from taxpayers to certain subsidized industries.

When the regime subsidizes a particular industry, business, or sector, this results in an increase in prices for competing businesses and industries. For example, if the regime decides to subsidize semiconductor makers, these firms will then have more resources to bid up the wages they pay, and the prices they pay for various resources necessary for production. This means that firms in other sectors now must compete more heavily for labor and raw materials or any other factor that the semiconductor industry is now buying up in larger amounts. 

This is especially repugnant in the case of the semiconductor scheme because most of the large tech firms in question have already been indirectly subsidized for years through the Fed’s financialization efforts, and especially in the form of the Greenspan put. This has served to inflate stock prices in the tech sector and has benefited large publicly-traded firms over smaller firms that have not been able to count on the Fed to have their back.

In other words, the semiconductor subsidy is just the latest part of a scheme to stack the deck against small business owners, employees, and customers. 

We Learn Economics to Learn How They’re Ripping Us Off

One can easily guess what the defenders of this latest subsidy will say. They’re likely to claim that it just amounts to a small amount per household: “What’s 50 billion dollars spread across so many households?” Of course, this is what advocates for tax increases, tariffs, and subsidies always say: “Just give us this one new, teeny-tiny tax/subsidy. It’s not a big deal!” But if we add up all the government schemes this claim has been used to justify, we get a pretty “big deal,” indeed. Moreover, as we’ve seen above, the real cost in terms of economic distortions, lost welfare, and harm to competitors, is quite real and beyond the dollar amounts we see in the subsidy itself. 

  • 1. Although tax credits are not “subsidies” per se, they are anti-competitive and amount to the regime picking winners and losers. In an environment of deficit spending and monetization of debt—an environment we now live in—a tax credit for one firm or group of firms amounts to putting a larger tax burden on all other firms as monetary inflation and deficit spending are employed to keep spending high in the face of lost revenue via tax credits. Thus, tax credits for the semiconductor industry are a way to shift the tax burden to competitors. 

Author:

Contact Ryan McMaken

Ryan McMaken (@ryanmcmaken) is a senior editor at the Mises Institute. Send him your article submissions for the Mises Wire and Power&Market, but read article guidelines first. Ryan has degrees in economics and political science from the University of Colorado and was a housing economist for the State of Colorado. He is the author of Commie Cowboys: The Bourgeoisie and the Nation-State in the Western Genre.

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Google Removes Entire State Of Georgia From Google Maps

Posted by M. C. on April 12, 2021

https://babylonbee.com/news/google-removes-entire-state-of-georgia-from-google-maps

MOUNTAIN VIEW, CA—Tech giant Google announced today that they are removing the entire state of Georgia from their Google Maps platform, effective immediately. This comes in response to the state’s recent voter law that many are calling racist.

“We cannot allow these racist laws to stand,” said a spokesman from the Google Office of Diversity, Inclusion, Anti-Racism, Climate Change, Immigration Reform, and LGBTQ Affairs. “That’s why we must act quickly to get states like Georgia off the map, both literally and figuratively.”

Starting today, the state of Georgia will be replaced with a blue body of water labeled “Sea of Racism” on all Google Maps platforms. Driving directions given by the site will be altered. For example, directions from South Carolina to Florida via I-95 will state: “continue south through the stupid Sea of Racism without stopping for 112 miles.”

Google will also be updating searches for locations inside the state. A search for directions to Atlanta, GA now returns the following message. “Location not found. Would you like to travel to a Google-approved destination such as Seattle, Minneapolis, or Beijing?”

The spokesman went on to clarify that Google hasn’t completely abandoned the state. “Google will still provide one-way driving directions out of the state for anyone who currently resides in Georgia,” he noted. “Also, we will still provide directions to any out-of-state celebrities or businesses who want to donate money to the Georgia Democratic Party.” 

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Julian Assange – Google Is Not What It Seems

Posted by M. C. on January 18, 2021

Caught red-handed last year making petabytes of personal data available to the US intelligence community through the PRISM program, Google nevertheless continues to coast on the goodwill generated by its “don’t be evil” doublespeak. 

https://wikileaks.org/google-is-not-what-it-seems/

by Julian Assange

In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department — and what that means for the future of the internet. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code “WIKILEAKS”.

* * * Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted to make an appointment with me, I was listening.         In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns with senior US officials for years by that point. The mystique had worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth. Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an empire.1

        I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I came to understand who had really visited me.

* * *
        The stated reason for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as Google’s in-house “think/do tank.” I knew little else about Cohen at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the US State Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking “Generation Y” ideas man at State under two US administrations, a courtier from the world of policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties. He became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened “Condi’s party-starter,” channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into US policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as “Public Diplomacy 2.0.”2 On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as “terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran.”3 Director of Google Ideas, and “geopolitical visionary” Jared Cohen shares his vision with US Army recruits in a lecture theatre at West Point Military Academy on 26 Feb 2014 (Instagram by Eric Schmidt)         It was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran.4 His documented love affair with Google began the same year, when he befriended Eric Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen’s natural habitat within Google itself by engineering a “think/do tank” based in New York and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.        Later that year the two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy.5 Describing what they called “coalitions of the connected,”6 Schmidt and Cohen claimed that Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. . . . They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].7

        In the same piece they argued that “this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector.” Shortly afterwards, Tunisia. then Egypt, and then the rest of the Middle East, erupted in revolution. The echoes of these events on online social media became a spectacle for Western internet users. The professional commentariat, keen to rationalize uprisings against US-backed dictatorships, branded them “Twitter revolutions.” Suddenly everyone wanted to be at the intersection point between US global power and social media, and Schmidt and Cohen had already staked out the territory. With the working title “The Empire of the Mind,” they began expanding their article to book length, and sought audiences with the big names of global tech and global power as part of their research.

        They said they wanted to interview me. I agreed. A date was set for June. Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Google, at the “Pulse of Today’s Global Economy” panel talk at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting, 26 Sept. 2013 in New York. Eric Schmidt first attended the CGI annual meeting at its opening plenary in 2010. (Photo: Mark Lennihan)

        By the time June came around there was already a lot to talk about. That summer WikiLeaks was still grinding through the release of US diplomatic cables, publishing thousands of them every week. When, seven months earlier, we had first started releasing the cables, Hillary Clinton had denounced the publication as “an attack on the international community” that would “tear at the fabric” of government.

        It was into this ferment that Google projected itself that June, touching down in a London airport and making the long drive up into East Anglia to Norfolk and Beccles. Schmidt arrived first, accompanied by his then partner, Lisa Shields. When he introduced her as a vice president of the Council on Foreign Relations—a US foreign-policy think tank with close ties to the State Department—I thought little more of it. Shields herself was straight out of Camelot, having been spotted by John Kennedy Jr.’s side back in the early 1990s. They sat with me and we exchanged pleasantries. They said they had forgotten their dictaphone, so we used mine. We made an agreement that I would forward them the recording and in exchange they would forward me the transcript, to be corrected for accuracy and clarity. We began. Schmidt plunged in at the deep end, straightaway quizzing me on the organizational and technological underpinnings of WikiLeaks.         Some time later Jared Cohen arrived. With him was Scott Malcomson, introduced as the book’s editor. Three months after the meeting Malcomson would enter the State Department as the lead speechwriter and principal advisor to Susan Rice (then US ambassador to the United Nations, now national security advisor). He had previously served as a senior advisor at the United Nations, and is a longtime member of the Council on Foreign Relations. At the time of writing, he is the director of communications at the International Crisis Group.8

        At this point, the delegation was one part Google, three parts US foreign-policy establishment, but I was still none the wiser. Handshakes out of the way, we got down to business. Google’s Chairman, Eric Schmidt, photographed in a New York elevator, carrying Henry Kissinger’s new book, “World Order”, 25 Sep 2014

        Schmidt was a good foil. A late-fiftysomething, squint-eyed behind owlish spectacles, managerially dressed—Schmidt’s dour appearance concealed a machinelike analyticity. His questions often skipped to the heart of the matter, betraying a powerful nonverbal structural intelligence. It was the same intellect that had abstracted software-engineering principles to scale Google into a megacorp, ensuring that the corporate infrastructure always met the rate of growth. This was a person who understood how to build and maintain systems: systems of information and systems of people. My world was new to him, but it was also a world of unfolding human processes, scale, and information flows.         For a man of systematic intelligence, Schmidt’s politics—such as I could hear from our discussion—were surprisingly conventional, even banal. He grasped structural relationships quickly, but struggled to verbalize many of them, often shoehorning geopolitical subtleties into Silicon Valley marketese or the ossified State Department microlanguage of his companions.9 He was at his best when he was speaking (perhaps without realizing it) as an engineer, breaking down complexities into their orthogonal components.

        I found Cohen a good listener, but a less interesting thinker, possessed of that relentless conviviality that routinely afflicts career generalists and Rhodes scholars. As you would expect from his foreign-policy background, Cohen had a knowledge of international flash points and conflicts and moved rapidly between them, detailing different scenarios to test my assertions. But it sometimes felt as if he was riffing on orthodoxies in a way that was designed to impress his former colleagues in official Washington. Malcomson, older, was more pensive, his input thoughtful and generous. Shields was quiet for much of the conversation, taking notes, humoring the bigger egos around the table while she got on with the real work.

        As the interviewee I was expected to do most of the talking. I sought to guide them into my worldview. To their credit, I consider the interview perhaps the best I have given. I was out of my comfort zone and I liked it. We ate and then took a walk in the grounds, all the while on the record. I asked Eric Schmidt to leak US government information requests to WikiLeaks, and he refused, suddenly nervous, citing the illegality of disclosing Patriot Act requests. And then as the evening came on it was done and they were gone, back to the unreal, remote halls of information empire, and I was left to get back to my work. That was the end of it, or so I thought.

* * *

        Two months later, WikiLeaks’ release of State Department cables was coming to an abrupt end. For three-quarters of a year we had painstakingly managed the publication, pulling in over a hundred global media partners, distributing documents in their regions of influence, and overseeing a worldwide, systematic publication and redaction system, fighting for maximum impact for our sources.         But in an act of gross negligence the Guardian newspaper—our former partner—had published the confidential decryption password to all 251,000 cables in a chapter heading in its book, rushed out hastily in February 2011.10 By mid-August we discovered that a former German employee—whom I had suspended in 2010—was cultivating business relationships with a variety of organizations and individuals by shopping around the location of the encrypted file, paired with the password’s whereabouts in the book. At the rate the information was spreading, we estimated that within two weeks most intelligence agencies, contractors, and middlemen would have all the cables, but the public would not.

I decided it was necessary to bring forward our publication schedule by four months and contact the State Department to get it on record that we had given them advance warning. The situation would then be harder to spin into another legal or political assault. Unable to raise Louis Susman, then US ambassador to the UK, we tried the front door. WikiLeaks investigations editor Sarah Harrison called the State Department front desk and informed the operator that “Julian Assange” wanted to have a conversation with Hillary Clinton. Predictably, this statement was initially greeted with bureaucratic disbelief. We soon found ourselves in a reenactment of that scene in Dr. Strangelove, where Peter Sellers cold-calls the White House to warn of an impending nuclear war and is immediately put on hold. As in the film, we climbed the hierarchy, speaking to incrementally more superior officials until we reached Clinton’s senior legal advisor. He told us he would call us back. We hung up, and waited. Sarah Harrison and Julian Assange call the U.S. State Department in September 2011.

          When the phone rang half an hour later, it was not the State Department on the other end of the line. Instead, it was Joseph Farrell, the WikiLeaks staffer who had set up the meeting with Google. He had just received an email from Lisa Shields seeking to confirm that it was indeed WikiLeaks calling the State Department.         It was at this point that I realized Eric Schmidt might not have been an emissary of Google alone. Whether officially or not, he had been keeping some company that placed him very close to Washington, DC, including a well-documented relationship with President Obama. Not only had Hillary Clinton’s people known that Eric Schmidt’s partner had visited me, but they had also elected to use her as a back channel. While WikiLeaks had been deeply involved in publishing the inner archive of the US State Department, the US State Department had, in effect, snuck into the WikiLeaks command center and hit me up for a free lunch. Two years later, in the wake of his early 2013 visits to China, North Korea, and Burma, it would come to be appreciated that the chairman of Google might be conducting, in one way or another, “back-channel diplomacy” for Washington. But at the time it was a novel thought.11 Eric Schmidt’s Instagram of Hillary Clinton and David Rubinstein, taken at the Holbrooke Forum Gala, 5 Dec 2013. Richard Holbrooke (who died in 2010) was a high-profile US diplomat, managing director of Lehman brothers, a board member of NED, CFR, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg steering group and an advisor to Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. Schmidt donated over $100k to the the Holbrooke Forum

See the rest here

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NPR, CNN, NYT, Wa-Po, MSNBC, Twitter, Facebook, Google Presstitutes Covering Up Biden Scandals by Refusing to Report on Them – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on October 24, 2020

NPR is so dishonest that it presents its commercial advertisements as if they are charitable donations in the same tone of voice and words—“with support from”—that NPR uses for its support from foundations. Somehow NPR’s member supporters are too dense to comprehend that if NPR will attempt to pass off a commercial advertiser as a charitable donor, NPR cannot be trusted to objectively convey news.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/10/23/npr-cnn-nyt-wa-po-msnbc-twitter-facebook-google-presstitutes-covering-up-biden-scandals-by-refusing-to-report-on-them/

Paul Craig Roberts

The New York Post’s report that the FBI has laptops belonging to Hunter Biden that contain emails showing Hunter and Joe Biden’s use of the Vice Presidency for business deals that amount to influence peddling and money laundering was banned from Twitter, Facebook, and Google.  The New York Times, Washington Post and other of the press prostitutes tried to discredit the story with the fake news that it was Russian disinformation to help Trump win the election.  National Public Radio refused to mention the story other than to brand it a story that is not really a story, simply a waste of “listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.” [1]  NPR, of course, was all into distractions that wasted readers’ and listeners’ time on Russiagate and Impeachgate and wasted President Trump’s entire term.  

The problem with the press prostitutes’ attempted coverup of the Bidens’ crooked dealings is that the FBI has Hunter Biden’s laptops, and both the FBI and the Department of Justice agree with the statement of John Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence, that the emails are the real stuff and not a Russian operation to interfere in the November election. [2]

Even worse for the presstitutes and the Bidens, two former business partners have come forward to verify the emails as authentic. [3]  [4]

The emails contain a list of “key domestic contacts” for the influence peddling scheme.  The names on the list are Democrat VP candidate Kamala Harris, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Speaker of the House Dianne Feinstein, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, NY City Mayor Bill de Blasio, and former Virginia governor Terry McCauliffe. [5]  

Whether these high ranking Democrats had agreed or not, I cannot say, but obviously the Biden team thought them corruptible.

The evidence against the Bidens is extremely damaging and is pouring out from Biden associates. [6]

So there it is out in the open.  A Democrat Party and presstitute scum that has spent four years telling lies about President Trump is revealed in all of its sordid corruption.  The  Democrat Party is a gang of crooks, and the American media is nothing but a propaganda ministry for the Democrat Party dedicated to covering up its crimes.  

It is impossible to find an ounce of integrity in the Democrat Party other than Tulsi Gabbard, and she is the party’s shunned member.  No integrity exists in the American TV, print, or NPR media other than Tucker Carlson and one or two others at Fox News.

NPR is the worst of the lot.  NPR pretends to be a “member supported” radio station, but it is nothing but another commercial station.  NPR is so dishonest that it presents its commercial advertisements as if they are charitable donations in the same tone of voice and words—“with support from”—that NPR uses for its support from foundations.  Somehow NPR’s member supporters are too dense to comprehend that if NPR will attempt to pass off a commercial advertiser as a charitable donor, NPR cannot be trusted to objectively convey news.

If Americans elect Democrats next month, they will have turned their government over to a criminal gang and will have empowered the most corrupt media—a.k.a. Ministry of Propaganda—in the history of the world.  The United States will never recover from such a devastating mistake.

[1]  https://www.zerohedge.com/political/waste-time-npr-refuses-cover-hunter-biden-story 

[2]  https://thefederalist.com/2020/10/21/fbi-doj-debunk-claims-the-hunter-biden-laptop-story-is-russian-disinformation/ 

[3]  https://www.foxnews.com/politics/hunter-biden-business-partner-email-genuine-joe-biden-advice 

[4]  https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-radio/peter-schweizer-bevan-cooney-emails- 

[5]  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/22/report-kamala-harris-listed-as-key-contact-for-biden-family-business-venture-in-china/ 

[6]  https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/10/16/exclusive-this-is-china-inc-emails-reveal-hunter-bidens-associates-helped-communist-aligned-chinese-elites-secure-white-house-meetings/?fbclid=IwAR3pLLc6qdFzL9qjSHEsHC2pWfpXql-4cpDy0DX1VRtshr9sHqo2ZWzn6EU 

See also: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/behind-curtain-biden-biz-partner-confirms-joe-involved-hunters-huge-china-deal?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

and: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/senate-demands-hunter-biden-turn-over-bank-records-wire-transfers-account-balances-and?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter 

and: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/blockbuster-report-reveals-how-biden-family-was-compromised-china?utm_campaign=&utm_content=Zerohedge%3A+The+Durden+Dispatch&utm_medium=email&utm_source=zh_newsletter

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Project Veritas Video Shows Google Employee Accusing Company of ‘Playing God’

Posted by M. C. on October 20, 2020

James O’Keefe strikes again!

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/10/19/project-veritas-video-shows-google-employee-accusing-company-of-playing-god/

by Breitbart Tech

A new undercover video from investigative journalists at James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas shows a Google employee accusing the company of trying to “play God” with search results and discussing its internal culture of political bias.

In the video, a technical program manager at Google can be heard discussing the tech giant’s often-brazen bias against President Trump and his movement. “Trump says something, misinformation, you’re gonna delete that because it’s illegal under whatever pretext,” he said. “If a Democratic leader says that, then you’re gonna leave it like that, so I’m like, okay, you’re not following one way or the other. You are just plain and simple trying to play God.” In another exchange recorded by the undercover journalist, the employee can be heard discussing Google’s ties to China.  GOOGLER: “I can’t keep doing this. Go and teach Chinese people how to do American jobs and come back and get surveilled on the way.”Journalist: “Were you doing that for Google?GOOGLER: “Google, FitBit. Yeah. Those two companies, primarily.”Journalist: “So, you were going there and working for Google in China?”GOOGLER:“Yeah.”Journalist: “Wow. That’s scary. I’m scared they’re gonna start doing stuff like that here.”GOOGLER: “Yeah. And when you have these candid conversations with your friends who are centrist or Republicans, then you wonder, all of a sudden, like, ‘Oh, I should vote for Trump.’” The Google employee can be heard expressing his dissatisfaction with the “ultra-leftist attitude” at Google, where “your entire existence is questioned.” “When I worked for Caterpillar or Corning, politics didn’t really matter,” he said. “You just do your job and: ‘Let’s make tractors, let’s make glass.’” He also recounted events after the 2016 election, when employees were crying in coridoors and taking days of work because of the outcome. “That kind of stuff — I’m like — are you serious, are you kidding me?” he said.

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Yes, YouTube Has Censored the Ron Paul Liberty Report. You Won’t Believe Why!

Posted by M. C. on September 25, 2020

The Masters of the Universe strike down anyone that blasphemes the (false god) WHO.

As we have pointed out on the Liberty Report several times – probably contributing to our being targeted – the World Health Organization is not even led by a doctor, but by a violent Ethiopian communist politician.

If you dare criticize a violent Ethiopian communist, you will be banned from YouTube. It seems that simple.

https://mailchi.mp/ronpaulinstitute/youtube?e=4e0de347c8

Dear Friends of the Ron Paul Institute:

As many of you have already heard, YouTube (owned by Google, with deep roots in the deep state), inexplicably removed our Ron Paul Liberty Report from 23 September, titled “Covid Whistleblowers Expose Narrative As ‘Total Fraud,'” and officially delivered a “warning” to the Ron Paul Liberty Report You Tube channel. They claimed in the notice that the program, which you can watch for yourself here, violated their “community guidelines” regarding “spam, deceptive practices, and scams.”

We are in danger of having our entire channel removed if we continue in these prohibited activities, they warned.  Please watch the program for yourself and attempt to identify where any of these three violations took place.

Dr. Paul sent an appeal asking for specific clarification as to what in the program violated their “community standards.” This seems important, because if they could point to something that was said or something in the title or thumbnail photo that violated their “guidelines,” it wouldn’t be that difficult to avoid such phrases or words or even photos in the future. Yes, it might be annoying and unfair, but knowing specifically what was the violation or violations would logically benefit both parties, as YouTube was clear in their “warning” that they did “not want to lose” us.

Imagine if a police officer pulled you over and began writing a ticket and when you requested the reason for the ticket they refused to tell you. Or perhaps they arrested you with no clearly articulated reason. Neither did the judge nor jury utter a peep when they ruled on the case and passed sentence.

This is how YouTube responded to a request for the “habeas corpus” of our “crime”:
As Ron Paul Institute Senior Fellow (and attorney) Adam Dick wrote me after I showed him the result of the appeal, “What ‘understanding’? Violation determined and appeal denied; that is all the info to understand. The process seems designed to prevent understanding anything other than that power is being exercised.”

Yes. Power is being exercised and we do not have to tell you why.

Digging a bit deeper into the actual reason they decided to pull the episode of the Liberty Report (which as most of you know is hours in the making and represents years in preparation), turns up this bizarre email YouTube sent to the Ron Paul Liberty Report’s gmail address:
So finally we are getting more of an explanation of where we might have gone wrong. YouTube simply does not allow any criticism of the World Health Organization – a United Nations bureaucratic body that has absolutely no idea what to do about the Covid health problem. One week you must wear masks, the next week you don’t need them, etc. But don’t dare criticize them or you will have your metaphorical larynx ripped from your body.

As we have pointed out on the Liberty Report several times – probably contributing to our being targeted – the World Health Organization is not even led by a doctor, but by a violent Ethiopian communist politician.

If you dare criticize a violent Ethiopian communist, you will be banned from YouTube. It seems that simple.

So, as another violent communist once wrote, what is to be done?

We are still looking at our options. For now we have opened a backup account on BitChute so that if a future YouTube broadcast is pulled we can offer it up to you without so much delay.

Ultimately we believe the noose will tighten on any “dissident” voices such as Dr. Paul’s. It seems bizarre in what so many love to claim is the “freest country on earth,” one that must spend billions “freeing” others overseas, that anyone challenging the prevailing mainstream media/US government narrative on Covid – or foreign policy or anything else – must be silenced. Once there was the gulag for dissidents, these days it’s “big tech” companies that do hundreds of billions of dollars in business with US intelligence and the US government who do the bidding of their paymasters. But hey, they’re “private” companies so don’t you dare complain as you are herded into your ideological boxcar!

We are looking at other options to deliver the Ron Paul Liberty Report to our viewers – who on YouTube are a hair away from passing the quarter million subscriber mark – but many of these options are not cheap. As you all know, we operate on a shoestring and we stretch every penny from the generous contributions of our supporters.

But we are going to need your help if we are going to keep the peace and prosperity message of the Ron Paul Liberty Report alive. We are directly challenging multi-billion dollar media empires and their narratives – they are not at all happy about it.

This is your program, and if you want it to continue – one of the last voices challenging the dominant and crushing narrative coming from the mainstream media on the Left AND Right – we will need your support.

Please consider a tax-deductible contribution to the Ron Paul Institute, which is the producer of the Ron Paul Liberty Report. Every donation is gratefully appreciated, but we’re going to need some big bucks to fight this freight train we see bearing down on us. Once they have obliterated us, they will be coming for you. Please help. By the way, we LOVE Bitcoin and you can make a Bitcoin donation at the above link. Please contact me directly at dmcadams@ronpaulinstitute.org for gifts of appreciated stock or other tangible items or to remember the Institute in your will.

Dr. Paul famously says, no army can stop an idea whose time has come. Even in these seemingly dark days, the time has come for our peace and prosperity message. Please do what you can to help us. We need you and we appreciate you.
Sincerely yours,

Daniel McAdams
Executive Director
Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity

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Report: Google Passes Data on ‘Far Right’ Users to Counterterrorism Agency

Posted by M. C. on August 18, 2020

I hope this isn’t a surprise.

The question is what is Google’s definition of far right?

Mom, apple pie, you?

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/08/18/report-google-passes-data-on-far-right-users-to-counterterrorism-agency/

Google frequently passes the personal data of “far-right” users to American counterterrorism authorities, according to leaked documents reported in the Guardian. 

According to the leak, Google passed the data to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center, one of many local intelligence agencies set up after September 11 to strengthen local counterterrorism efforts.
Via the Guardian:

The Google documents retained by NCRIC highlight the activities of individual users, providing detailed subscriber information, which often includes real names, street addresses, credit card numbers, Gmail and recovery email addresses, YouTube channel addresses and the time and IP addresses of recent logins.

…

Google also reported three videos by a third user – who is identified by name, address, phone number, email address, IP address and alternate account – all of which remain on YouTube.

The reports contain detailed descriptions of the three videos, including “At around 1:10, the words ‘Muskets would be glowing RED” appear on the screen. Assault weapons are visible in the background. At 3:28, subject asks: “Where is your line in the sand? When is enough, enough?’”, and “Video is titled ‘A Toast to the Few & the BooGaLoo.’”

There is no indication from the leaks that Google has been similarly proactive in monitoring the activities of the extremist left, who have been responsible for the vast bulk of violent civil unrest and domestic terrorism that erupted around the country over the past few months.

However, some left-wing activists expressed concern to the Guardian about Google working with law enforcement at all, even to target the far right.

“In a moment of reckoning on the failure of police to keep people safe, it is reckless for Google to hand off private user information to law enforcement,” said Steven Renderos, executive director of the left-wing civil rights group MediaJustice.

Are you an insider at Google, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter, or any other tech company who wants to confidentially reveal wrongdoing or political bias at your company? Reach out to Allum Bokhari at his secure email address allumbokhari@protonmail.com. 

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. His book #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election is out in September. 

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