John Hayward Profile picture
15 Oct, 9 tweets, 2 min read
It's so weird that the big social media platforms simultaneously decided to throw away their "platform, not a publisher" protection to suppress a flimsy nothingburger story that should be like the buzzing of flies to a candidate with an insurmountable lead in the polls.
It almost makes you wonder if maybe that candidate knew even worse revelations were coming, so he got in touch with his very dear friends at the social media giants and told them to crush the early releases at all costs, to shut the whole chain of stories down.
DNC Media long ago mastered the art of the soft embargo. They simply refuse to amplify stories that don't fit their precious political narratives, while the stories that DO fit get wall-to-wall coverage. They don't confront Democrats about inconvenient stories.
We know all the tricks by heart: "Republicans pounce" framing, changing the subject, whataboutism, attacking the sources of inconvenient stories, downplaying them as "old news" or "debunked" when they really aren't.
For Big Tech to instantly leap directly to Chinese Communist-style hard embargoes - clumsy, obvious, and coordinated suppression of information, so ham-fisted that it clearly risks bringing government regulators down on their heads - over a trifling story seems illogical.
All the soft embargo tools were readily available. They could have said it was just "old news," everybody knows Hunter Biden is a train wreck. They could have used "Republicans pounce" to wave the whole thing off as a partisan smear. No way they'd ask Joe Biden for comment.
But instead they instantly leaped to an unprecedented level of China-style hard oppression that was all but guaranteed to make the story a much bigger deal, and their actions could well have disastrous repercussions for the Big Tech companies. And this fallout was predictable.
It doesn't take a genius to see that the New York Post isn't some internet rando with 100 followers who can be squashed without blowback, or to see that people become 1,000 times more interested in a story they are arrogantly ordered not to read.
And it's predictable that this hard embargo tactic would raise deafening cries of election interference, because it obviously IS. No bubble is thick enough to keep the people who did this from seeing what the response would be, but they did it anyway, without hesitation. /end

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More from @Doc_0

16 Oct
One of the most polarizing things about this election is that nobody can imagine anyone voting for the other guy after listening to him talk for five minutes. "You Gotta Be Kidding Me" should be the slogan for the entire contest.
I confess I have this reaction too. Trump frequently says, and tweets, things I find exasperating. Rarely have I seen anyone work so hard to talk himself out of a job. But I listen to Biden talk and I can't believe anyone would be foolish enough to vote for him.
Biden can't even finish his sentences properly when he's regurgitating 30-year-old talking points. The man clearly is not all there. I guess his supporters are just talking themselves into ignoring it because they hate Trump, or because they know Biden's just a figurehead.
Read 6 tweets
16 Oct
Why would hostile foreign powers and shady characters keep paying Hunter Biden millions of dollars for access, year after year, if he never delivered any?
The media/Biden campaign (but I repeat myself) framing for this story is that some shifty foreigners stuffed cash into Hunter's pockets one time, then found him passed out in a bathtub with a crack pipe and cursed themselves for fools, as if he had conned them.
But that's not what happened AT ALL. Shifty foreigners and outright enemies of the United States paid Hunter Biden huge sums to buy access, over and over again, for years. He's not some fake Nigerian prince who swindled people one time and then scurried away with the loot.
Read 5 tweets
15 Oct
I wrote about Internet freedom a few hours before it suddenly became a massive crisis in the United States, so the post (and the Freedom House report I discussed) became an instant time capsule. The questions I asked are more urgent than ever:

breitbart.com/national-secur…
"Disinformation" is treated by analysts as a menace to Internet freedom, but so are the measures employed to combat it. The worst totalitarian regimes on Earth justify Internet repression as efforts to control disinformation. We're getting a taste of that in America right now.
"Cyber sovereignty" means states like China establishing their own little Internet backwaters, ruled according to their definitions of acceptable speech, hate speech, disinformation, and sedition.

We have that too. In America, cyber sovereignty is imposed by Big Tech moguls.
Read 16 tweets
14 Oct
It's funny how so many people who claim to worship "democracy" also dismiss nationalism as selfish xenophobia. Democracy is absolutely meaningless without strong national sovereignty. Under globalism, citizens of any given state have little influence over how they are governed.
Nationalism isn't just mindless tribalism. People are correct to insist their government has a responsibility TO THEM that vastly outweighs any imagined responsibility to foreign governments they have absolutely no influence over, or foreign populations.
We've seen that point taken to absurd extremes by the Left during the Trump administration, with whack-job judges ruling that foreigners have rights that EXCEED those of American citizens, including absolute rights to enter the U.S. and influence its government.
Read 13 tweets
14 Oct
The media's complaints about transparency in the Trump White House are hilarious when you consider how opaque Obama's was, and Biden's would be - with the active complicity of the media. Reporters will block damaging stories like Secret Service agents diving in front of bullets.
Given a media as thoroughly corrupt, lazy, and partisan as ours, and the immense power of the central government, no one truly concerned about in "transparency" can possibly vote Democrat. You're literally voting for the media to become PART of the administration.
There is simply no possibility of an adversarial relationship between the degenerate mainstream media and a Democrat administration, especially not after they push Biden into the White House. "Reporters" would be taking victory laps right alongside him.
Read 11 tweets
13 Oct
A Biden win would decisively hand the 21st Century to China. I think it's very important to prevent a fascist superpower from ruling the world. Funny how so many self-professed "anti-fascists" seem untroubled by the prospect.
Of course, some of the people sleeping at the wheel on China think of it as "communist," view communism as super-sized socialism, and think socialism is good. They should be thinking harder about how China demonstrates the shared DNA between socialism, communism, and fascism.
China, at any rate, is more clearly fascist than anything else. Its core structure long ago shifted to fascism - nominal private ownership of capital, but absolute control by political dictators. Chinese Marxists frequently get thrown in jail for complaining about this.
Read 25 tweets

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