A chorus of international voices slammed Silicon Valley’s overlords when they silenced President Donald Trump on social media in January, including heads of state from France, Germany, Mexico, and Australia. To stave off similar political manipulation, Uganda blocked Facebook ahead of its election and India threatened to jail Twitter employees who got out of line. The European Union has threatened fines in the billions for Silicon Valley’s tacit support of terrorists. Poland and Hungary are realizing Big Tech is the biggest threat to their national sovereignty since the Soviet Union.
And feeding into legitimate fear of Big Tech’s tyranny are leaked videos like this one where they outline their evil plans for world domination.
Silicon Valley has grown so formidable that literal nation states are afraid of them. But they shouldn’t have to: America created the Silicon Monster, and America has to kill it – or, more accurately, tame it.
It seems preposterous that the “Biden” Administration would dare to challenge Silicon Valley, indeed it’s hard to tell which one is doing the other’s bidding at this point. But Utahns can take pride and faith in Sen. Mike Lee, who is leading the charge against the Silicon Monster, which at this point is equal parts Big Brother, Goliath, and Lex Luthor.
Last week, Utah’s Sen. Mike Lee announced he’s ready to lead the charge against Big Tech’s political interference and market suppression; however, his advocacy on this issue is nothing new. As the lead Republican on the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee for the last decade, he has sounded the need toanti-trustBig Tech before they completely undermine our economy, political system, and way of life. Decrying the “soft totalitarianism of a corporate shadow state,” Lee said, “The Silicon Valley fairy tale of innovation and technological progress sold to Americans has turned into a corporatist nightmare of censorship and hypocrisy.”
The most recent example of this was Big Tech’s brutal attack on Parler, an alternative social media outlet, that Amazon and others quashed under the guise of fighting the modern-day sasquatch of “white supremacy.” In any other industry, this kind of criminal behavior toward a competitor would invite legal action, fines, and probably jail time for the responsible executives.
This kind of monopolistic corporate raiding is comparable to Google’s stealing 11,500 lines of code from Oracle’s celebrated Java program to develop the Android OS. Sun Microsystems (which Oracle acquired in 2010) granted Google a three-year license to its code for $100 million … which Google decided not to pay for. The case is headed for the Supreme Court, which one hopes will at last put shackles on the company that has spent the last 20 years lying about not being evil.
The right decision from the Supreme Court would be great support to Lee’s efforts. While the Silicon Monster seems unbeatable, others are joining the fight: New York is suing Facebook, while Texas and Colorado are suing Google.
If these companies were really so virtuous, why is everyone in the world trying to shut them down?
There are several layers of irony to the Silicon Monster’s efforts to undermine the conservative value-system protecting America’s political structure. The largest is that Big Tech owes its success to the twin forces of conservatism: the military industrial complex and Reaganomics. Without these two, there never would have been the critical mass of talent, capital, and relaxed regulatory standards necessary for the last 30 years of innovation.
The second layer of irony is from the “because thou hast been faithful over small things, I will make thee ruler over great things” perspective: Tech Tyrants want to rule the world, but they cannot even run their own backyard.
Life in the Bay Area is terrible for someone’s physical health and worse for their mental health. Its woke population doesn’t form relationships or have babies. They have the worst housing affordability and income equality in the country. San Francisco is, literally, covered in feces, but you won’t find any human excrement in the Googleplex, because they – drumroll please – built a wall. Beyond that, they’re helping China develop its AI war-machine and actual terrorists with their data needs.
And somehow these lunatics are the most powerful people on the planet.
Sen. Lee and others need all the support they can get to fight against the overwhelming malignancy of Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter. If these companies were as virtuous as they say they are, they would self-select to break up their own monopolies, stop stealing your privacy, and give billions away to charity. But they’d rather not do that: the people who cannot run their own city would rather have absolute power over the world forever.
Jared Whitley is a longtime Utah and DC politico, having worked in the office of Sen. Hatch, the Bush White House, and the defense industry. He has an MBA from Hult International
Business School in Dubai.
