We Will Crush You

If one thing has become clear during these early days of the Zhou Baiden regime, it's that the new regime is determined to crush all dissenting voices that might oppose the regime's agenda. Not surprisingly, that effort is starting on Capitol Hill, guarded now by the New Army of the Potomac--the National Guard units that are the regime's occupying force in the Imperial City on the Potomac. There can be little doubt that Nancy Pelosi's January Sixth Commission will be targeting GOP legislators, given that Pelosi's hand picked witchhunt leader has openly called for the likes of Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz to be "run out of DC" for their alleged role.

But all the forces at the regime's command are being marshalled to solidify power and control. Most chillingly, perhaps, is How the Biden Administration is Politicizing the Military. 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has made it absolutely clear that the U.S. military’s top priority is not facing external threats, ...  Instead, Austin sees the main threat as coming from within the U.S. military. In his confirmation hearings, Austin said that he would make it his priority to combat racism and extremism in the United States military. ...

 

Can you say "purge"? Any pretense that the national defense will be a bipartisan endeavor has been cast aside:

Austin’s order to remove all Trump appointees to the 42 Defense Department advisory boards is unprecedented and downright stupid. ... Advisory boards are a second set of eyes from outside the organization to review policies, planning or course curricula and offer suggestions. Often outside advisors spot a problem your organization overlooked or offer good ideas for better policy implementation. And it’s useful to have a diversity of ideas for policy review. But ... accepting advice only from Biden loyalists will ensure only party line thinking will be allowed in the military. Two notable defense secretaries were famous for not listening to advice or tolerating debate on policy ... Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, and both led our armed forces into military disaster. ...

What type of "extremism" will the regime be seeking to root out of the military? Remarkably, the regime has called in its political police to assist in vetting members of the military. And the FBI is known for partnering with far left organizations when it comes to defining domestic threats:

An especially troublesome feature of Austin’s focus on extremism is the preference of the military and the FBI to employ the ultra-left Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) as their authority on extremism. ...

We can rest assured that, with the SPLC involved, the purge will be directly strictly against conservative views. As the author argues, this means a culture war that will have a decidedly negative impact on military preparedness:

Austin’s steps to politicize the military to a degree never seen before means a culture war on the conservative half of America. That might make Austin extremely popular with Biden, but it will make recruitment and retention for the armed forces pretty difficult. ... If Austin bans conservatives from the military under the SPLC definition of “extremism” and takes away the constitutional rights of citizen soldiers in the Reserve and Guard, he’ll never get enough recruits from the liberal states.

We'll be left with an inward focused military focused on policing society--just in case. That is exactly what concerned the Founding Fathers about a standing military, but is what the military presence in DC so aptly foreshadows.

Of course, the use of force to exert social control will remain a second or third option--once widespread use of the military is invoked too many dangers arise. No, the preference will remain to crush dissent by controlling the flow of information. That will come under the guise of controlling the flow of dis-information. You didn't know that that had become the government's business? Well, you might say--if you were a leftist--that the regime is engaged in the "moral equivalent of war," facing multiple "national crises." In such a situation, the argument runs, anything goes. For starters, there's the problem of those people who won't shut up and just take their shots.

This effort will blur or even erase constitutional distinctions between government and the private sector, but who does that surprise? The use of corporate America for the purposes of government control of information has been in the works for years. This has all the marks of a Corporate State, a Fascism of the Left:

Biden Admin "Working Directly" With Big Tech To Crush Vaccine Dissent

"In a corporatist system of government, wherein there is no meaningful separation between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship."

Those were the prophetic words of Caitlin Johnstone in 2018 warning of the slippery slope that Big Tech and its liberal minions were embarking on as the corporate-sponsored cancel-culture began.

...

... all the 'behind the scenes' nods and winks are gone and conspiracy theories proved fact as Reuters reports, "The White House has been reaching out to social media companies including Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet Inc’s Google about clamping down on COVID misinformation and getting their help to stop it from going viral, a senior administration official said."

Right. As if we've had something like even minimal functional transparency during the Covid casedemic? Isn't transparency the most effective means of combatting disinformation? But transparency can be very problematic, when truth has been closely guarded by a bodyguard of lies. Once the truth comes out, who knows whose ox will be gored? What party's governors will be recalled? What party's governors will be ... indicted? What relatives of the regime head will be called to account?

And so, Pelosi's Dem House is openly pressuring an already only too compliant Big Tech to greater efforts. Glenn Greenwald elaborates, in one of his trademark long-as-your-arm articles. Here we learn that--surprise!--the Dems are concerned not only with vaccine doubters but even more so with election doubters. Which is to say, they're concerned with regime legitimacy, and they want Big Tech to crush any doubts in that regard:

Congress Escalates Pressure On Tech Giants To Censor More, Threatening The First Amendment

For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”

The Committee’s Chair, Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ), and the two Chairs of the Subcommittees holding the hearings, Mike Doyle (D-PA) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), said in a joint statement that the impetus was “falsehoods about the COVID-19 vaccine” and “debunked claims of election fraud.” They argued that “these online platforms have allowed misinformation to spread, intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety,” adding: “This hearing will continue the Committee’s work of holding online platforms accountable for the growing rise of misinformation and disinformation.”

There you have it. Concerns about election fraud in America--concerns, by the way, that have been repeatedly expressed by international election monitoring entities--have suddenly become an "intensifying national crises with real-life, grim consequences for public health and safety." Reason enough to have DC under military occupation, right? The nationwide riots of last year, explicitly encouraged by the Dem leaders like Pelosi and featured on video during the second Faux Impeachment recently, weren't a crisis. But the doubts of a majority of Americans is a crisis that must be addressed by controlling the flow of information.

... “Industry self-regulation has failed,” they said, and therefore “we must begin the work of changing incentives driving social media companies to allow and even promote misinformation and disinformation.” In other words, they intend to use state power to influence and coerce these companies to change which content they do and do not allow to be published.

Greenwald describes Twitter and Facebook and Google almost as if they were victims of government coercion. The reality is that their CEOs (and Amazon's Bezos) willingly partnered with the Dems and spent hundreds of millions of dollars in doubtfully legal campaigns to change voting procedures in swing states. One can imagine the scene when the coercion begins: Go ahead, twist my arm! Ouch! I'll do it, I'll do it! Haha! Twist it again if you want!...

Little effort is required to see that Democrats, now in control of the Congress and the White House, are engaged in a scheme of speech control virtually indistinguishable from those long held unconstitutional by decades of First Amendment jurisprudence. That Democrats are seeking to use their control of state power to coerce and intimidate private tech companies to censor — and indeed have already succeeded in doing so — is hardly subject to reasonable debate. They are saying explicitly that this is what they are doing.

So, it's a good thing that we have a SCOTUS to guard the First Amendment rights of We The People against this new and sinister threat. If we're lucky any cases will get to the SCOTUS in, oh, maybe five years? And who thinks Big Tech will be the ones challenging government "coercion"?

Greenwald goes on to describe the unholy alliance we're seeing before our eyes in terms very similar to those of Caitlin Johnstone, describing the "corporatist" system of state censorship: 

One might think of tech companies, the corporate media, the U.S. security state, and Democrats more as a union — a merger of power — rather than separate and warring factions. But whatever framework you prefer, it is clear that the power of social media companies to control the internet is in the hands of government and its corporate media allies at least as much as it is in the hands of the tech executives who nominally manage these platforms.

...

The power to control the flow of information and the boundaries of permissible speech is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime. It is a power as intoxicating as it is menacing. ...

Are conservatives, much less Republicans, ready for this battle? I don't see it.