673 Comments
Jul 16, 2021Liked by Matt Orfalea

The fascism accusation never fit Trump. You could call him a number of things that weren’t good but he wasn’t a fascist. What you describe here is classic fascism. How can educated liberals not see it.

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Something I'd also like to point out, basically the 100 ton white elephant in the room, is the incredible fact that one 80 year old blowhard, has-been epidemiologist has basically run the show in this country for the last 18 months, with tremendous help from Big Tech. The same man who I, and a great many very smart people, believe is involved in a massive cover-up of the lab leak theory for the origins of Covid. This cover-up (or at the very least, censorship of the scientific questioning of the lab leak theory) as well as massive and illegal rulings under the guise of having the "utmost of caution," i.e. lockdowns, eviction moratoriums, et al. were all sold through strong-arm tactics by Big Tech and have involved a large swath of censorship, especially of those scientists who proposed the Great Barrington Declaration.

That Harvard's own Martin Kulldorf, a man of the left and one of the most esteemed epidemiologists of the 21st century, would be banned from Twitter for his utterly rational "focused protection" ideas to battle Covid, sends shudders down my spine. Big Tech was leveraged very early on by the Fauci brigade to silence almost all dissent. It's one of this century's biggest, if not THE biggest scandal and has far reaching implications what will be felt for decades. But hardly anyone but libertarians and conservatives are talking about it.

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The Biden Administration has only been in place for 6 months, and look how boldly they're already talking and acting.

For you folks on the left, what would you have thought if a spokesman for the Trump Admin just casually mentioned, "Hey, we're going to be monitoring and censoring your private text messages? We're in touch with the social media companies to make sure you don't see or hear things we deem to be harmful? We're doing it all to protect you."

At this pace, what will America be in 3 1/2 years?

But, as they like to say on conservative sites--at least there will be no more mean tweets.

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Bottom line is that companies like YouTube, Facebook, and their ilk have become quasi-governmental, basically acting as appendages of .Gov. Disagree with the narrative, no matter how benignly, and “disappeared” essentially. Kids being told to inform on their parents. The list goes on.

BLM, with their flag still flying at various American embassies (!) praises and supports the Cuban dictatorship over the tens of thousands of black Cubans demonstrating, some with American flags(oh the horror!), for their rights. Black Lives Matter only goes so far I guess.

Taken together it looks like to these old eyes the beginning (well, we’re past that) of good old-fashioned Stalinist Soviet Union, and The People’s Republic, to name just the biggest. Mao would be proud.

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Thank you for this, Matt. People are not seeing the creeping tyranny in our country. The censorship, the illegal changes in voting laws, General Milley ordering troops to attack over the head of a US President, the extended lockdowns, the suppression of information about Covid, and who knows what will be next. Where is the outrage? Are US citizens asleep, distracted, too busy to notice, or simply willing to live with tyranny?

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Man, is this fascist takeover happening quickly.

How ironic that it would’ve been impossible were not set up under the guise of “confronting fascism.“

Donald Trump appears to be the greatest gift the establishment ever received.

Accident?

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Can somebody please explain again what was so bad about Trump? He was against Tech amassing too much power. Please explain it as if you’re speaking to a five yr old. I want to know again - in clear language- What was So bad about Trump?

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I've always hated Facebook, and the oversharing, fake-presenting nature of social media. It's not a surprise at all that platforms owned by Google, Facebook and Amazon are blocking more and more even mildly controversial material. It's been past time to stop using products by these monoliths, which is wildly difficult, but doable.

The bigger problem now is the question of whether upstart competitors will be allowed to even exist to give us the alternatives. The shutdown of Parler was just the tip of the iceberg. If Amazon, Google and Facebook show they're willing to play ball with the party in power, and move information in their favor, they're awarded additional protections (adding clear first amendment violations - and who knows what else - to their already illegal monopolistic practices).

I don't think its unreasonable to think that the internet will be a closed system in a few years, where only companies with a great deal of start-up capital being able to even enter. Think of it like the FCC: created to give space and voice to the community on the airwaves, but over time kept everyone except for the big players off radio and TV. Think of how controlled speech is on broadcast radio and TV to this day. Now apply that to the internet.

(The censoring of text messages is way, way, way over the line. At this point we can only hope that neither of our political parties gather enough power to make any significant changes to anything. This situation is beyond dire.)

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Huh. I'm one of those guys that says, "It's a private company they can do whatever they want", but I never considered them working in concert with the government - THAT is quite disturbing.

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Wow! How long will it be before our personal emails and substack comments are censored and any strikes against us are factored into our credit scores? The 21st century is quickly turning into a dystopian nightmare.

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None of this is surprising. None of it. It’s been going this way for years. I actually said to a friend of mine about ten years ago,”A government couldn’t have devised a better way to surveil their citizens than Facebook. And y’all are just willingly ‘checking in’ and posting publicly where you are and who you’re with, all the time.” There’s nothing you can do about this, I don’t think. I mean, seriously, what can you do? I’m really asking. If anybody has a solution to this, I’m all ears. My solution, just for my own peace-of-mind, has been to just get the fuck off of FB and any form of social media. I just don’t log on there anymore. Ours is a capitalist society; money talks. If nobody goes on Facebook or YouTube anymore, their business models cease to exist. They go under.

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"We’re not China." C'mon man, we're so far ahead of them, they're not competitive. We can eat their lunch. And, they have lots of money that isn't in my family's pocket yet, so let me work on that for, say, two more years, then you'll have Kamala to deal with. Meanwhile, before my retirement I'll pardon every member of my family except myself, and Kamala will do the same for me as soon as she's sworn in. I have her word for it, and Hunter has the photos.

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Please, please, please quit posting your video's to YouTube. Do you see the irony? Some of us are trying to break-up with big tech. There are alternatives.

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Up next: banning misinformation about inflation.

It's for the children.

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So you're saying the good news is that we don't have to worry about a war with China

because the bad news is that we're becoming an idealogical suburb of China?

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How terrifying. It's like we are watching the world pre Germany nd wondering if and when we should act. We are the frogs slowly boiling.

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