OPINION:
Joseph Heller, the author of “Catch-22,” once famously said, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
The same holds true for conspiracy theories. Yes, many — even most — are outlandish and have no basis whatsoever in fact. But a few actually turn out to be real, and oftentimes, they turn out to have been orchestrated by our own government.
Which brings us to COVID-19 and a story so huge that it made headlines and then promptly disappeared, so little did the liberal media want to discuss it.
Just more than a week ago, Google admitted what we’ve known all along: President Biden turned Silicon Valley into his own personal “1984” Ministry of Truth, complete with digital gulags for anyone who dared question the official narrative.
In a stunning display of corporate confession, Alphabet, the parent company of Google — which also owns YouTube — admitted that Team Biden “conducted repeated and sustained outreach” and “pressed” it to silence Americans whose only crime was thinking for themselves about how they — and they alone — wanted to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The best part? Google admitted these targeted Americans weren’t even violating the platform’s policies. The silenced offenders were guilty of nothing more than existing while being inconvenient to the Biden administration’s preferred storyline. They were getting kicked off a platform for breaking rules that literally did not exist.
Now Google is scrambling to rebuild bridges it burned, promising to restore accounts of creators who were digitally disappeared faster than dissidents in a banana republic. YouTube is rolling out the red carpet for those they previously treated like lepers, essentially saying, “Our bad! Come back! We promise we won’t censor you again (until the next Democrat tells us to).”
In a letter to House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan, Alphabet’s attorney, Daniel F. Donovan, wrote: “As online platforms, including Alphabet, grappled with these decisions, the Administration’s officials, including President Biden, created a political atmosphere that sought to influence the actions of platforms based on their concerns regarding misinformation.”
Even though Alphabet quietly went along with the subversive censorship — not once intimating that Mr. Biden and his cronies were behind it — the attorney now says, “It is unacceptable and wrong when any government, including the Biden Administration, attempts to dictate how the Company moderates content.”
The mainstream media quickly let Google off the hook, moving on to the far more pressing story of a pedophile who killed himself in jail (and I’ll say it yet again: If there was one iota of information in Jeffrey Epstein’s voluminous files that implicated President Trump, Mr. Biden, a scummy politician for 50 years, certainly would have released it).
Sure, Alphabet faced pressure from the Biden administration’s digital Brownshirts, but at the end of the day, it had a choice. It could have stood up for free speech and told the government to pound sand. Instead, it chose to be good little corporate citizens and silence Americans for the crime of wrongthink.
Under Google’s byzantine rules, there was apparently no difference between stating a fact and spreading misinformation. It’s like punishing a weather reporter who mentions that it’s raining because the government prefers sunshine.
The whole saga reveals the dysfunctional friendship between Big Brother Biden and Big Tech, a partnership so cozy it would make Josef Stalin blush. While Americans were being silenced, shadow-banned and digitally exiled, our tech overlords were taking orders from Washington like obedient little jackboots.
The real kicker? Many of those same mainstream media voices now crying about “jawboning” were suspiciously silent when it was happening to conservatives, libertarians and anyone else who refused to genuflect before the altar of approved opinion. Funny how free speech suddenly matters when it’s their ox being gored.
Google’s confession isn’t just an admission of guilt; it’s also a road map of how our supposed guardians of democracy weaponized private companies to do what the government legally couldn’t. They outsourced constitutional violations to Silicon Valley and called it a “public-private partnership.”
The Biden administration didn’t just cross the line; it obliterated the line with a bulldozer and then built a censorship factory on the ruins. And Google? It happily provided the construction materials.
Now they’re all sorry, of course. Sorry they got caught. Sorry it’s politically convenient to apologize now. But mostly sorry that someone finally called them out for turning the First Amendment into suggestion rather than law.
Better late than never, Google. But don’t expect us to forget that when push came to shove, you chose government approval over American freedoms. That’s a betrayal that takes more than a corporate mea culpa to fix.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on X @josephcurl.
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