Conservative Nonprofits Help Google, Facebook, Twitter Silence Conservatives on the Internet

“The richest companies in the world are being defended by conservative nonprofits as they attack conservatives.” — Tucker Carlson, host “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News 

Friday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” Fox News host Tucker Carlson accused Koch brother-funded conservative organizations of helping Google, Facebook, and Twitter suppress conservative speech on the Internet.

Carlson pointed to a recent report (“Google and the Koch Network: A Troubling Alliance of Convenience” published by the Campaign for Accountability) that found 22 Koch-funded conservative organizations including Americans for Prosperity, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the American Conservative Union, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and the Mercatus Center have been colluding with giant social media monopolies to shield the giants from government oversight.

“Here’s how it works. Big Tech companies silence conservatives; conservative nonprofits try to prevent the government from doing anything about it.” — Tucker Carlson, host “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News

The nonprofit conservative champions in Washington, D.C., which reputedly uphold and defend conservative ideas and causes, actually aren’t defending conservatives; they’re really defending Big Tech.

“They [conservative nonprofits] make deals with people who hate you [conservatives]. They secretly sell out your interests; then they beg you to tithe like its the medieval church.” — Tucker Carlson

The Koch brothers network has secretly funneled at least $10 million into defending Silicon Valley companies, which have been silencing conservative voices and censoring conservative speech over the Internet.

“As one former Koch employee recently told this show, quote, ‘I know for a fact they take money from social media companies to do their bidding.'” — Tucker Carlson

Carlson said the Competitive Enterprise Institute and three other groups, which are bankrolled by Google and the Koch brothers, sent a joint letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions in September 2018 expressing their dismay over the Justice Department’s intentions to investigate the Internet giants for squashing competitors and stifling speech.

Carlson then called out the Heritage Foundation, the “biggest and best-funded think tank in Washington,” for carrying Big Tech’s water rather than looking out for the interests of conservatives.

According to Carlson, Heritage defends Silicon Valley’s special privileges when it argues that conservatives can simply “start their own Google” if they don’t like what the tech giant is doing.

The Heritage Foundation fired back at Carlson’s allegations in a statement accusing him of making “several false, outrageous, and unfounded accusations” on Friday’s show.

“We won’t be intimidated or bullied as we continue to represent the interests of conservatives and all Americans. Heritage supports empowering consumers rather than government. We are, and have always been, champions of the free market and critics of government intervention.” — Rob Bluey, vice president of communications, Heritage Foundation

The problem is Heritage hasn’t always been “champions of the free market and critics of government intervention” as Bluey claims.

In 1989 when universal health care was neither established nor inevitable, Heritage unveiled its plan for comprehensive legislation to provide universal “quality, affordable health care” in the book A National Health System for America by Stuart Butler and Edmund Haislmaier.

Heritage’s individual mandate was “not a mandate on employers, but a mandate on heads of households.”

“[T]he Heritage mandate was indistinguishable in principle from the ObamaCare one. In both cases, the federal government would force individuals to purchase a product from a private company.” — Avik Roy, Forbes 

Again in October 2015, Jim DeMint, who headed Heritage at the time, and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich pressured Freedom Caucus members to endorse Paul Ryan for House Speaker.

In a closed-door meeting with the House Freedom Caucus, DeMint and Gingrich convinced some members to rethink making Ryan Speaker, whom they saw as a tool of John Boehner, the Speaker they had just ousted.

“Promises were made … as I understand it … I was really surprised that the head of the Heritage Foundation, Jim DeMint was making calls telling conservatives to back off their conservatism and back the guy for Speaker that doesn’t just have a D, he has an F under the Conservative Review analysis.” — Louis Gohmert, Republican Congressman, Texas

According to Carlson, the duplicitous conservative nonprofits’ system has been in place for decades, which could explain “why, no matter how much money you send, nothing gets more conservative.”

Sources cited in this story include: Tucker Carlson: Heritage Foundation, Other Koch-Funded Groups Carrying Water For Big Tech’s Left-Wing Agenda, Google and the Koch Network: A Troubling Alliance of Convenience,  Google Transparency Project Releases Database of 3,000 Grants Awarded to Academic Researchers by Google, Heritage Foundation Responds to Tucker Carlson’s False Accusations on Big Tech, and How the Heritage Foundation, a Conservative Think Tank, Promoted the Individual Mandate.

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Taking My Ball and Going Home and Leaving Social Media Behind

“[W]hosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet. Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment” Matthew 10:14,15, KJV

It’s an understatement to say that I’ve had a rocky relationship with online social networking services and video-sharing websites over the last twelve years.

After being blocked by Facebook, shadow banned by Twitter, and terminated by the Google subsidiary YouTube, I moved my conservative opinion and Christian worldview postings to USA.Life, Gab, and Brighteon.com. And now I’ve deleted my accounts from Gab and USA.Life and the videos from my channel at Brighteon.com. 

When I had first joined Gab, I received a lot of feedback to my comments, postings, and responses. But after a few months, interest in my posts waned considerably. Fewer and fewer Gabbers responded to my postings and views.

And as for USA.Life, the reaction and interest to my posts and comments were few and far between from the time I joined. It appears that the truths and insights I had to offer never resonated or caught on with USA.Life members.

The decision makers at Brighteon had little appreciation for the time, work, and creativity I put into my videos. The site’s “moderation team” would periodically delay publishing particular videos, especially the ones critical of the Roman Catholic Church.

More than once I’d wait several hours or even days for one of my videos to be approved for public viewing on my channel, which increased my anxiety and added to my frustration. I would spend days finding a theme, gathering information, music, and video clips, and then rewriting and editing what I’d gathered for the video. 

The final straw came when Brighteon’s “moderation team” rejected a video and refused to publish it for copyright violations. Their rejection notice was déjà vu all over again.

The YouTube braintrust had used “copyright violations” as the excuse to terminate my channel. The emerging pattern was clear. First build the case for termination by withholding certain videos for subject matter infractions and reject others for perceived copyright violations; then lower the termination boom on my channel for repeated infractions and violations. 

I’m convinced that the social networking services and video-sharing websites to which I had subscribed didn’t want my conservative opinions and Christian worldview expressed and disseminated on their platforms. It’s also true that the “followers,” “friends,” and “viewers” I had on these sites expressed little to no interest in my comments, responses, and postings.

So, I’m taking my ball and going home. I’ve returned to my blog The Millstone Diaries to make one last ditch effort to reach people online with the truths that I have learned, the opinions I’ve formed, and the worldview I’ve developed over the years.

Paul wrote that “faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God.” It’s God alone who causes people to hear, and unless people online are given ears to hear the truth, The Millstone Diaries will join the ash heap with my other futile endeavors. 

Amen.

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Google Helped Democrats Win House Seats in 2018 Midterms

Google’s biased search algorithm actually flipped seats in the 2018 US midterm elections, according to senior research psychologist Dr. Robert Epstein of the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. Epstein, who received his PhD in psychology from Harvard University and is the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today, said that the search engine’s “dramatically biased” results could have shifted over 78 million votes to Democrats.

Epstein’s study of three California House races found that Google played a major role in flipping the Republican-held seats to Democrats by controlling what millions of undecided voters saw when they searched 500 election-related terms.

Unlike Bing and Yahoo, Google’s results showed a “significant liberal bias” and with 90 percent of the search engine’s market share in the US such a bias has enormous influence.

“People trust algorithmic output. They trust Google. They think because it’s generated by a computer, they don’t see the human hand – they think it’s impartial and objective and, because of that, their opinions change,” Epstein said.

 

 

I.M. Kane

Like me at https://usa.life/misterjkane

Follow me at https://gab.com/imkane

Watch my videos at https://www.brighteon.com/channel/imkane

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Why Are the Social Media Giants So Afraid of This Commentary?

Why Won’t Google, BING, and DuckDuckGo allow this published commentary to appear in their search engines? 

Only You Can Prevent Social Media Giant Censorship

“GOVERNMENT INTERVENTION” NOT REQUIRED

by Jerry Kane, ©2019, blogging at The Millstone Diaries

Back in the day when leftists masqueraded as liberals, they’d often say, “I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.” Although the aphorism’s meaning was lost on them, it reverberated within their “echo chambers” and gave them the pretense of magnanimity, which they seemed to relish at the time.

Today the leftists have bolted from the closet and have abandoned all pretense of embracing the protection of free speech. They’ve taken off the mask of liberalism, and discarded it along with their “cherished” aphorism. Now they are leading the effort to squelch freedom of speech, demanding that ideas and opinions they deem insensitive and hateful be censored and silenced on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Being hardcore leftists themselves, the CEOs of these social media giants have been more than happy to comply with their wishes.

First Stormfront, a white nationalist, white supremacist, neo-Nazi group lost its web address of more than two decades beginning the “crackdown against hate sites.” Whimpers chimed over the Internet, but not many on the right gave serious attention to what was happening. Next the social media giants collectively set their sights on Alex Jones, which garnered more attention and brought their assault on free speech to the forefront. Although they saw Jones as an easy target, he was the proverbial “canary in the coal mine” (albeit more Kuku than canary) warning Americans that the social media giants had joined forces and were out to purge the Internet from politically “inappropriate” ideas and “offensive” speech.

But the giants weren’t concerned because they viewed Jones as the tin-foil hat poster boy for offensive, insensitive, and hateful speech. They surmised that the mainstream conservative and evangelical opinion-makers would show little sympathy for Jones and wouldn’t make much noise about the violation of his free speech rights. And they guessed right because few of the mainstream talkers and pundits on the right voiced any genuine concern for what was happening to Jones.

As they say, the camel doesn’t stop once its nose is under the tent, so the social media giants went after more undesirable voices that they considered low-hanging fruit. They banned Dennis Prager, Franklin Graham, some lesser-known Christian ministries for posting “unsuitable” content on their platforms. And now it’s become a daily occurrence as more and more evangelicals, conservatives, classic liberals, and patriots are rounded up and shadow-banned by Twitter, censored by Facebook, and terminated by YouTube for expressing ideas and opinions that the giants claim violate their community standards regarding bullying and hate speech.

America needs a kid who’s good with a slingshot because the lauded movers and shakers and heralded opinion-makers with the loudest voices and biggest megaphones on the right are either intimidated, afraid, or controlled and won’t stand up and fight the giants. They know what’s been going on, yet they constantly promote the social media giants’ platforms on their shows, encouraging people to join the platforms and to like and follow them when they go there. They’re appeasers feeding the giants hoping to be the last ones censored and banned.

Conservatives, classic liberals, evangelicals, and patriots on social media find themselves on the horns of a dilemma. If they continue to express contrary thoughts, ideas, and opinions, they will be purged. If they self-censor and stop posting and tweeting their “offensive and hateful” thoughts, ideas, and opinions and go along to get along, some social media friend, social justice warrior, or LGBTQ and sometimes Y-stapo member will uncover something offensive they tweeted or posted years before they got their mind right and they’ll be given a strike or a time out or some other childish reminder that failure to communicate means time in the box.

Yet something must be done to halt the attack on free speech and to keep the giants from purging all their political and religious enemies from their platforms under the pretense of promoting inappropriate ideas and expressing offensive speech. Although the solution may prove to be easier said than done, it will solve the problem, and it doesn’t require government intervention.

If the majority of account-holding conservatives, classic liberals, evangelicals, and patriots on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube would en masse join the giants’ competitors such as Gab, USA.Life, and Brighteon.com and ask their friends on social media to join them there, it’s likely Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube would backpedal their censorship and revise their speech code guidelines and community standards.

If the U.S. Constitution, the First Amendment’s freedom of speech and conscience clause, and the Founders’ belief in God-given rights and individual liberty mean anything to conservatives, classic liberals, evangelicals, and patriots in this country, this proposed solution will be easier done than said. What’ll happen next only God knows. “I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. … Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.”

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