The Hunter Biden Laptop
Hunter Biden is clearly benefitting from the convergence of Big Tech. Or so it would seem. Facebook, Google, and Twitter have a stranglehold on the overwhelming majority of information distribution. All three Big Tech companies have done their best to kill the Hunter Biden Laptop story. The son of former Vice-President Joe Biden found himself once again at the center of alleged international corruption. This week The New York Post broke a number of stories indicating Hunter Biden leveraged his connection to his father. E-mails which surfaced this week detail correspondence between Hunter Biden and one of his business partners. This goes against what Joe Biden asserted as recently as September of last year.
“I have never spoken to my son about his overseas business dealings.” – Joe Biden
The owner of a Delaware computer repair shop discovered the e-mail from an abandoned laptop brought in for service.
Among the e-mails discovered are communications from executives employed by Burisma, a Ukrainian Energy Company upon whose board Hunter Biden sat. One e-mail discusses how Hunter Biden can best use his political connections with his father on behalf of the company. Another is from an executive thanking Hunter for introducing him to his influential father.
Hunter Biden Laptop Photos.
Not going there. Not even providing a link.
Is The Hunter Biden Laptop a smoking gun?
None of this is particularly illegal. Bad optics? Check. Enough for federal law enforcement to make a referral to the Department of Justice? Check. Probably not enough for a conviction without a U.S. Attorney performing a thorough investigation. Any investigation into the Hunter Biden Laptop will probably die in vitro. Should such an investigation commence, it would meet nearly insurmountable obstacles from Democrat lawmakers as well as their imbedded toadies in the Deep State. I’m strangely at peace with this.
Big Tech Censorship
What bothers me, are the initial efforts of Big Tech to suppress this story. The entire “build your own platform, then” refrain from Big Tech is a bit much to swallow given their chokehold on information.
Suspending the twitter of account of the Whitehouse Press Secretary is a bold move. Suspending the twitter account of the NY Post is another one.
So-called “community standards” should not fly in societies that permit monopolies. And believe me, we’ve permitted them. To be candid, I’m still trying to figure how and why we all decided to migrate from Myspace to Facebook. What switch was thrown? Why did we all just suddenly come up with this tacit agreement among ourselves?
What do we call monopolies we permit to exist? Simple: utilities. The definition is embedded right there in the word. An entity that is useful to us. Make no mistake – Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple are useful. Ridiculously useful. Three of those companies, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, are monopolies. Amazon might be on its way, though the big-box realtors and companies like Overstock will fight to the death. Apple can still assert that it has plenty of competition from Samsung, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, etc. Google, Facebook, and Twitter can make no such claim. They are 100% first ballot-hall-of-fame monopolies. Google, Facebook, and Twitter have had their thumbs on the scale in favor of the Democrat Party for a long, long time. This goes way beyond that.
Big Tech Investigation
Ken Buck, R-Colo., sent a letter to the Department of Justice on Wednesday, asking the attorney general to look into accusations of censorship by Twitter and Facebook. It goes against my libertarian instincts to invite government in like this. Except that government has already been invited. By the tech companies themselves. The Big Tech companies with their well established presence, spend fortunes on lobbyists with but a single aim: writing legislation to prevent others to achieve their level of success. It doesn’t take a village, just an army of lawyers. If Conservative Inc. doesn’t get its act in gear, this November may very well be the last credible election we have.
When you’re a monopoly, the free market doesn’t apply anymore. I hate saying that. So if the free market doesn’t apply, then you have to accept certain constraints. Refusing service in the free market will get you sanctioned. It’s traditionally unheard of in a monopoly, as it should be. If you identify with the local Antifa cell, the power company can’t simply show up and shut off your electricity. Same with BLM, or the Southern Poverty Law Center. Nazis don’t get their phones turned off just because they violate Verizon’s “community standards” when speaking with fellow travelers.
So yes, time to treat Big Tech like utilities. No more de-platforming, censoring, or purging information or ideas that someone working there doesn’t like. If you grant a platform to one, you grant it to all. Everyone has the right to a voice. Not the right to be heard of course. Just the right to speak. I still get to change the channel on my television, or shut the lid on my laptop.
Hunter Biden will not go to jail. Be at peace with it.
Based on the open source information available thus far, it is likely that Hunter Biden and his father Joe Biden engaged in some form of influence peddling. It’s likely that their actions in Ukraine, to say nothing of their actions in China, were unethical even illegal. (The campaign has not disputed the veracity of the information found on the Hunter Biden Laptop). That would be for the Justice System to sort out. The interconnected web that is our media and social media, (Twitter and Facebook) should not dedicate themselves to squashing this story or other stories they don’t like. We maintain a free society with the open and free exchange of ideas and information. Even when especially that information is uncomfortable, emerging, or [gasp] possibly inaccurate. We’re a nation of adults. We’ll figure it out.
Selah.
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