How many times have we heard the word “oligarch” used in the last year in reference to the most dangerous places in the world — places where authority is meted out not to the people, but to the people with power?
Places like Russia, China, Ukraine, Iraq.
Russia, in particular, gets singled out a lot as the place where “election interference” was birthed as an evil plot by oligarchs who wanted to elect Donald Trump president in 2016.
But what if the most dangerous place in the world isn’t Russia? What if it is Silicon Valley?
After all, what influence did Russia have over the 2016 election? A few hundred “bots” making the rounds of Facebook to complain about “Crooked Hillary”? A few hundred thousand dollars to spend on Facebook advertising (in an election where $1.5 billion was spent by the two candidates)? Yet there is no evidence the Russians shifted even one vote.
Compare that to the oligarchs of Silicon Valley — the Big Tech Bullies — who have a few hundred billion dollars of influence to throw around. One professor testified in 2019 that Google, Facebook and Twitter could shift up to 15 million votes in the 2020 election through data manipulation if they all supported one candidate.
Well, it’s 2020, and they do support one candidate, and it ain’t Donald Trump. And they aren’t just using data manipulation either. As of last week, they have come out from behind the curtain and shown that they are willing to do anything to help “their guy” — Joe Biden. That’s why, when evidence surfaced that implicated the former vice president in possible involvement in his son Hunter’s suspicious business dealing overseas, Twitter and Facebook came to the rescue — blocking access to the New York Post stories that brought these allegations to light. And beyond that, blocking the Twitter accounts of the president’s reelection campaign, his press secretary and many other advocates.
For the last five years, you’ve heard Democrats attack President Trump because of his alleged indebtedness to Russian oligarchs. Well, what about Joe Biden’s indebtedness to not just the Big Tech tyrants, but also to the mainstream media, which is also covering up the story?
Let’s take a step back and consider who is a greater threat to the free world — those Russian oligarchs or the Big Tech variety?
Despite the complaints of Russian collusion with Trump in 2016, the lengthy Mueller probe found no evidence that any Russian had any corrupt influence on Trump or his campaign, either before or after he became president. There was just innuendo and smears, and by the way, they were greatly amplified by the very social media platforms whose threat we are considering today.
Any connection between Trump and Russia has been distorted into chicanery or corruption. That’s nonsense. What we are talking about in regard to Trump and Russians is business deals, not politics, but since Democrats are now more anti-capitalist than the former Soviet Union, they are worried about the fact that capitalist Trump might have looked at investing in Russia or vice versa — that Russians might have invested in Trump’s businesses. In their world, doing business is a crime.
But doing business is not a form of corruption. Unless you intend to relegate Russians to the status of undesirables simply because of their national origin (in other words, because you approve of anti-Russian discrimination), there is no reason why Trump or anyone else would not talk to Russians about business deals.
Consider what Business Insider touted as Trump’s “decades-long history of business ties to Russia”:
- In 1986, Trump considered building a luxury hotel in Moscow. Never happened.
- In 1996, Trump considered investing $250 million in Russian real estate. Never happened.
- People with Russian passports or addresses bought properties in Trump’s luxury towers in Florida. So what? According to the federal fair housing office, “It is illegal to discriminate in the sale or rental of housing. … The Fair Housing Act prohibits this discrimination because of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability.” If Trump had turned down Russians because they were Russians, then you could start investigating him for breaking the law.
- In 2005, Trump thought about turning the site of a pencil factory into a “high-end skyscraper.” Never happened.
- In 2015, Trump authorized his attorney Michael Cohen yet again to pursue the idea of building a hotel in Moscow. Sorry, never happened.
So why didn’t any of those lucrative deals come to fruition? A statement by Trump in 1988 seems to suggest he didn’t want to play ball with Russian oligarchs, bureaucrats or dictators: “In the Soviet Union, you don’t own anything. It’s hard to conjure up spending hundreds of millions of dollars on something and not own.”
Or as Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008, “As much as we want to take our business over there, Russia is just a different world. It is a question of who knows who, whose brother is paying off who. … It really is a scary place.”
Got it?
How this could be transformed into the damning portrait of a “cozy” relationship between Trump and Russian oligarchs just boggles the imagination, but that is the nonsense that Democrats have been peddling for the last five years.
But let’s ask this: Who did have a cozy relationship with Russian oligarchs and Chinese oligarchs and Ukrainian oligarchs? Thanks to the New York Post (and the Senate Homeland Security Committee) we now have compelling evidence that Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son, was trading on his name for huge sums of money in all three of those countries.
We found out last month from a Senate report that Hunter Biden’s company received a $3.5 million wire transfer from Elena Baturina in 2014. Baturina, the widow of the former Moscow mayor, is among the richest people in Russia. Then last week, we found out from the New York Post that Hunter Biden’s greasy deals in foreign lands also implicated his father.
The Post had acquired a copy of the hard drive from a mysterious laptop that seemed to have previously belonged to none other than Hunter Biden. It contained thousands of emails, photographs and more. Among the emails were evidence that the younger Biden had arranged a meeting between his father and an adviser working for the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings (where Hunter was inexplicably a highly paid board member). This, of course, contradicted Joe Biden’s frequent claims that he didn’t know anything about Hunter’s business dealings.
Most damning of all, perhaps, was an email outlining a lucrative deal between a Chinese company, Hunter Biden and several other principals. With the subject line “Expectations,” the email included details of “remuneration packages” for six people involved in a business venture with CEFC, apparently a reference to the former Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Co.
Hunter Biden was slated to be chair or vice-chair, “depending on agreement with CEFC,” and his “remuneration” was going to be “850,” presumably $850,000. Ninety percent of the equity in the new company was to be divided between five people, but most suspiciously the email asks whether the final 10 percent would be “held by H for the big guy?”
Gee, which “big guy” do you think H (Hunter) might be holding 10 percent for? Maybe the vice president of the United States who had introduced Hunter to top members of the Chinese Communist Party when they traveled together to Beijing on Air Force Two in 2013? Nah, who would believe it? Good guy Joe Biden?
Well, most people didn’t believe Richard Nixon was a crook either, until it turned out he had taped himself in the Oval Office doing crooked things, and then all of a sudden the nation turned against him almost as one. That’s how bad these emails are for Joe Biden.
At least, they would be bad if voters found out about them — which explains why Twitter and Facebook and, let’s face it, the major networks and the major news channels and the major newspapers want to pretend they don’t exist.
As I and every other sentient being on the planet have known for the last four years, the mainstream media and the social media have made it clear — they hate Donald Trump and they will do anything to get him out of office, even if it means selling their souls to Joe Biden.
So it was no surprise that the media tried to write off the corrupt Hunter Biden sex-tape, crack-pipe, email confessional laptop hard drive as just so much “Russian disinformation.” Talk about a conspiracy theory! Who thinks the Russians spent years faking 40,000 emails and creating deep-fake sex videos of Hunter Biden smoking crack while getting his thing on? But I suppose that lunatic cover story is to be expected from the Fake News media.
What no one could have expected, however, is that the increasingly power-drunk oligarchs at Facebook and Twitter would brazenly thumb their nose at not just the Washington elites whom they own, but also the American people, whom they despise.
When the New York Post — the oldest newspaper in the United States, founded by Alexander Hamilton, and the fourth largest paper in the country — tried to post a link to its first story on the Hunter Biden emails, it discovered that Twitter was blocking the URL. Facebook basically did the same thing. The explanations — however disguised — came down to one thing, and one thing only: The stories about Hunter Biden were a threat to the elevation of Joe Biden to the presidency, and thus must be stamped out of existence.
Well, that’s an exaggeration, but you know damn well that if Twitter had the wherewithal to stuff the damn laptop hard drive back into the genie’s bottle, poof! Now you see it, now you don’t!
No one with a bit of sense, let alone anyone who has read “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” will be comfortable with a Ministry of Social Media Truth determining what is safe for the public to consume — and what to drop down the “memory hole” to be burned or buried forever.
Yet Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, and Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, have arrogated to themselves so much power that they apparently no longer care who knows it — who knows that they, not some random Wall Street trader, are the real Masters of the Universe.
Compare that to those famous Russian oligarchs whom the media has told us for the last four years are the most dangerous people on the planet. According to Forbes data from 2018, the richest of those oligarchs, Alexey Mordashov, has a paltry $20 billion. Do you think he can even kiss the ring of Zuckerberg, who is worth a cool $96 billion? OK, most of the Russian oligarchs clock in between $5 billion and $10 billion, which is also the realm of Jack Dorsey’s fortune, but you get the idea.
The thing to remember is that those Russian oligarchs only care about one thing — making money. Most of them got their power the old-fashioned way, by hijacking an industry like real estate or energy or manufacturing, or by sucking up to the powerful politicians who control the distribution of government contracts and the corresponding graft that goes with them.
But our homegrown American oligarchs control something much more powerful than an industry — they control information. With it, they can control not just a country, but a world — a world that now teeters dangerously on the brink of the perfect mix of Pravda and Nazi propaganda. Indeed, Hitler created a Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, which might well serve as the model for the self-anointed arbiters of truth at Twitter & Gang.
Can they be stopped?
That, of course, is the question any right-thinking person is asking today. It may be too late, but the Senate Judiciary Committee plans to subpoena Dorsey (pictured) and probably Zuckerberg to come and testify this Friday about their plans for world domination. It sounds like a joke, but it isn’t.
As unlikely as it might seem, apparently the first step toward Dorsey and Zuckerberg running things is to get Joe Biden elected. Perhaps they heard from their friends in China how easy it is to do business with the former vice president. In any case, if there is no President Trump after Jan. 20, 2021, then there is no real hope of anyone ever again having the strength to stand against the Big Tech Beast before it devours not just our First Amendment but also the bright shiny object formerly known as the land of the free.
