Incestuous. It’s an ugly adjective, but it’s the only one that accurately describes the interrelationship between three powerful and highly influential leftist families: Obama, Biden, and Big Tech.
As Katherine Doyle of the Washington Examiner reports, “The Obama-Biden administration from 2009-2017 was criticized for its close ties to Big Tech, and veterans of that White House, as well as of technology firms, are finding their way back into Joe Biden’s government. This at a moment when major tech firms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google are under fire for what critics call a politically biased crackdown on conservative speech.”
Doyle calls these people “reverse revolvers” — which is to say they’ve moved from the Obama administration to the private sector and back to the Biden administration. Their numbers are dizzying. Suffice it to say that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will have plenty of speech suppressors whispering sweet nothings into their ears.
It’s great work if you can get it: Join an incoming administration’s transition team, help it vet thousands of personnel for key staff positions (including those at the Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and the DOJ’s antitrust division), and then, when you’ve got all your people in place, jump aboard yourself. What could be more … incestuous? I mean, it’s not as if these Big Tech transplants will advocate on behalf of their former employers. It’s not as if they’ll promote policies that make Big Tech even bigger and more powerful, regardless of whether those policies are beneficial to fundamental American institutions such as competition, free-market capitalism, and the marketplace of ideas.
Even Jennifer Palmieri, the longtime Democrat communications operative and author of the worst-selling book Dear Madam President, can see what’s going on here. “It has not escaped my attention,” she tweeted on January 7, two days after the Democrats took both Georgia Senate seats, “that the day social media companies decided there actually IS more they could do to police Trump’s destructive behavior was the same day they learned Democrats would chair all the congressional committees that oversee them.”
The Big Tech companies are, as Rachel Bovard says, “very much buying off any enforcement action from the Biden administration — be it aggression on Section 230, more antitrust enforcement, or regulatory action from the FCC.” Bovard, a senior policy director at the Conservative Partnership Institute, says Big Tech;s presence is everywhere, including Commerce, State, and Defense.
Serving as Biden’s one-woman Praetorian Guard will be former Facebook lawyer and regulatory wrestler Jessica Hertz. As his staff secretary, she’ll be able to review memos, regulations, and appointments before they reach his desk — even deciding whose viewpoints deserve a hearing in the Oval Office.
“Personnel is policy,” writes Steven Nelson at the New York Post, and this Beltway axiom couldn’t be any more true than with the intermingling of Biden and Big Tech, and their targeted assassination of inconvenient speech.
As libertarian journalist Glenn Greenwald tweeted, “History moves quickly. The 9/11 attack was 20 years ago. That means nobody under 35, maybe 40, has a real political memory of it. Liberals begging corporations to censor ‘extremist’ speech. Emotions exploited to demand quick new anti-terrorism laws & powers? The same dynamic.”
Greenwald is right. We’ve heard the Capitol rioters described as terrorists by numerous Democrats, and even one feverish Republican, Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, whose time would be much better spent denouncing the Biden administration’s creepy relationship with Big Tech, and the Left’s craven efforts to silence the Right.