'Hate speech engineering team': not from 1984

The Friday Letter / No. 451 / Orlando, Florida

At the search engine duckduckgo.com, the first several reviews of Josh Hawley's devastating report on how Big Tech colludes with government to create authoritarian rule are all from – you guessed it – establishment “journalists” connected with monopolist Jeff Bezos or his cohorts. This is the search engine that is supposed to provide the fairness that state-affiliated Google prohibits.

This should surprise nobody. Whenever a patriot peels the scab from Approved State Doctrine, that's when the howling gets loudest. The Tyranny of Big Tech is arguably the most important book of the year.

What infuriates the Establishment Elite is that Hawley is an intellectual. He uses words you have to look up in the dictionary and weaves arguments that require actual brain activity to understand. In the Establishment's view – left and right – only progressives can be intellectuals.

First, some background. Simon & Schuster was the original publisher. It bailed after Hawley challenged the election results, similar to what Democrats did in 2016 and 2000. A Washington Post reviewer noted that the challenge, on Jan. 6, was “the same day pro-Trump rioters stormed the Capitol.” To bolster its excuse, S&S cited Trump's “role in what became a dangerous threat to our democracy and freedom.”

Unless you get your information from state media, you already know that Trump's rally speech contained not one word about rioting, storming the Capitol, committing insurrection or engaging in any kind of lawbreaking.

Simon & Schuster is one of the Big Five U.S. publishers. It has a lot of weight to throw around. Its explanation of the cancellation began with “After witnessing the disturbing, deadly insurrection that took place on Wednesday in Washington. . .”

The incident was deadly all right. But the only non-natural death was the shooting of unarmed Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol Police lieutenant that some press reports now identify as Michael L. Byrd. He has not been charged in her murder, as was Derek Chauvin, who committed a stupid but department-sanctioned procedure to restrain a fatally-drugged violent felon by pinning his neck to the ground. Ashli Babbitt was an Air Force veteran. George Floyd was a loser and a menace. His last act, under a fatal dose of fentanyl, was to commit a felony by trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, followed by resisting arrest.

Derek Chauvin got 22 and a half years in a kangaroo trial in which one of the jurors announced her vote before the trial even began. Lt. Byrd, if that's who shot Ashli Babbitt, to our knowledge did not even undergo the standard procedure of being taken off duty, having the death weapon seized, and undergoing a thorough investigation. That may have happened, but we don't know because the Capitol Police, under the ultimate direction of Nancy Pelosi, doesn't follow usual law enforcement procedure.

This may strike you as my wandering off the subject, but the worst event that took place that day was not what the Socialist-Democrat-Media Alliance calls an attack on our democracy (actually, we are a republic). The most outrageous event that day was the killing of Ashli Babbitt.

Ignoring Ashli Babbitt's homicide, Simon and Schuster used the “insurrection” to justify abandoning Hawley's book. A nifty excuse, but the real reason is something else: pressure from the S&S worker corps. An unnamed insider reported the threat of a rebellion if Hawley's book were published. Says a leftwing website called Vox, “Simon & Schuster’s decision to cancel Hawley’s book is just the latest flashpoint in an ever-escalating publishing battle: a battle between the idealistic and underpaid young liberals who make up the bulk of the industry’s workforce and the cynical and profit-motivated structures in which they do their work.”

Egads, a company that seeks profits!

Because publishers like to make money, a Vox writer explains, “all of the so-called Big Five publishing houses that put out the majority of trade books in the US have right-wing imprints that publish un-fact-checked screeds full of racist and anti-democratic ideas. Those books may or may not be good for society, but they definitely sell.”

Oh, now we understand.

Open any page of The Tyranny of Big Tech to understand why the Left and Establishment Right need to silence Josh Hawley: His exhaustively-researched reporting is a threat to the comfortable status quo they enjoy.

Even Fox News ignores him. Interviewed about something else the other night by Tucker Carlson, Hawley didn't get one question or mention of his book. Earlier, while promoting his own forthcoming book from Simon & Schuster, Carlson acknowledged that S&S had cancelled Hawley but never reported that Hawley was picked up by the great conservative publisher Regnery.

With increasing annoyance, Carlson spends valuable air time hawking both his book and his pay-wall Fox Nation show, while both Mark Levin and Jesse Watters have virtually turned their programs over to marketing their own books, obviously too busy to give this U.S. Senator a platform. Their programs have become painful to endure. To be considered newsworthy at Fox, the test seems to be employment there.

With unquestioned obedience to her boss, the Washington Post reviewer tried to explain why S&S had to cancel the untrustworthy Hawley: “A good example is his attempt to prove, with information from a Facebook whistleblower, that platforms such as Facebook, Google and Twitter had colluded on the kinds of posts to disallow on their sites. The evidence, Hawley says, was in an internal Facebook workflow tool called Tasks that showed that the company was getting input from Google and Twitter about what to 'censor.'

“Hawley confronted Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg about the issue at a Senate hearing last November, and Zuckerberg patiently explained (emphasis added) that the platforms do not coordinate on what to take down, except in instances involving important matters of security, like a terrorist attack or child exploitation.”

Or, she might have added, when actual newspapers like the New York Post expose Black Lives Matter founder Patrisse Cullors' five multi-million dollar homes or reveal the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop computer.

How's that for mawkish fawning?

Excerpt from The Tyranny of Big Tech

“Mike Gilgan knew Facebook's censorship practices. He had seen them in action. He could rattle off the deliberately prosaic names the company assigned its various censorship teams: there was the “Integrity Team,” the “Hate Speech Engineering Team,” and the “Community Well-Being Team.” And he knew what these teams were up to. When he spoke to us, Gilgan still had access to some internal Facebook platforms and materials, which was one of the reasons we assessed him to be credible. And it turns out there was quite a lot of talk about censorship at Facebook.

“Facebook didn't make censorship decisions at random, not according to Gilgan. Nor did the company simply leave them to the whims of algorithms. Real, living humans at Facebook made scores of censorship decisions, including the most sensitive ones, working across the company's various content moderation teams with a tool called Tasks.”

The Tyranny of Big Tech by Josh Hawley. Regnery Publishing, 2021. 188 pages including annotations. U.S. $29.99. Canada $38.99. From Thriftbooks, $25.76.