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Home » The Biden administration and Facebook: isn’t this fascism?

The Biden administration and Facebook: isn’t this fascism?

The New Neo Posted on by

Not “fascism” as in “mean people doing mean things that I don’t like,” but “fascism” in its economic sense of “large private businesses being in bed with government”?

Fascism as an economic system is sometimes described this way:

As such, scholars argue that fascists had no economic ideology, but they did follow popular opinion, the interests of their donors and the necessities of World War II. In general, fascist governments exercised control over private property, but they did not nationalize it. Scholars also noted that big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Italian Fascist and German fascist governments. Business leaders supported the government’s political and military goals. In exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies.

Facebook is still considered to be a private company, but it does the government’s bidding – if the government is on the left. And right now, the government is on the left:

Comments

The Biden administration and Facebook: isn’t this fascism? — 47 Comments

  1. Why, yes, Neo, yes, it is fascism. That’s how the Obama regime operated, how a Clinton regime would have, and how the Biden regime is going.

  2. Admitting the collusion with Facebook shows they aren’t afraid to do anything they need to hold on to power. I don’t think the average person knows how fascism works or what fascism even looks like. To many it’s just another word.

  3. Why, yes, Neo, yes, it is fascism.

    No, it’s grotesque corporate / security state manipulation. Look at the behavior of higher ed officialdom over a generation. The mentality is quite unremarkable among the nexus of interests who make the Democratic Party their electoral vehicle.

  4. And of course we see Republican Sen and Rep standing up on their hind legs and condemning this. NOT!
    Another good reason we left the rep party.
    I admit that I am being more circumspect on what I send and say on the net.

  6. The modern semantics of fascism is antifa.

    The modern semantics of KKK is Some, Select [Black] Lives Matter. Also, not to be left in a back h/t transgender pride … black hole… whore ht/ NAACP

    The modern semantics of witch hunts and warlock trials (e.g. trial by press) is the art and philosophy of plausible in lieu of probable. Modern science, too.

    The modern semantics of racism, sexism, ageism, etc., is diversity [dogma] (i.e. color judgment), inequity, and exclusion.

    The modern semantics of religion (i.e. behavioral protocol) denies women and men’s dignity and agency, and reduces human life to a property.

    Yes, an unholy progressive collusion of public and private interests that are antithetical to a reconciliation of each. Demos-cracy is aborted at the Twilight Fringe in a democratic/dictatorial duality.

  7. Yes.
    At this point they’re just toying with us because they’re sure they can say the quiet part out loud.
    But the next question is, of course, “So…what’re you going to do about it?”

  8. At this point they’re just toying with us because they’re sure they can say the quiet part out loud.

    I think you overestimate Psucky.

  9. I would have called it a corporatist government move, but the fascist angle is interesting.

    In recent months I’ve heard talk in congress from both the right and left about breaking up the tech monopolies. I don’t normal want to go there, but at this point I was thinking “Screw ’em” and the Dems say they want to help out.

    Well no, silly me. As Greenwald implied; it’s a protection racket. Bend to the Democrat party’s will or suffer our wrath.
    _____

    This Biden admin. move is so outlandishly unconstitutional and anti-democratic it beggars belief. How do they imagine that they will get away with this?

    This first amendment censorship lawsuit that Trump is involved with: One of their primary arguments is that these private companies are acting as agents of both the government and a political party. But the lawyers would have to prove that, which a few days ago might have difficult to do. Not now!

    I suppose the admin. will claim a national health emergency crisis as a basis. Almost a martial law circumstance, as laughable as that is. I saw Biden on camera today looking more feeble that ever, and as he mumbled for words he said, “This stuff [vaccine misinformation] will kill ‘ya. It’ll kill ‘ya!”

    Joe’s talking about life and death here, and you folks are worried about an antiquated old first amendment?

    Remember hydroxychloroquine? It’ll kill ‘ya!

  10. SHIREHOME:

    I constantly see remarks like yours, about how Republicans haven’t spoken out on a certain topic. And yet I’ve noticed that those making the comments have often not checked to see if that’s the case.

    Now, granted, it can be hard to check for several reasons. One reason is that a person has to do a search for person after person after person in order to see who has spoken out and who is silent. Obviously, that would be incredibly time-consuming. And it’s also the case that the things Republicans say are not always given much airing on the MSM news (unless they can be spun to Republicans’ disadvantage). So they can be harder to find for that reason.

    But have you tried to find them? It’s really not all that hard. For example, just now, I did a quick search for “Ted Cruz on Facebook censorship and Biden administration,” and limited the results to the last 24 hours. Immediately the following statement from Cruz came up, posted very recently:

    Kevin McCarthy has also addressed the issue.

    I’m not going to search for every Republican. But I would guess that quite a few of the more conservative ones have also spoken out.

  11. “I saw Biden on camera today looking more feeble that ever, and as he mumbled for words he said, “This stuff [vaccine misinformation] will kill ‘ya. It’ll kill ‘ya!”

    As we speak the evening news almost word for word giving cover for Biden.

  12. Silver lining: Biden Admin is daily dramatically strengthening argument in Trump lawsuit that Big Tech censorship is state action. — Ted Cruz

    Thanks for backing me up Ted. Heh. He wrote it first, but I hadn’t read it. I swear.

  13. There have been stories in the press about Biden’s halting and erratic decision making process in the Whitehouse. (Should we believe anything in the press?) You don’t suppose some cabinet member or aid threw out a crazy censorship idea and Joe latched on to it and wouldn’t let go?

  14. In the world of actual policing…. rat infested tenements, flop-house hotels reeking of curry, blood stained sidewalks, not the FBI version where they have to ask the US Attorney for permission to visit the men’s room — the police cannot enlist the assistance of a non-police citizen to do something the police are prohibited to do because of law. Example: Officers want to see if the occupant of an apartment has some identifiable stolen property inside. They don’t have enough information for a warrant. They cannot ask the apartment manager to use his pass-key and go in to “have a look around”. As soon as the make that request that manager becomes an agent of the police and is bound by the same legal restraints as the police, in this case the 4th amendment of the US Constitution.

    So when the feds ask, or tell, the techs to so something that the Constitution prohibits them from doing themselves, they are making FB, Twitter, etc Federal agents and therefore bound to abide by the same rules.

    DJT has got to be dancing in the driveway. The Biden admin’s last 48 hours of news briefings has saved him thousands in billable hours for all the research and tracking down of witnesses, etc. Hes been relatively quite, heeding his attorney’s advice of “never interrupt the opposing attorney in the middle of a mistake.”

  16. These fsckers couldn’t make their transgendered trains run on time in a million years. Let’s not Sulla the good name of Fascists.

  17. Glen Greenwald just made Another Mike’s argument, exactly, on Tucker Carlson tonight.

    Facebook becomes a government agent when they comply with government orders to censor.

  18. “Glen Greenwald just made Another Mike’s argument, exactly, on Tucker Carlson tonight.

    Facebook becomes a government agent when they comply with government orders to censor.”

    Well that ought to stop them in their unconstitutional illegal tracks, no? 🙂

    *Ninth Circuit Rubs Hands with Glee*

  19. “Why, yes, Neo, yes, it is fascism.

    No, it’s grotesque corporate / security state manipulation.”

    It’s the definition of Fascism. Crony Capitalism is Fascism.

  20. Big Tech, the Biden administration, Congress and the juduciary KNOW that it’s unconstitutional. So what? They are and will deny it and ‘judges’ will declare that the public has no standing.

    As for SCOTUS, hasn’t the necessary majority repeatedly demonstrated an unwillingness to stand in the face of political winds?

    Where then the redress of grievance? The charge of being a domestic terrorist can now be created out of whole cloth. The message is that, “the nail that sticks up, gets hammered down.” How much longer before Tucker Carlson is discovered to have ‘child porn’ on his computer?

    By definition, in a rigged game, playing by ‘the house rules’ is a game for losers and fools.

    The 2022 and 2024 elections are going to either demonstrate that it’s not yet a fully rigged game or remove any remaining basis for arguing otherwise.

    But if the pubs do take back Congress or even the Presidency, don’t expect the stables to be washed clean. Because that’s a legal impossibility. While the requisite ruthless disregard for Constitutional guarantees necessary to sweeping the stables clean would destroy what we wish to save.

    “Welcome to the real world, neo”. Morpheus, The Matrix

  21. What is deemed disinformation is the new -ism/phobia conjured up by The Left to use against those that stray from the path.

  23. This doesn’t require political theory. Facebook cannot claim to be a private party or to not be bound by the constitution if it is taking instructions from the Government. period.

  24. I think it meets many, perhaps most of the criteria of classical fascism, yes.

    – Increasingly authoritarian government, moving toward totalitarian in its treatment of citizens and small business and state governments.
    – Increasing controls of certain aspects of the economy, of industry. Tech sectors are particularly good examples, being compliant with the requirements of the ideology and policy objectives, each a near-monopoly acting in concert in a cartel-like dominance of the marketplace. The same for the big banks. All showing many examples of doing the bidding of the Administration via the alignment of their actions with the stated goals of the Administration.
    – Increasingly rigid sense of censorship. We already have self-censorship of the main-stream press who are already aligned. Increasingly we have imposed censorship of private citizens and dissenting press alike, and removal from public square forums such as YouTube / Facebook / Twitter.
    – Active collusion of cartel members in silencing or removing alternative platforms of expression (eg Parler etc). Same with the cancellation of financing / payroll / cashflow arrangement of individuals and businesses, by the banks.
    – Use of police functions in clandestine investigations to silence or penalize political dissent.
    – Use of justice functions to further enforce punishment of dissenters.
    – Use of racial issues in a way designed to inflame and / or worsen racial relations across society – see Critical Race Theory for instance.
    – Indulgent and uncritical ‘Blind Eye” treatment to violent protestor factions that destabilize and damage businesses and neighborhoods such as Antifa or BLM.

    Yes I think many of the elements are there, and all seem to be on a trajectory to become increasing coordinated, increasingly obvious. It seems clear that the Administration is providing the authority and available force of government above the Rule of Law on disfavored targets while the cooperating corporate side is doing the dirty work (censorship / cancelling) that would run foul of Constitutional protections. On any of the above issues, a normal person would go broke or bankrupt their business trying to fight such treatment in the system as it exists.

  26. Both Fascism and Communism are varieties of Socialism.

    In Communism the government control of all property is de jure.
    In Fascism the government control of all property is de facto.

  27. Big companies often jump into the bed thinking they will have a total monopoly in their business. Medical insurance, corporations hospitals loved the idea everyone must have insurance. Big Tech agee to do the governments’s dirty work and they get all control.

  28. You are absolutely right. In fact Venezuela under Hugo Chavez was also a facsism.

  29. Biden thinks that ‘vaccine misinformation’ will kill people. I think that if there’s anything persuading people not to take the Covid vaccine, it has been Kamala’s attack on vaccine safety while Trump was still in office, followed by the Biden administration’s hectoring, threatening, we-know-best approach to vaccine promotion. A serious professional marketing campaign would have had much bettr results.

  33. It’s the definition of Fascism. Crony Capitalism is Fascism.

    Disagree strongly. Crony capitalism is crony capitalism.

    Fascism has three components (1) it is revanchist and (2) it favors a political economy of national mobilization and (3) it is constitutionally authoritarian. Stanley Payne had some other criterion I forget and Zevedei Barbu had an engaging argument from the perspective of social psychology that I’ve forgotten. The archetypical fascist regime is devoted to marshalling resources to wreak revenge on the country’s enemies, internal and external. There are regimes and movements which might be called ‘fascistoid’ but lack some key feature (the Japanese regime during the period running from 1937 to 1945; certain Latin American movements). There are regimes which have features in common with fascist regimes, but are not properly termed fascist (examples in Europe would be the Franco, Salazar, and Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regimes). There are fascist regimes which somehow evade the label (Nasser’s and the Ba’ath regimes in the Near East). The label is used with abandon by vulgar magazine writers to describe any sort of non-communist and non-democratic regime, generating much confusion. (The Pinochet regime in Chile is a cardinal example of a mislabeled regime).

    The Maduro regime isn’t fascist, either. It’s just the grossest example of organized thievery in the post-war era.

  34. The entire Green space is a marriage of corporations and governments The federal government subsidizes EV’s and we got Tesla. Same deal with wind and solar. Fascism at its worst.

  35. OBloodyHell:
    Macron is simply using a very narrow definition of “mandatory.” He’s using the term to mean that it will not be punishable by law to remain unvaccinated; that does not mean that unvaccinated people will not be so restricted that ordinary life will not become impossible for them. It’s like what CNN’s Leanna Wu has suggested. Unvaccinated people will not be able to go to work, or go to stores or entertainment venues, they will have to submit to testing twice a week, etc. We won’t require you to get vaccinated, but we’ll harass you and make your life miserable until you do.
    Just as a matter of full disclosure, I’ve been vaccinated myself. That was my personal decision, weighing, as best I could, the risks and benefits as known at the time. Other people have the right to make their own decisions after doing their own weighing. If they come to different decisions than I do, that is their right. It may even turn out their choice was better than mine.

  36. Not “fascism” as in “mean people doing mean things that I don’t like,” but “fascism” in its economic sense of “large private businesses being in bed with government”?

    neo:

    That’s the core of fascism, at least as I remember learning it back in the 80s. However, it seems the Ministry of Truth has been at our dictionaries again to make sure the reader applies it to Trump and not Obama or Biden:
    ____________________________________________________

    Definition of fascism
    1 : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

    –https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
    ____________________________________________________

    Note how this definition leads with nationalism, racism and dictatorial leader but only a nod to business/government.

    I’ll have to find some old dictionaries and encyclopedias and see what they say.

  37. The entire Green space is a marriage of corporations and governments The federal government subsidizes EV’s and we got Tesla. Same deal with wind and solar. Fascism at its worst.

    That’s not fascism. That’s clientelistic rent-seeking politics. The Democratic Party does that reflexively and the McConnell-Boehner wing of the Republican Party does this whenever business lobbyists call dangling checks.

  38. I believe the proper description would be fascistic, rather than simply fascist, and the description would apply to this promotion of censorship in conjunction with so much of the other nonsense going on.

    It’s not just semantics, either. The actual fascists who will rise in response to these fools will be distinctly different.

    Mike

  39. Macron’s definition of “not mandatory” is a distinction without a difference.

    “You don’t HAVE to do it” he said with a gun at my head.

    Making life unlivable without compliance is making it mandatory in every way that matters.

    Let us not let the tap dancers tap dance, on the political stage. That is how we got here, lots and lots and lots of tap dancing, none of which got called out for the dance of lies that it is. They tap danced around the “Patriot Act”, and now we have legitimate people seeking redress of their grievances ONLY kept in Federal prisons indefinitely. They did the same with the Rico statutes. It’s time we started taking serious issue with tap dancing politicos.

    And no, that’s no besmirching Fred and Ginger, or Gene. THEY were tap dancing where it belonged, on Broadway and the movie screens.

  40. }}} I’ll have to find some old dictionaries and encyclopedias and see what they say.

    And THIS is why we have hard copies of books.

    Remember, it’s been A DECADE since Amazon revealed it had the Orwellian capacity to not only reach into your kindles and remove things, but to literally change the actual contents of what you have without ever telling you it was doing so.

    Yeah, that wasn’t a wakeup call to be wary of Amazon’s “book” publishing. Nope. not the least. :-/

  41. Dere’s DIS information, and den dere’s DAT information.
    Facebook only wants you to publish DAT information… See?

    😀

  42. OBloodyHell:
    Oh, I wasn’t justifying Macron. I was trying to point out the symantic gymnastics by which he would justify saying that vaccination was not madated, while at the same time coercing people by harrassing them until they gave in.

  44. Fascism is nothing more or less than watered down communism.
    Both these ideologies hate capitalism, demand absolute obedience of the citizenry, arrest or murder anybody who they deem an “enemy of the state,” and crush individual liberties.

    Here in the USA, prior to Bidet et al. being installed in power, the govt. coerced via rules, regulations, edicts, and laws, business to not do or do whatever the govt demanded of them.
    That is fascism.

    And are we to believe that when an absolute dictator – like a Hitler – takes power, business leaders can tell him, “sorry pal, but we are not going to do what you want us to do.
    Sure.
    Not that some business leaders do in fact support the goals of an absolute dictator, but that is really irrelevant. Those that do not will be murdered or tossed in a gulag, maybe with their entire families.
    An absolute dictator calls the shots, and eventually everybody falls in line. Those that do not, are dead.

  47. TommyJay asks “(Should we believe anything in the press?)”

    A new international media study funded by Reuters, led by an Oxford University media expert (named Nielsen), surveyed over 2,000 people in 47 nations about their trust in news media.

    The US ranks dead last of 47, with only 29% agreeing to trust new media.

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