by Rush Limbaugh in the Limbaugh Letter, October 2019
"[M]y research and writings have focused on Google, LLC, specifically on the company's power to suppress content -- the censorship problem, if you will -- as well as on the massive surveillance the company conducts, and also on the company's unprecedented ability to manipulate the thoughts and behavior of more than 2.5 billion people worldwide." -- Robert Epstein, Ph.D., American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, 6/16/19
"The work that Google is doing in China is indirectly benefiting the Chinese military ... and frankly 'indirect' may not be a full characterization ... it's more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military." -- General Joseph Dunford, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, CNN, 3/14/19
Once upon a time, when its motto was still "Don't be evil", Google refused to be part of the repressive Chinese Communist system. The company pulled out of China in 2010 due to the Chi-Coms' "censorship of search results", according to MIT Technology Review. But then the potential big bucks of a 1.4 billion population beckoned -- 840 million internet users -- and Google did a 180. "We have always looked at serving the next billion users," as Google CEO Sundar Pichai put it to CNN last June.
Getting in bed with the Chi-Coms has transformed Google -- from a freedom-oriented, censorship-hating American company to a censorship-oriented, Chi-Com-compliant, global surveillance force. As International Business Times reported on 9/4/19: "Google Removes 17,000 YouTube Channels, 100,000 Videos, 500 Million Comments for Hate Speech." (Which is always code for anti-leftist speech.) And that was just in the second quarter of this year.
Google has, sadly, adopted the Chi-Com government-control model. In fact, China's chilling system of "social scoring" was actually developed in tandem with the tech giant. The Chinese government scores people on their behavior and attitudes as they comport with (or stray from) the dictates of the Chinese Communist Party. And then hands out punishments.
Do you really think Google wouldn't transport this system they helped create to the U.S.? They're leftists! "Shaming" in order to control is exactly what leftists do, everywhere and always -- such as actors Debra Messing and Eric McCormack calling to blacklist anyone who attends a Trump fundraiser. We already have left-wing social-media mobs, the pajama-clad, basement-dwelling, anonymous hatemongers who make up the base of the Democrat Party. Look at the boycotts of businesses and firing demands by small bands of crazed leftists using tech to inflate their numbers and influence. Note the number of conservatives who are shadow-banned or banned outright simply because they're conservative.
It's not yet Chi-Com-level control -- Google and Twitter are not the government. But wait until a Democrat is in the White House, and they'll be unofficial government appendages. Hell, Google then-CEO (and eventual Hillary campaign advisor) Eric Schmidt had a satellite office in the Obama West Wing!
China's Brave New World
"[In China, tech] giants ... act as arms of the ... Chinese Communist Party ... As these companies export their products and services to the rest of the world, the security and human rights problems associated with this 'China Model' are progressively exported with them." -- Dr. Christopher Ashley Ford, assistant Secretary, Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, U.S. State Department, 9/11/19
"China's authorities have deployed roughly 200 million cameras across the country to maintain control by expanding surveillance to deter behavior they don't like." -- Washington Examiner. 8/27/19
"...China's social credit system ... is a technology-enabled, surveillance-based nationwide program designed to nudge citizens toward better behavior. The ultimate goal is to 'allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step', according to the Chinese government." -- Fast Company, 8/26/19
"Beijing maintains two nationwide lists, called the black list and the red list -- the former consisting of people who have transgressed, and the latter people who have stayed out of trouble (a 'red list' is the Communist version of a white list.) These lists are publicly searchable on a government website called China Credit ... [F]or example, if someone criticizes the government ... their kids might be ineligible for acceptance to an elite school. Public shaming is also part of China's social credit system [using] pictures ... and the addresses of blacklisted citizens..." -- Fast Company, 8/26/19
[T]ransgressions ... can include membership in or support for the Falun Gong or Tibetan Buddhism, failure to pay debts, excessive video gaming, criticizing the government, late payments, failing to sweep the sidewalk in front of your store or house, smoking or playing loud music on trains, jaywalking, and other actions deemed illegal or unacceptable by the Chinese government." -- Fast Company, 8/26/19
"Some ... checkpoints are equipped with special machines called 'data doors' that -- unbeknown to the people passing through them -- vacuum up identifying information from their mobile phones or other electronic devices. Machine-readable QR codes are ... posted on people's front doors (and officials are equipped with mobile apps to scan them), allowing the authorities to quickly link individuals to their homes and possessions." -- New York Review of Books, 8/16/19
From Yiwu (in Zhejiang province) government website: "Punishments for 'very poor' credit score ... Barred from luxury hotels, buying real estate or luxury cars, kids barred from elite schools." The "rewards for 'outstanding' credit score ... discounts on public tolls, priority to schools, and financial support." -- The Washington Post, 6/4/19
"[N]o-nos include smoking or driving while using a mobile phone, vandalism, walking a dog without a leash, and playing loud music in public. Too much time playing video games and circulating fake news can also count against individuals." -- The Washington Post, 6/4/19
"[A]uthorities are collecting massive amounts of personal information -- from the color of a person's car to their height down to the precise centimeter -- and feeding it into the IJOP ["integrated joint operations platform"] central system ... [A]uthorities consider many forms of lawful, everyday, nonviolent behavior -- such as 'not socializing with neighbors, often avoiding using the front door' -- as suspicious ... The system is tracking the movement of people by monitoring the ... location data of their phones, ID cards, and vehicles; it is also monitoring the use of electricity and gas stations of everybody in the region ... When the IJOP system detects irregularities or deviations from what it considers normal ... the system flags these 'micro-clues' to the authorities as suspicious and prompts and investigation." -- "China's Algorithms of Repression", Human Rights Watch, 5/1/19
"Social credit is like a personal scorecard for each of China's 1.4 billion citizens ... Those ... with top 'citizen scores' get VIP treatment at hotels and airports, cheap loans, and a fast track to the best universities and jobs ... Those at the bottom can be locked out of society and banned from travel, or barred from getting credit or government jobs ... Surveillance cameras will be equipped with facial recognition, body scanning, and geo-tracking to cast a constant gaze over every citizen ... it will be the world's first digital dictatorship." -- ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation), 9/18/19
"The app Google is building for China will comply with the country's strict censorship laws, restricting access to content that Xi Jinping's Communist Party regime deems favorable. The Chinese government blocks information on the internet about political opponents, free speech, sex, news, and academic studies. It bans websites about the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre ... and references to 'anticommunism' and dissidents'. Mentions of books that negatively portray authoritarian governments, like George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm, have been prohibited ... When a person carries out a search, banned websites will be removed from the first page of results ... The search app will also 'blacklist sensitive queries' so that 'no results will be shown' at all when people enter certain words or phrases." -- The Intercept, 8/1/18. Google alternately admits and denies working on "Project Dragonfly", its censored search engine for China.
"In December 2017, sources say [Google CEO Sundar] Pichai traveled to China and attended a private meeting with Wang Huning, a leading figure in the Communist Party. Wang is President Xi's top foreign policy advisor ... The same month, Google announced that it was launching and artificial intelligence research center in Beijing," The Intercept, 8/1/18. Wang Huning is described in The South China Morning Post as China's "ideology czar".
"The idea of constant monitoring is [familiar] in China. Indeed, the name of the government's 2020 project -- xueliang, or 'sharp eyes' -- is a throwback to a Communist Party slogan, 'The people have sharp eyes', referencing the totalitarian ploy of encouraging neighbors to spy on their neighbors." -- Financial Times, 7/20/18
People's Republic of Big Tech
"The Invisible Shackles of America's Social Credit System: China's Social Credit System Is Coming to America, but Big Tech Is Enforcing It." -- Human Events, 9/13/19
"PayPal will close the accounts of anyone it does not agree with on the political spectrum, and some of the big banks are closing the accounts for the same reason. JP Morgan Chase has already done exactly this. Investigative journalist James O'Keefe and his Project Veritas team ... released a disturbing and eye-opening video on the runaround that Chase officials gave to Texas conservative entrepreneur Enrique Tarrio about his canceled account. In February 2019, the Texas Trump supporter received a letter from Chase Bank informing him that 'after careful consideration', the financial institution could 'no longer support' his banking account." -- American Thinker, 9/9/19
"Many Westerners are disturbed by what they read about China's social credit system. But such systems, it turns out, are not unique to China. A parallel system is developing in the United States, in part as the result of Silicon Valley and technology-industry user policies, and in part by surveillance and social media activity by private companies." -- Fast Company, 8/26/19
"[PayPay cofounder Peter] Thiel said he is most concerned about Google's sharing of its artificial intelligence called 'DeepMind', what he deems the tech firm's 'crown jewel'. ... The search giant opened its AI [Artificial Intelligence] research lab in China, the same year that the nation amended its constitution to include a mandate that requires all research done inside the country to be shared with its armed forces [the People's Liberation Army]. 'I think it is unprecedented in the last 100 years, or ever, that a major U.S. company refused to work with U.S. military and has worked with our geopolitical rival,' he said." -- Fox Business, 8/11/19
"Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she's very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don't have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it's like a small company cannot do that," -- Jen Gennai, Google Head of Responsible Innovation, Project Veritas video, 6/24/19
"We all got screwed over in 2016 ... so we're rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again. We're also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?" -- Gennai, Project Veritas video, 6/24/19
"They [Google] are going to redefine a reality based on what they think is fair and based upon what they want, and what ... is part of their agenda." -- Google whistleblower, to Project Veritas, 6/24/19
"Google has likely been determining the outcomes of upwards of 25 percent of the national elections worldwide since at least 2015. This is because many races are very close and because Google's persuasive technologies are very powerful." -- Robert Epstein, Senate testimony, 6/16/19
"Data I've collected since 2016 show that Google displays content to the American public that is biased in favor of one political Party [Democrats] ... a Party I happen to like, but that's irrelevant. No private company should have either the right or the power to manipulate large populations without their knowledge." -- Epstein, Senate testimony, 6/16/19
"In 2016, biased search results generated by Google's search engine algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton ... Google search results -- which dominate search in the U.S. and worldwide -- were significantly biased in favor of Secretary Clinton in all ten positions on the first page of search results in both blue states and red states ... I call this shift 'SEME' -- the Search Engine Manipulation Effect." -- Epstein, Senate testimony, 6/16/19
"[W]here did this ability to control such a giant country [China] come from in the first place? ... Google, Facebook, YouTube, Apple, Oracle, Intel, Cisco, and all those other American high-tech companies eager to get a piece of the fat Chinese pie. The technology was taken piece by piece by the Chinese from all of them to execute, with some local improvements, the social credit system ... Did the companies care? Not enough ... After all, basically, the companies were doing the same thing to us." -- PJ Media, 6/7/19
"Witness just the other day when YouTube instituted a social credit system of its own, demonizing a whole host of conservatives. That's almost identical to what the Chinese are doing, penalizing people who are ranked poorly in their system by denying them mortgages, etc. ... Actually, it may be worse because our tech companies are more deluded than the Chinese. YouTube, etc., think they are doing good (while suppressing free speech) ... Be that as it may, both these systems (American and Chinese) have more similarities than differences." -- PJ Media, 6/7/19
"YouTube 'Adpocalypse' Begins: Steven Croeder and Countless Others on the Right Are Demonitized." -- PJ Media, 6/5/19
"75 years ago: young Americans braved Nazi fire on beaches to liberate a continent and defend Constitutional rights. Today: young Americans whine about people making mean jokes about them on YouTube and demand censorship." -- Ben Shapiro, on Twitter, 6/5/19
"The U.S. is not far behind [China's surveillance state] ... [A] Manhattan judge ruled a bar can toss Trump supporters for their political viewpoints. A recent proliferation of politically motivated boycotts seeks to punish 'bad' viewpoints; protesters are eager to shout down incorrect speech. In this political climate, it's not difficult to imagine businesses or the government assessing social benefit or worth based upon ... political speech. With incredible data collection, the plumbing is already in place for such a system to take hold." -- The Hill, 5/7/18
In his Senate testimony, Dr. Epstein warned that if Big Tech is not harnessed by 2020, "they will be able to shift upwards of 15 million votes to [their preferred] candidate with no one knowing and without leaving a paper trail."
Leftists are -- and always have been -- a minority in America, but due to leftist media and leftist Big Tech, they fake people into believing they're the majority. Like their hardcore comrades in China, they have one agenda: to stamp out all opposition. They are never going to stop trying to shut us up. But because we are America, not China -- they will never succeed. Never!