Big Tech and the Weapons Industry
How the Democratic Party Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Censorship
When Donald Trump won the 2016 US election, I initially thought this was the single worse event to have befallen US politics in a century. From a purely discursive perspective, I now realise that it was perhaps one of the best.
Over the past two decades on both sides of the Atlantic, the Democratic and Labour parties have abandoned class criticism. From the US to the UK there is a growing shift from class-oriented analyses and policies and anti-military interventionism to a concerted focus on language, empowerment through one identity or another, and a complete elision of the voices of the poor, disenfranchised and the very individuals whom these parties claim to represent. Along with the atomisation of individual identities, we have seen a rise of a corporate elite within these left-of-centre parties where Democrats in the US and Labour in the UK have, in terms of foreign policy, oftentimes become more hawkish than their conservative counterparts.
In the weeks leading up to the 2016 presidential election of Donald Trump, the so-called “left”—to include the neoliberal class of wokerati and identitarians—embraced the pollsters who foretold the tremendous surge of support for Hillary Rodham Clinton which would lead to her win and a ravaged GOP. The outcome of that election was not only a devastating blow to the Democratic Party but it has served as a cautionary tale throughout this election. This is a story of how class politics and non-interventionism were quickly forgotten by the very party that had previously prided itself on representing the working class and promoting reform of the multilateral global order to enhance peace. As a result of the left abandoning class issues, the working class responded by putting the GOP’s most belligerent and arguably wealthiest guy into power.
While many Democrats, Republicans and political pundits had faulted the pollsters and the media for placing these rank propagandists into position to read our political future, the problem is not really about how pollsters “got it wrong” in 2016 as they did this election. Of course, the pollsters got it wrong. When major media paints Republicans as “white supremacists” and bigots, it’s no surprise that pollsters won’t get accurate answers to their research. The real story is how the pollsters missed the fact that political parties are radically shifting their political directions in an era of callouts and social media shaming.
Since the emergence of COVID-19, the Republicans have expressed more concern for the working class than I have witnessed in my lifetime—and their voter base has been shifting massively toward the working class regardless of ethnicity. In fact, 26 per cent of Americans who voted for Trump were not white and Missouri senator Josh Hawley, a rising star within the GOP’s populist core responded to the shift within his own party on Twitter: “[T]he future is clear: we must be a working-class party, not a Wall Street party.” Florida senator Marco Rubio concurred with Hawley underscoring his party’s shift towards a non-white, working-class base.
With the Democratic Party’s embrace of the elitist ideology underpinning Clintonism, working-class values have been shoved aside in favour of elite meritocracy. With this in mind, it’s easy to see how the shock that Democrats experienced last Wednesday is not so different from their surprise four years ago after Trump’s victory. While the Democratic Party might have grasped the seat of the presidency, their hold on the Senate is tenuous given that they have been losing the working-class vote as mounting evidence demonstrates the party’s gravitation towards the most elite. Certainly, such observations have been made for many years to the disgruntlement of the Democratic managerial class.
What has brought about this palpable shift in Democratic politics towards a more aggressive managerial capitalism with techno-corporate interests in warfare? Much of this resides in how the Democrats shifted their views on the freedom of speech which has directly effected how major media and social media inform us about government involvement in Big Tech and the weapons industry.
Let’s look back to the Democratic Party of the 1980s which was battling Republican Senator Jesse Helms and the Moral Majority’s hold on the First Amendment. Aside from Helms’ consistent proposal of federal personhood amendments, he along with Al D’Amato, Pat Buchanan, religious leaders Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson, launched a concerted attack on the National Endowment for the Arts for supporting artists and venues engaged in “anti-Christian bigotry.” From Andres Serrano’s notorious photograph “Piss Christ” to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs which explicitly demonstrate gay male bodies, these men successfully campaigned to cancel the 1989 exhibit of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. They were then able to pass legislation forbidding the NEA from funding artists and institutions that “promote, disseminate or produce obscene or indecent materials.”
This is where the once non-partisan American Civil Liberties Union entered the scene along with various witchcraft and pagan organisations and even the IRS. Together they stood against the Helms Amendment which the ACLU called “the crudest example of First Amendment infringement.” Where the ACLU used to be the organisation that protected the freedom of speech, it has, over the past twenty years, shifted to partisan politics protecting Democratic Party interests. Additionally, the ACLU is actively promoting the destruction of women’s and girls’ sports while directly addressing its stance against free speech claiming that free speech can “harm” marginalised groups, notably those with “conflicts between competing values and priorities.”
Jonathan Turley, George Washington University law professor, has expressed concern that the ACLU has aligned itself too closely with the Democratic Party and is less willing than it has been in the past to support unpopular causes such as the free-speech rights of far-right activists. In recent years, the ACLU has actively engaged in repressing the freedom of speech, pushing for the shift of vocabulary with regular call outs to those who question this organisation’s validity. Far away are the days when this organisation defended the First Amendment rights of a Ku Klux Klan leader prosecuted for addressing a small rally and calling for “revengence” against blacks and Jews (Brandenburg v Ohio, 1969) which resulted in the US Supreme Court reversing Clarence Brandenburg’s conviction for advocating white supremacy. That victory for free speech distinguished between political speech and speech both intended and likely to cause imminent illegal action. This case made the essential distinction between advocacy and action—a distinction which today progressives have entirely abandoned, to include the ACLU.
All it takes for the ACLU to tweet about so-called bigotry and “violence” is for this organisation to equate any form of speech (eg. that men cannot be female) with actual discrimination or actual violence. ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio is not unfamiliar with these tactics as Strangio exaggerates the protection of children from sterilisation by framing this as “killing” trans-identified folk. Where the state of Alabama is proposing ground-breaking legislation to protect children’s health, the ACLU is calling such political proposals as “cruel and dangerous.” Free speech is murder and protecting children from what this lobby calls “gender affirmation” is being framed as felonious.
In an interview with Philadelphia Gay News, publisher Mark Segal interviewed Joe Biden who stated, “I will make enactment of the Equality Act a top legislative priority during my first 100 days—a priority that Donald Trump opposes.” Just to be clear—the priority underscored by the incoming president represents a minuscule percentage of Americans most of whom come from middle-upper class backgrounds. More to the point, the Equality Act pivots upon unhinging the rights of women and girls in terms of their fair participation in sports and their physical safety in hospitals, prisons, toilets and changing rooms. The Equality Act, passed by the House of Representatives last year, would ban “discrimination on the basis of sex, gender identity and sexual orientation.” Those who have followed the debates on gender ideology will recognise this legislation for the Trojan horse that it is: a stealth way of removing the rights of women and girls from the protection of single-sex spaces and sports under the guise of "inclusion" (of men).
Not only have many feminists from the UK to the US been outspoken on this issue for the past six years, but Big Tech has played a major role in silencing the dissenting voices against identity politics to include banning users who state that "women aren't men." It’s also no surprise that the Democratic Party has similarly invoked this strain of identity politics while embracing Big Tech’s purge of social media accounts that engage in “wrong speak.” It’s a political gift to any political party to have Big Tech remove politically antagonistic voices from social media allowing masses to believe falsely that there is a consensus. This theatre of political smoke and mirrors lends to the appearance that being progressive—and declaring it regularly through social media posts which fixate on the atomised self—is the most important social commodity. Even the liberal media systematically underscores these virtues giving these ideals positive reinforcement on the nightly news as Elizabeth Warren and others add their pronouns to their Twitter bios. (Warren's is she/her/hers, as if there were any doubt.)
Big Tech has not only a large a role to play in maintaining the freedom of expression today as did the ACLU in years past, but Big Tech is the primary landlord for where freedom of speech takes place. Add to this the fact that Big Tech is largely run and staffed by Democrat Party champions and we need look no further for evidence of how Big Tech partisanship affects our media. The recent scandals involving both Twitter and Facebook which chose to censor the New York Post article on Hunter Biden and then Glenn Greenwald's attempt to cover this for The Intercept speaks volumes to how Big Tech, major media and now independent media are echoing policy off one another. So is it any surprise that Democrats applaud the banning of political ads while these same Big Tech companies also ensure the digital public sphere will host only the “right kind” of ideas? A quite similar scenario has been directed against radical feminists and stalwart Republicans over the past several years on these platforms. Even for those who are not in agreement with either groups’ politics, there is good reason for concern.
Turley has also spoken out against many Democrats who have colluded with Big Tech’s control over free speech to include Jack Goldsmith and Andrew Keane Woods who co-authored an article this year proclaiming that “China was largely right” about censoring the internet. Vituperating these Democrats’ approach to internet censorship to include the flimsy excuse that only governments must respect free speech, Turley writes: “Some may willingly embrace corporate speech controls but it is still a denial of free speech.” Even Dorsey himself admitted to Congress two weeks ago that Twitter censorship is dominated by the mob mentality where users are the ones making the callouts: “We don’t have a general policy around misleading information and misinformation…We rely upon people calling that speech out.” The problem is that when you are a Democrat SEO who decides who can and who cannot have access to the public square while your platform is populated with those of similar political beliefs, the calling out of "wrong speak" will invariably take the form of political purging. Or, at the very least, that’s how it looks from the outside.
And if you don’t think Big Tech's purging users from social media’s public square moves beyond the internet, think again. The online purge has been extended to the real world as was seen earlier this week when CNN anchor Jake Tapper tweeted, “I truly sympathize with those dealing with losing — it’s not easy — but at a certain point one has to think not only about what’s best for the nation (peaceful transfer of power) but how any future employers might see your character defined during adversity.” Tapper’s threat, though implicit, expresses that a person might be left jobless for simply asking that all votes be counted. Tapper’s is hardly a one-off statement. Recently, others have suggested making blacklists of Trump voters. The Trump Accountability Project promises the same end claiming as its mission to “[catalogue] the anti-LGBTQ statements and actions of President Donald Trump and those in his circle” while Antifa member, Adam Rahuba has promised to provide a map listing everyone’s neighbours who have donated to the GOP encouraging them to confront these Republican voters. While a call to have individuals fired, Rahuba promises a blacklisting of GOP donors in a country replete with weapons and is at the very least a disaster in the making.
So much for vigilante uses of Big Tech given that Joe Biden has already begun to assemble his inner circle for his stint at the White House involving the heaviest of hitters from Silicon Valley. If you thought Trump’s “shithole countries” comment unacceptable, you might find Biden’s picks even more so because, you know—sticks and stones.
Who’s on the ballot? For starters, former National Security Advisor and Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, an enthusiastic champion for the invasion of Iraq invasion, is said to be high up on the list for Secretary of State. Her push for the invasion of Iraq resulted in what Medea Benjamin and Nicolas Davies estimate to be 2.4 million Iraqi deaths and her work on Libya during the Obama administration have led to the current humanitarian disaster in the country. As the US permanent representative at the United Nations Security Council, Rice campaigned for votes in the council to secure the passing of Resolution 1973 in 2011 which authorised the use of force. This move invariably ended up violating the War Powers Resolution as NATO began its “humanitarian bombing” under false pretences. We know now that the bombing of Libya was purely about regime change which resulted in the extrajudicially murder of Muammar al-Qaddafi.
In a 2016 keynote address to the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), the think tank founded and, then led by Michèle Flournoy, Biden acknowledged that Flournoy was to become the first female defence secretary were Clinton to have won that election. While that never transpired, it is now widely believed that Flournoy will be tapped to head the Pentagon. It was Flournoy who told the Washington Post in 2002 that the Bush administration needed to strike pre-emptively in Iraq. Then in 2009, Flournoy joined the Obama administration as Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, where she used her skills to create what most every expert in the field regards as political and humanitarian disasters in Libya and Syria where she advocated military intervention. Flournoy is also considered an influential actor who shaped the administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. From 2013-2016, Flournoy traded on her Pentagon connections after joining Boston Consulting, increasing the revenue from her firm’s military contracts to the tune of $1.6 million in 2013 and $32 million in 2016.
Just as concerning is that Tony Blinken,—Vice-President Biden’s National Security Advisor from 2009 to 2013, former Deputy National Security Advisor to Obama from 2013 to 2015 and then as United States Deputy Secretary of State from 2015 to 2017— is rumoured to be a top candidate for the Secretary of State or National Security Advisor. Blinken was opposed to the withdrawal of US troops from Syria stating that it would lead to a dangerous “power vacuum.” Antiwar’s Mariamne Everett last week underscored the unfortunate irony that both Flournoy and Blinken are possible cabinet members:
It is extremely important to note that Flournoy and Blinken co-founded the strategic consulting firm, WestExec Advisors, where the two use their large database of governmental, military, venture capitalists and corporate leader contacts to help companies win big Pentagon contracts. One such client being Jigsaw, a technology incubator created by Google that describes itself on its website as “a unit within Google that forecasts and confronts emerging threats, creating future-defining research and technology to keep our world safer.” Their partnership on the AI initiative entitled Project Maven led to a rebellion by Google workers who opposed their technology being used by military and police operations.
In short, what Google employees protested may very well end up being our collective nightmare. Imagine a world where our private information, biometric data and photos, location and internet usage are now paired with military and police oversight databases and operations.
In 2018, Google workers protested just this since the discovery that Google was involved in drone operations, an endeavour code-named Project Maven by the military and code-named Dragonfly by Google. This project was designed to help drone operators recognise images captured on the battlefield with Google providing cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology that enables drone warfare. Lilly Irani, an Assistant Professor at the University of California and former Google employee co-authored a letter signed by more than 200 academics and researchers demanding that Google terminate its contract with the Department of Defense on Project Maven. It also made other demands such that Google and its parent company Alphabet: to cease developing military technologies, to disallow the personal data it had collected to be used for military operations, and to end all participation or support for the development, manufacture, trade or use of autonomous weapons. The internal uprising within Google in addition to this letter eventually resulted in Google executives announcing in June that they would not renew their contract with the military when it expired the following year.
In 2019, as promised Google abandoned the DoD contract with Palantir taking over the work that Google turned down. Last week learned that Palantir’s stock had risen 26 per cent due to the speculation that Biden would “rein in military spending and spur demand for the company’s lower-priced surveillance technology.” But this is only half the story, especially because Palantir is one of many tech firms willing to lower the bar on drone warfare and ethical questions around data privacy, to include the transparency of a former staff member working for Biden.
Avril Haines, former deputy director of the CIA during the Obama administration is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution whose biography page at the Brookings Institute had a crucial item missing after Biden named her as an advisor to his campaign on 25 June. Within hours, her stint as a former consultant for the data-mining firm Palantir was wiped from the Brookings Institute site. Even her White House bio fails to mention this fact although her position at WestExec is prominently displayed (a point to which I will discuss shortly). Haines was tapped to advise Biden on policy earlier this year and was as a candidate for his Director of National Intelligence.
As we now know—in large part, thanks to Lee Fang’s excellent reporting on this matter—Google only stopped its planned growth into the military sector because of the outcry from Google’s workers. But what happens when we no longer have access to leaked emails? Certainly, banking on the transparency of money-hungry corporations is not going to pan out. Just as tricky is the situation that arises when companies like Google face internal revolts from their own workers only to pass the baton of military technology back to the government, or when the government hires former consultants and managers from tech firms and think tanks that will shore up the managerial-technocracy of data plus warfare in one neat package.
Make no mistake, this is precisely what is happening as the President-elect who billed himself as “the most progressive” of the other presidential candidates is setting his sights on the most hawkish of cabinet appointments. Biden's picks include Big Tech advisors who have made their careers from cashing in on Pentagon contracts while also working for companies that make their money from personal data. It was Michèle Flournoy who told The Intercept in 2018: “We help tech firms who are trying to figure out how to sell in the public sector space, to navigate the DOD, the intel community, law enforcement.” The merging of Big Tech and the weapons industry might be best characterised as a military-tech industrial complex.
If you think this is a one-off coincidence then look at Biden’s transition team: Facebook executive Jessica Hertz as his general counsel to oversee “ethical issues”; Carlos Monje, Twitter’s public policy chief whose role in Biden’s team is not yet announced, and Eric Schmidt, the former Google chief executive and fundraiser, rumoured to lead a new technology industry task force in the White House. Aside from these three tech figures, Biden also has many current and former tech employees from the following companies: Airbnb, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Dell, DropBox, Microsoft’s LinkedIn, Lyft, Stripe and Uber.
The Democratic Party has become constant bedfellows with Big Tech that maintains the enormous power to exile people from the digital public square with one hand and with the other to maintain and control the uses and abuses of our private data. From Big Tech’s known oversight of free speech and data privacy to its relationship with the weapons industry, including its contribution to drone warfare that the Obama administration brought out as the “new normal” in military operations, we must question how Big Tech and the military state are now inextricably linked to the Democratic Party. The fact that over one-third of Biden’s Pentagon transition team is paid by the weapons industry makes such queries imperative. Most worrying on this list of Biden's weapons-industry hires is that three of his team comes from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)— Kathleen Hicks (a former defence official under Obama), Melissa Dalton and Andrew Hunter. CSIS is an extremely influential foreign policy think tank that receives money from General Dynamics Corporation, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman Corporation, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Bechtel Corporation (remember them from G.W. Bush’s Iraq invasion), and other weapons manufacturers and defence contractors. Also of note, here are a few of the tech companies which donate to CSIS: Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Between the Equality Act that Biden and Harris promise to drive through to law in their administration’s first months which may very well criminalise language (eg. pronouns that must be said) and Big Tech’s drive to shut down any dissenting voices on the digital public square, we are seeing the tip of a very large iceberg which has totalitarianism undertows. The irony is that much of identity politics as overseen by Big Tech is coming straight from the blue states and billionaires who have the power to shut down dissent. Some as these same actors donate generously to gender clinics and chair think tanks that “doubl[e] as a weapons industry lobbying firm, pushing for expanded drone sales.”
In the USA, Big Pharma, the weapons industry and Big Tech are largely in the hands of the Democrats where the equality of a tiny group of university-educated elites are thrust into the centre of political debate and media discussions. We are told to “get educated” meanwhile the science of human sexual dimorphism is being sold to us as fiction while identity politics is used to derail our collectivity from seeing the larger picture. These combined theatres of the absurd are derails for the more serious violations to our democracy resulting in anyone who urges for class analysis or historical material readings of the present to be labelled a “bigot.” Meanwhile, journalists who have documented the illegal activities of our military are imprisoned or put into a lifetime of political exile, Big Tech continues to purge “undesirables” from public space and The Guardian which benefited by the whistleblowing actions of Edward Snowden can now barely be bothered to cover Julian Assange’s recent trial.
As Mark Crispin Miller writes in Vile Acts of Evil (2009), “Media manipulation in the U.S. today is more efficient than it was in Nazi Germany, because here we have the pretense that we are getting all the information we want. That misconception prevents people from even looking for the truth.” Miller points to a growing problem that Marshall McLuhan and Noam Chomsky have underscored for decades. Where any single party maintains alliances with the media and Big Tech, our democracy is necessarily in peril.
After the dead are counted, the second greatest victim of the collusion between governments, major media, Big Tech and the weapons industry is the truth being curated out of existence. While many of us on the left have pushed back again Trump’s repeated mantra of “fake news” over the past four years, the reality is that this is one of the truest and most apposite statements made by a president in recent decades about an institution which is negatively affecting democracy.
Now it’s up to us to hold Big Tech and our politicians accountable and to demand uncensored media. We have been here before and the one truism that we know to be true is this: Authoritarianism has a nasty way of coming back to haunt its instigators.