'The Atlantic' Jumps The Shark, Claiming Chinese Totalitarian Net Control Is 'Largely Right,' Creates 'Flourishing Internet'

P. Gardner Goldsmith | April 29, 2020
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The pages of the The Atlantic are often full of idiocy, but this clownish outing might take the proverbial cake.

In a stuffy, artery-hardening, brain-fogging piece that could only be sourced from some of the snobbiest “lawyerly” culprits of America’s law school elite, Jack Goldsmith (no relation – I hope) of Harvard Law, and Andrew Keane Woods of the University of Arizona College of Law decided to strap on their water skis and jump the ocean maneaters of free speech and mental clarity.

They showered praise on the totalitarian speech control of Chinese internet crackdowns, and applauded giant Western-originating tech and social media firms for finally “collaborating with one another” to censor “harmful information related to the coronavirus.”

From the piece:

Covid-19 has emboldened American tech platforms to emerge from their defensive crouch. Before the pandemic, they were targets of public outrage over life under their dominion. Today, the platforms are proudly collaborating with one another, and following government guidance, to censor harmful information related to the coronavirus. And they are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures.

Which, right away, tells a few things to anyone with a modicum of alacrity.

There’s that awfully telling term, “collaborating”, which evokes some very apt thoughts of Vichy France, and the World War Two collaborators there who worked with the authoritarian, totalitarian, truth-defying, death-wielding Nazis to shut down speech and suppress other fundamental human rights.

Then there’s the very fact that these writers are publishing a piece on the internet while praising… Chinese-style internet censorship being adopted by American tech firms.

The Atlantic gives Goldsmith and Woods huge swaths of e-space to spew plenty of make-believe in praise of Chinese and Western tech emperors with no clothes.

(T)hey are using their prodigious data-collection capacities, in coordination with federal and state governments, to improve contact tracing, quarantine enforcement, and other health measures. As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg recently boasted, 'The world has faced pandemics before, but this time we have a new superpower: the ability to gather and share data for good.'

Isn’t that cute… One’s reminded of recent stories concerning Facebook’s move to suppress posts deemed “unacceptable” by its mighty morphin’ team of “fact-checkers.”

But, what a shock, it turns out that their team of “fact checkers” is biased, and not just biased, but so biased as to expose some pretty huge problems. It turns out that Facebook-Fact-Master Danielle Anderson worked at… the Wuhan, China, Institute of Virology Level Four Biohazard Lab – the very lab that was not only working on this particular strain of the SARS coronavirus, but which reportedly got a $3.7 million dollar gift from American taxpayers via the US national Institutes of Health in 2014 – a period when such research was supposedly banned by the feds, and a story that has inspired many to wonder about why Anthony Fauci, who was circling the NIH at the time, has never spoken about this, even though he should have known about it and a lot more research already conducted in this area.

But leave it to Facebook and Ms. Anderson to syphon what you see.

And leave it to Google and Twitter to lead you down the Primrose Path.

That would be Google, which whistleblower Zach Vorhies has exposed for creating a titanic BLACKLIST of conservative, libertarian, and anti-war news sources it reportedly suppressedMRCTV and NewsBusters being two of them.

Personally, I find that news about Google more than a bit offensive. Sure, Google is not the government, but it got a lot of help from the feds early on, and not only never bothered to tell people about this manipulation, Vorhies has reported that it actively worked to stop people from knowing that it was manipulating search results.

There’s something about honest dealing that strikes to the heart of human relations, isn’t there?

And then there’s Google’s most recent attack on reality, which was perpetrated in the last few days.

After Donald Trump mentioned possibly flooding the inside of a sick person with ultraviolet light, he was roundly criticized, even lampooned.

But what the critics and comedians didn’t know – or didn’t want others to know – was that Trump had based his statement on something about which he had read: a biotech firm’s amazing breakthrough invention that allows doctors to treat badly infected lungs with disinfecting UV light.

Indeed, the company, called AYTU, has developed “Healight”, a way to eliminate the two types of UV light that can damage human cells, and retain the UV light that can kill viruses. They’ve also developed a way to deliver this light via scope into the lungs and flood the interior of the lungs with the light. They are working with Cedars Sinai to test and expand it.

Google’s YouTube removed the AYTU demonstration video, reportedly after a New York Times writer complained about it.

And they weren’t alone. Twitter reportedly temporarily suspended the primary AYTU company account, despite the fact that the business is publicly traded.

But that’s okay. It makes the American internet more like China’s, and who wouldn’t want that?

After all, it sure is great when whistleblowers trying to warn people about viral outbreaks get snatched by the government once the government finds their online posts.

Right, Mr. Goldsmith? Right, Mr. Woods?

Oh, then there’s that nutty thing that most legal “scholars” ought to know.

It’s called the Bill of Rights, and, within it, the First Amendment doesn’t allow Congress to suppress speech of any kind (which means the FCC is beyond constitutionally questionable).

But, hey, this is the “Atlantic”, and they’re so closely tied to statist and authoritarian philosophy they might as well change the name to “Communist Manifesto”.

Maybe someday, they can ask government overlords if that’s okay to do.

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