by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

PREFACE: If you have an account at Twitter, Facebook, Google, Apple, or Amazon, I urge you to go online immediately and instruct them that you forbid them henceforth from selling or sharing any of your private or other information. That is how they make money from you. No need to support suppression of speech — unless you are into that sort of thing.

Many of us more perspicacious had been warning for months, even for a few years, that severely repressive Social Media Monopoly suppression was coming. We warned and warned. No one took us seriously enough.

Well, it may as well begin now because it was coming anyway, as the behemoths of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Amazon, and Apple had grown bigger than the old American Telephone & Telegraph (AT&T) and John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopolies combined. They broke up the telephone and gasoline monopolies. Anti-trust laws? The “Rule of Reason”? Those Silicon Valley behemoths are monopolies that need to be busted up.

While President Trump was directing his Justice Department to study and litigate whether the ever-so-diminished AT&T could buy Time Warner under our anti-trust laws, the high-tech giants kept growing and swallowing up the competition. It was one of the areas of public policy that President Trump somehow missed and overlooked for too long.

He cannot be blamed. He was a businessman and developer who never had wallowed in the labyrinth of government, and now he was walking into a Swamp. How does one clean a swamp — with soap, laundry detergent? It cannot be cleaned; one has to drain it. But what if, as one enters the Swamp to drain it, he finds it so massive that it drains him instead? Though Trump is bigger than life, the D.C. Swamp is bigger than Swamp. He came in ready to clean it up but eventually learned — from the corrupt destruction of Michael Flynn, from the corrupt FBI manipulation of the FISA court, from the corrupt cash pipeline from Hillary Clinton to her Perkins Coie Seattle law firm to Fusion GPS to a fabricated dossier — that he was as unprepared to take on the Swamp as would be any other entering politics without prior political experience. Such people get swallowed up.

In the end, the Swamp swamped him. He was misdirected to see Paul Ryan as an ally, so he also brought in Ryan’s people: Reince Priebus as Chief of Staff and Sean Spicer as Press Spokesman. Those last two are good men, but Trump needed a Mark Meadows and Kayleigh McEnany from Day One. He needed Mike Pompeo at State, not Rex Tillerson. He needed William Barr at Justice, not Jeff Sessions. Mr. Trump got bad advice, failed to grasp that the 2018 mid-year would turn on health care and ensuring uninterrupted coverage of medical preconditions, and soon was busy achieving great things but constantly having to pause to ward off Swamp tsunamis. Along the way he tweeted so often — and good for him for doing so! — that his radar missed the peril of the approaching Social Media Suppression. In the end, CNN and Jim Acosta were not Public Enemies No. 1 and 2 among the Enemies of the People. Rather, Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg were. But Trump was having so much fun with Twitter that he did not realize it would turn on him like a serpent turning on its snake charmer.

Championship entertainer-wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura came from out of nowhere to be elected governor of Minnesota in 1999, a fresh new warrior ready to clean up that state’s mess. He began with great success and was very popular at the outset. He was the only candidate of the Reform Party ever to win such high office anywhere. But The Body got swamped. By the end of his first and only term, he was a political goner in 2003, unpopular in virtually all quarters. The Swamp got him. Similarly in California, a remarkably incapable gray Democrat governor was recalled overwhelmingly by the voters, and popular body builder and film star Arnold Schwarzenegger got elected in 2003, initially as a moderately conservative Republican. Again, a muscle man with no prior political experience — but actually much smarter than people realized. He was enormously popular at first. And then the Swamp consumed him. In 2005 he called a special election to pass four important conservative initiatives that the Democrat state legislature blocked. And the unions demolished him by raising some $160 million to defeat him, crushing his efforts and teaching The Terminator who terminates whom in real life. The U.S. Supreme Court later found the public employee unions’ use of compulsory fundraising during the campaign had been illegal — but that decision came too late because, by then, the unions had destroyed him. By the end, to survive politically, he had to count on his Kennedy family in-law connections to remain electable as a liberal. And when he proved unfaithful on that front, he was back in the movies.

Today Jesse Ventura is a faint memory evoking a smile, and Arnold — who once exhibited the political incorrectness to call out his Democrat then-opponents as “Girlie Men” — now is reduced to having joined the long line of Those Insulted by Trump who have waited years for the Day of Revenge, to pile on and take down a man who hurt their feelings publicly. Trump unnecessarily had mocked Schwarzenegger’s inability to capture and hold the audience ratings Trump had built for NBC’s The Apprentice, and he once had embarrassed Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney for coughing during a Trump TV interview with George Stephanopoulos. So Arnold and Mulvaney waited on line for the day to strike back. And now Arnold, whose delightful Austrian accent reflects that he should know better about things Austrian and Nazi, compares the Capitol Hill breach of January 6 to … Kristallnacht.

Really? Kristallnacht? OK, here we go again:

[On November 10, 1938] Jewish homes, hospitals and schools were ransacked as attackers demolished buildings with sledgehammers. Rioters destroyed 267 synagogues throughout Germany, Austria and the Sudetenland. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were damaged or destroyed, and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and incarcerated in concentration camps…. The Times of London observed on 11 November 1938: “No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany before the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless and innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.”

Estimates of fatalities caused by the attacks have varied. Early reports estimated that 91 Jews had been murdered. Modern analysis of German scholarly sources puts the figure much higher; when deaths from post-arrest maltreatment and subsequent suicides are included, the death toll reaches the hundreds, with Richard J. Evans estimating 638 deaths by suicide. Historians view Kristallnacht as a prelude to the Final Solution and the murder of six million Jews during the Holocaust.

That is just the Wikipedia preface. Here is a bit more:

Over 1,400 synagogues and prayer rooms, many Jewish cemeteries, more than 7,000 Jewish shops, and 29 department stores were damaged, and in many cases destroyed. More than 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps; primarily Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.

The synagogues, some centuries old, were also victims of considerable violence and vandalism, with the tactics the Stormtroops practiced on these and other sacred sites described as “approaching the ghoulish” by the United States Consul in Leipzig. Tombstones were uprooted and graves violated. Fires were lit, and prayer books, scrolls, artwork and philosophy texts were thrown upon them, and precious buildings were either burned or smashed until unrecognizable.

If Arnold still were a conservative Republican, as he briefly was at the start of governing California, Democrats now would be demanding he be removed from the country and sent back to Austria for invoking despicable Nazi comparisons. When a Republican misspeaks and references Hitler in an analogy that could be better made, Democrats immediately converge to demand that a perfectly excellent congressional representative resign. But when Ocasio compares ICE to Nazis and detention centers for illegal border-crossers to concentration camps like Dachau and Auschwitz — well, that’s OK. Schwarzenegger knows much better about Nazi history in Germany and Austria than does Ocasio because his father was the local chief of police and had served in World War II as a Hauptfeldwebel after voluntarily joining the Nazi Party in 1938. The record is more than clear that Arnold is not a Nazi but a good friend of Israel and the Jewish community. Yet with such a dad, and he being born in 1947 Austria, Schwarzenegger cannot be excused for comparing January 6 on Capitol Hill to Kristallnacht. He knows the difference — only too well.

But Schwarzenegger is not censored on Social Media for his Lie and Defamation because his lying is good lying. After all, he is lying against Trump supporters, comparing them to Nazis. It is a simple mathematical equation: If January 6 at Capitol Hill is Kristallnacht, then Trump is Hitler and his supporters the Nazis. And presumably the fool who sat on Nancy Pelosi’s chair at her desk is akin to Nazis who imprisoned 30,000 Jews and sent them to Dachau and Buchenwald. Yes, that sounds like something that Jack Dorsey can live with at Twitter, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and their counterparts at Apple and Google.

The Social Media Monopoly now is in radically partisan left-wing hands. Four years ago they falsified the allegation that Vladimir Putin used their platforms to elect Donald Trump. The Robert Mueller investigation accomplished virtually nothing, but at least it left a clear conclusion that Putin did not elect Donald Trump. Yet the idea came to plant seeds along these lines in Silicon Valley:

Y’know, it actually could be possible, with the right teamwork and coordination, to manipulate a presidential election. If we all close down Trump’s Social Media footprint at the same time, while leaving the Democrat opponent’s presence and his supporters unchallenged, and if we unilaterally blacklist any breaking news item that might help Trump, like an explosive New York Post exposé regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop, we could actually throw a close election to the other side.

And so they did.

Had it not been for January 6 on Capitol Hill, who knows how much longer the Social Media Monopoly might have waited before coming down with the full power and suppression of a Soviet Union, Communist China, or Iranian Islamic Republic ban on free speech? How much longer would they have waited, continuing to amass control of information and our mass communication platforms, before clamping down at a later critical moment and leaving only their versions of American Pravda and Izvestia as approved media? January 6 hastened their hands, as they have clamped down on free speech sooner than they otherwise would have. In coordination, the likes of an unelected Jack Dorsey and Jeff Bezos closed down the voice of the president of the United States, even going so shamelessly far as to announce that the voice shall be suppressed permanently. Permanently — wow!

When the president of the United States responded that, OK, he would move his voice to an alternative communications platform, Parler, the Social Media Monopoly rapidly announced that Parler’s very app would be removed from Apple’s iPhones, from Amazon, from Google, from society. Overnight, for the first time, Americans learned that the Social Media Monopoly — with tightly coordinated horizontal synchronization — now is so behemoth that, as in Maoist China and Stalinist Russia and Ayatollah Iran, they actually can close down the voices of half the country in minutes.

It was coming, and since Republican lawmakers have been blind to the approaching catastrophe in American democracy and freedom, it may as well have come now before the midterm elections rev up in September 2022 and the next presidential elections in 2024. The ball now is in the hands of the recently deposed Republican Senate because the Democrats are using their newly won muscle to restrict speech all around them, banning such words as “father,” “husband,” and “brother,” while ending a congressional prayer with “Amen and Awomen.” What has been done now to Trump next can be done in any state to any Republican seeking office in a close race. At the 11th hour, they can be closed down while the Democrat is given free sway until after the polls close. Afterwards, senators can hold hearings, and Jack Dorsey will apologize, and Mark Zuckerberg will promise to look into it, and the next election will have been stolen in a way that only a Putin or Erdogan fully could admire and that an Ayatollah will hope to emulate.