Oh Bernie....

 

Bernie, Bernie, Bernie...

Taking a Big Stick to Big Tech

 Taking a Big Stick to Big Tech

Big Tech's suppression and manipulation of news undermine an informed citizenry.

Jean M. Yarbrough, Claremont Review of Books

Although the title of senator Josh Hawley’s (R., Missouri) new book gives no hint of this, The Tyranny of Big Tech packs three stories into one slim volume. First, briefly sketched, is the ugly backstory. Following President Donald Trump’s 2020 defeat, Hawley announced he would challenge the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral college votes on January 6, the day Congress was to meet to ratify the results. But after demonstrators rioted in the Capitol, Hawley’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, canceled his contract—according to the New York Times, because Hawley was illegally attempting to overthrow the election results. Not long after, the conservative Regnery Publishing announced it would bring out Hawley’s book. News of the cancellation did nothing to harm sales, and The Tyranny of Big Tech rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists when it appeared earlier this year.

The second and main story details the various ways in which Big Tech harms America. It steals our private data, surveils our every move, addicts our children, and suppresses dissenting opinions, all of which endanger the bedrock principle of our republic: the capacity of citizens to govern themselves. Hawley’s own experience bears this out. For a time, Amazon made it difficult to purchase his book, a tactic marginally better than simply refusing to sell the book, as Amazon had done with other authors. And it is not only Amazon. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all suppressed information that does not align with their politics; they continue to do so with the encouragement of the Biden Administration. This underscores the urgency of Hawley’s warning about the dangers of Big Tech. Though it won’t come as news to anyone who is even half-paying attention, it is good to have these charges spelled out in one place, along with suggestions about what we as citizens, as well as our government, can do about them.

Finally, and regrettably, there is Hawley’s attempt to place the tyranny of Big Tech in historical context, arguing that Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, along with their affiliates Instagram, YouTube, and others, are heirs of the 19th-century robber barons. In his opening chapters, and sprinkled throughout the book, Hawley casts these tech giants as the foes of a republican political tradition stretching back to Rome and to the letters of Saint Paul, and realized most fully by the American Founders, whose last great champion was—Theodore Roosevelt! Hawley, who wrote his undergraduate honors thesis at Stanford on Roosevelt (published as Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness while Hawley was clerking for Chief Justice John Roberts; see my review “Progressive Conservative?,” CRB, Fall 2008), insists that T.R. stood for a kind of republican politics that “we might call to our aid in the modern fight against monopoly.” In Hawley’s telling, Roosevelt exemplified the founders’ distrust “of concentration, of bigness” (emphasis in the original). His antitrust policies, Hawley believes, were “distinctly populist and republican.”

* * *

In thinking about Hawley’s claim, a well-known line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance comes to mind: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” So, too, with T.R. His face is etched in heroic proportions on Mount Rushmore; Americans to this day know more about the legend of “Teddy” (a name he never used) than they do the actual man.

Hawley could be given a pass for not knowing much about American political thought, or political philosophy more generally when he published his first book. He was, after all, a history major, and many of our leading American historians in the last decades of the 20th century were in thrall to “classical republicanism” as a way of understanding the founding. Much like the young T.R., Hawley was a well-educated political star with a bright future before him. But 15 years later, there is no excuse for repeating these discarded theories. Hawley is to be commended for his efforts to rein in Big Tech, but he is mistaken in his discussion of the founders’ republicanism and wrong to suggest that Theodore Roosevelt can provide a useful model for how to deal with the tyranny Americans currently face.

Hawley grounds his overview of the founders’ republicanism in the political thought of Thomas Jefferson and, to a lesser extent, James Madison. He is especially drawn to Jefferson’s paeon to the yeoman farmer. Hawley extends it to the common man generally—which may be good politics but is bad history. Jefferson was committed to agrarian life because he thought it promoted the independence necessary for republican self-government. Those who labored for others could be too easily bossed around; only the man who derived a living from his own land could be truly independent. Factory workers and day laborers—especially city-dwellers—are also “common men,” but they were not what Jefferson envisioned for republican America. Hawley’s description more accurately applies to Jacksonian Democrats. For obvious reasons, the Republican senator does not want to go there.

Hawley is not only mistaken about American history, he seems unfamiliar with how the “classical republicans” analyzed regimes. He repeatedly assails “aristocracy,” at one point calling it “unnatural” without explaining why. (One surmises it has something to do with his understanding of Saint Paul, who proclaimed the dignity of all human beings in the eyes of God, though the political implications for the apostle were nil.) Yet both Greeks and Romans distinguished between aristocracy—the rule of the wise and virtuous for the common advantage—and its corrupt form, oligarchy—the rule of the few wealthy for their own selfish good. By contrast, Hawley uses these terms interchangeably, often describing Tech barons as “aristocrats,” which they clearly are not. This gets especially awkward when we consider the founders Hawley most admires. How can Hawley rail against aristocracy when Jefferson insisted that “natural aristocracy” is the best form of government?

As for Madison, Hawley briefly notes his discussion of faction but glides over his confident assurance that minority faction presents no real danger in a democratic republic. Yet this is precisely the threat posed by Big Tech. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon are a decided minority faction that deploys their enormous power (technological, financial, and political) for their own selfish ends, endangering both individual rights and the public good. They are oligarchs, pure and simple.

* * *

More to the point, Jeffersonian republicanism has nothing to do with Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt belonged to that small group of educated postbellum Americans who admired Alexander Hamilton—whom Hawley mentions only once. As Roosevelt himself put it, he “cordially despised” Jefferson, mostly for the latter’s opposition to the energetic government, especially on matters of national defense, but also because of his hypocrisy on slavery. Roosevelt’s founding heroes were George Washington, Hamilton, and John Marshall, all of whom opposed the Jeffersonian Democrats. Yet, somehow, Hawley finds in Jefferson’s opposition to concentration and bigness the germs of Roosevelt’s antitrust policies.

There are several problems with this. First, Hawley lumps Roosevelt in with earlier populist discontent against the railroads. Chronology aside, early on Roosevelt can best be described as a Republican reformer, who battled the corrupt machine in New York politics. He was never a populist, though it is easy to see why Hawley uses this term rather than locate Roosevelt within the progressive movement in which he later played a leading role. Second, pace Hawley, Roosevelt was not, like Jefferson, an opponent of “bigness” per se. Although Hawley concedes that Roosevelt accepted the growth of large corporations as a natural stage of economic development, he does so with misgivings because he rightly understands that this implies the need for an expanded regulatory regime. Third, Hawley plays on Roosevelt’s popular reputation as a trust-buster, but this, too, is more the stuff of legend than fact. Although as president Roosevelt initiated a few high-profile antitrust suits, he came to have serious reservations about breaking up these large combinations. Antitrust litigation took years to work its way through the courts, and its outcome depended upon how the justices understood the meaning of the Sherman Antitrust Act (see Daniel Oliver’s “From Big Tech to Big Brother,” CRB, Spring 2021).

Accordingly, after his landslide re-election in 1904, T.R. focused instead on regulating these behemoths, pressing Congress to expand the powers of his Bureau of Corporations. This would shift power away from the courts and back to the executive branch, where Roosevelt could exercise greater control. Only after Roosevelt’s departure from the White House were antitrust suits revived as the weapon of choice to combat powerful combinations. William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s hand-picked successor, initiated more antitrust suits in his one term than Roosevelt did in his nearly two. Come to think of it, Taft, who would later go on to serve as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, offers a better model for Hawley than the flashy T.R.

* * *

Hawley’s account of regulations and “corporate liberalism” more generally relies heavily on the work of the late economic historian Martin J. Sklar, a principled man of the Left. In The Corporate Reconstruction of American Capitalism (1988), Sklar considers the various policies proposed by Roosevelt, Taft, and Woodrow Wilson to rein in the trusts. He analyzes the legislation Roosevelt backed in the waning days of his administration (but failed to get enacted) that would have significantly strengthened the regulatory regime. Had Roosevelt’s proposals succeeded, Sklar maintains that the Bureau of Corporations would have become “a vast centralized planning and administering agency” that would have paved the way for “state-directed corporate capitalism.” In his view, Roosevelt’s proposals were more top-down and statist than those of Wilson and Taft, a telling point Hawley fails to mention. At most, Hawley concedes that some of Roosevelt’s later proposals, such as the federal power to set prices and issue stocks, were “perhaps more dubious.” This is surprisingly mild for a sitting Republican senator, who rightly fears the expanded reach of the federal government. Indeed, Sklar himself concludes that Wilson’s proposals triumphed precisely because they were more aligned with an anti-statist—that is, Jeffersonian—American political culture.

To be fair, Hawley is more interested in Sklar’s discussion of how the rise of corporate capitalism transformed the American understanding of liberty. According to the older republican tradition, liberty meant independence and the right to self-government. Hawley has a point, but he goes too far, attributing to ordinary citizens a greater role in the formation of national policies than the framers intended. It was Madison, after all, who insisted in The Federalist that the principal difference between ancient republics and America lies in “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity from any share” in governing the latter (emphasis in the original). The people do participate at the local level, and they continue to deliberate about national policies, but mostly in their choice of representatives who give voice to their opinions and safeguard their interests. With the coming of the new corporate order, however, liberty was privatized; it came to mean the right of self-development and individuality. The older public dimension of liberty was consigned to a bygone age. “Control of the common man over his government,” argues Hawley, was replaced by the rule of unelected experts, who would determine public policy for the good of the ordinary citizen. In his account, this new corporate liberal order—the administrative state—is essentially the Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s doing, allowing Hawley to conclude by asking whether this new “aristocratic” regime is worth preserving.

* * *

Hawley is wrong, however, to lay the blame for “corporate liberalism” solely at Wilson’s feet. In 1909, Herbert Croly—a Republican—published The Promise of American Life, which surveyed the American political tradition from a Progressive perspective. Although Croly found both Jefferson and Hamilton wanting, he criticized the former’s influence as by far the more pernicious. Jefferson’s vaunted principle of equality encouraged mediocrity; the right of the common man to govern himself boiled down to promoting the “barren and insipid” aims of average individuals, without regard for the national good. Americans had moved beyond the time of the rural farmer as a jack-of-all-trades; the day of the specialist had arrived. What was needed were experts who would use their scientific knowledge to elevate and improve the material and spiritual lives of Americans. Croly’s book ends with a sketch of a new industrial policy for the country, one that would “transform” human nature by encouraging Americans to shed their selfish individualism for a new and higher form of individuality. Theodore Roosevelt loved the book and wrote to Croly to tell him he would incorporate its ideas in upcoming speeches.

Roosevelt was true to his word. In his “New Nationalism” speech delivered a month later (August 1910), the former president argued it was no longer enough for wealth to be amassed honestly. Now, it must be shown to “benefit” the nation. Hawley cites this remark approvingly, without considering what Roosevelt had in mind. T.R. did not mean philanthropy, such as endowing private charitable organizations, or the establishment of cultural, educational, and scientific institutions. Nor did he mean improvements in the standard of living, lower prices for the consumer, greater efficiencies, or protection of small businesses, all of which have been invoked in support of antitrust suits. No, benefit meant primarily wealth redistribution, with the government deciding how much was too much and how much was too little. Roosevelt candidly admitted this would mean “a policy of far more active governmental interference with social and economic conditions in this country than we have yet had,” but he trusted that idealistic experts would set the tone for the moral and spiritual crusade he sought. To that end, Roosevelt (like Croly) looked forward to a time when businessmen would free themselves from “the taint of selfishness” and work disinterestedly for the good of the whole. Finally, like Croly, T.R. did not reject socialism. Indeed, while still in the White House, he made clear that there was much about socialism he admired. In his mind, socialism was merely an advanced form of liberalism. Croly’s book reinforced that view.

* * *

Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech was just his opening salvo. At the beginning of 1911, the ex-president was cautiously endorsing Western progressives’ calls for direct democracy by means of the initiative, referendum, and recall. By the end of the year, he was fully on board with these reforms. In this sense, Hawley is correct that Roosevelt wanted to return power to the common man—but T.R. did so in the belief that ordinary citizens agreed with him that the constitutional design of the framers no longer served their needs. Direct democracy would provide citizens with the tools to override elected officials and advance the Progressive agenda.

From there, Roosevelt moved on to the judiciary. Announcing his candidacy against Taft in the sitting president’s home state, Roosevelt levied his most public criticism of the courts to date. His speech before the Ohio Constitutional Convention early in 1912 urged Ohioans to include a provision for the recall of “outworn” judicial decisions and possibly even of judges themselves. Although Roosevelt insisted that these reforms were only intended to apply to the states, his private correspondence suggested that the federal judiciary was also in his sights for standing in the way of the regulatory state. This was too much for Roosevelt’s staunchest allies, Henry Cabot Lodge and Elihu Root, who saw this attack as a threat to the constitutionalism of the framers and refused to support his presidential bid.

Roosevelt’s leftward lurch, begun during his second term as president and accelerating after he left the White House, is reason enough for Republicans to steer clear of him as a useful model for our present-day problems. But if more proof were necessary, it is worth remembering that the last great champion of a Roosevelt revival on the Republican side was John McCain, led by his cheerleaders William Kristol and David Brooks. How did that work out for the republic, or even for the Republican Party?

* * *

Leaving aside this misguided attempt to hitch our current political situation to the ghost of Theodore Roosevelt, Hawley’s book proceeds in its second half to lay out the very real dangers posed by Big Tech and sketches what both citizens and government can do. Big Tech clings to a misguided, almost childlike belief in an open, connected global community. As Mark Zuckerberg put it, Facebook was conceived as a social mission to transform society by reaching beyond local associations and even national boundaries. Of course, it is also a business that seeks to penetrate markets worldwide. What it sells is personal information, some of it supplied freely by individuals who want to link up with friends and acquaintances with common interests, but much of it extracted without their knowledge or consent. Users of social media seldom read the fine print or understand what they are allowing when they “agree” to the terms of service.

Even more ominous, Big Tech deceives its users about how much personal information it is acquiring and selling to advertisers. The key to Big Tech’s profitability is its proprietary algorithms, which enable businesses to target potential customers based upon Big Tech’s surveillance of their every online movement. If, say, an individual searches on the web for information about a subject, clicks on an ad for a product, reads an online news source, asks Siri or Alexa to find something, or even privately messages someone, that information is captured, sorted, and sold. That’s why ads pop up on our screens that seem to read our minds. In some sense, they have. This goes way beyond psychological manipulation, which the advertising business has long been engaged in, because it is targeted to our individual and private (or so we thought) search histories. And the more these ads appeal to our unique interests and wishes, the more time we spend online, clicking on ads or stories (which in turn leads to more clicks and more ads). It’s addictive, and that’s the point—to get us to spend as much time as possible glued to our “devices” in the hopes that we’ll buy something we didn’t know we wanted.

* * *

It comes as no surprise that spending large chunks of the day online is not good for our mental and civic health. Our powers of concentration decline, our social skills deteriorate. We’re not summoned to make rational arguments or try to persuade. All we have to do is click “like,” or choose from an ever-expanding world of skin-toned emojis, many designed to express anger. Outrage rules. As bad as this is for adults, it is even worse for children, especially vulnerable adolescent girls. The COVID crisis, which forced most students into remote learning for more than a year, exacerbated these problems. During the last year, cases of teenage anomie and depression skyrocketed. Parents, naturally, are the first line of defense against such abuses, but too many parents are themselves glued to their devices. (The one bright spot in this year-long experiment in “virtual” learning is that parents got to see what their children were studying and began to organize against it.) Hawley proposes raising the age that a child can open a social media account from 13 to 16. That’s a good idea, but it won’t by itself prevent older teens from becoming addicted to the internet.

Big Tech’s efforts to penetrate international markets, especially in China, have also come with serious downsides. Far from creating an open, connected, global community, Silicon Valley has helped shore up China’s oppressive regime. To mention two of the most egregious examples, Google created a new search engine that enabled the Chinese Communist Party to watch its people and suppress the free flow of information more effectively (it was discontinued after public outcry), and Apple has moved parts of its production chain to China and turned a blind eye to allegations of slave labor.

As dangerous as these developments are, the greatest threat Americans face from Big Tech is the suppression and manipulation of news that is essential to an informed citizenry. One of Hawley’s longest and best chapters is devoted to the problem of censorship. Hawley deserves credit for compelling Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in Senate testimony to admit that its “moderation teams”—some of which include Chinese nationals—inordinately target conservative and right-leaning groups. The liberal psychologist Robert Epstein has testified to the power of Facebook to tilt elections in favor of Democrats. Although the number of votes Facebook can shift is open to debate, it seems likely that its one-sided maneuvers have some effect. (After all, the whole point of its surveillance is manipulation of our behavior.)

Nor is this all. In the month before the 2020 election, Twitter and Facebook refused to allow news of Hunter Biden’s laptop (with information harmful to the Biden campaign) to be retweeted, posted, or even messaged privately. And after the election, Twitter brazenly shut down the president of the United States, while Apple removed start-up social networking service Parler from its app store, effectively shutting it down and preventing conservative challenges to the liberal narrative from being transmitted over the internet.

* * *

One would think Republicans would be outraged—but that would be naïve. Some Republicans object to interfering with Big Tech on libertarian grounds. Others take campaign contributions from them or give in to the pressure of lobbyists, think tanks, and academics, many of whom are lavishly funded by the wealthiest interests on the planet. How then can the tyranny of Big Tech be overthrown? First, Hawley notes, we must explode the myth that Big Tech achieved its dominance through the free market. Big Tech benefitted massively from special privileges awarded to it by government. For years, Amazon avoided collecting state sales taxes if a merchant had no brick-and-mortar stores in that state. It also enjoyed subsidized shipping rates, compliments of the U.S. Postal Service. Hawley suggests something like an internet Glass-Steagall Act (which erected a wall between investment and commercial banking) to force Big Tech to choose between being either consumer-facing digital platforms or producers of goods and services—not both, as they currently are.

Most of all, the Tech monopolies enjoy the protection of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Under this provision, they are granted immunities from lawsuits afforded to no other publishers of news. Although Congress originally intended to protect the social media sites from penalties for their users’ posting of obscenity and the like, court decisions gradually allowed them to expand their “content moderation” of news without fear of being sued or paying any price at all for their blatant partisanship. This is where we are today—and with Democrats benefitting from this arrangement it is not going to be overturned until Republicans are back in power. Hawley’s proposed legislation—which would remove Section 230 immunity unless companies submit to an external audit to prove their political neutrality—is a useful start, but right now it’s dead on arrival.

* * *

Still, as soon as feasible, the Big Tech monopolies must be broken up. Before that can be done, Congress must revisit its antitrust policy, since it is unlikely to accomplish much with the law as it currently stands and is interpreted. Under the old dispensation, monopolies need not be broken up if they provide a benefit to the public, understood as lower prices for the consumer and greater efficiencies. But as both Hawley and Daniel Oliver—the former head of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC)—argue, these monopolies cause harm in other ways, both to the individual and to the public. Lower prices, greater efficiencies, and ease of use do not outweigh the manipulative, addictive, and highly partisan sins of Big Tech.

What’s more, enforcement of antitrust policy is currently divided between the Department of Justice (DoJ) and the FTC, with the FTC taking the lead. Hawley argues that the DoJ should be in charge because the FTC has often had too cozy a relationship with Big Tech and because the DoJ is—at least in theory—accountable to the people. But is that true? Although the attorney general and other top officials are politically appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate, recent experience has made all too clear that permanent civil service appointees can obstruct and impede the policies of the administration, especially if a Republican is in office. It is no secret that the permanent bureaucracy skews heavily Democratic.

Some of the harms Hawley discusses could be remedied by relatively straightforward fixes, which Big Tech can nevertheless be counted on to oppose. For example, Congress could require tech giants to offer customers a “do not track” option and make them live up to these new, more stringent terms of service. And customers could be empowered to sue tech companies themselves, instead of depending on the government to do it. Hawley’s brief discussion of the monetary fines for such infractions, however, considers penalties that are a drop in the ocean as far as Big Tech goes. They could be much higher.

Still, the gravest problem Big Tech poses is the suppression and manipulation of news stories and views it doesn’t like. In a free society, citizens must have access to a wide range of political opinions. The last election made plain that the tech monopolies acted in concert to shut down news that threatened their desired outcome, putting a lid on legitimate debate both before and after November 3. This is the problem we need to solve.

Senator Hawley deserves to be commended for his courage and for grappling with the threat Big Tech poses to America. Rather than trying to resurrect the fighting spirit of Theodore Roosevelt, however—whose top-down statist policies are no help to Republicans today—he would benefit from a closer look at the antitrust policies of William Howard Taft. Up to a point, Jefferson and Madison can also serve as useful allies, especially in defending the free flow of ideas so vital to republican self-government. But Hawley should also consider the political thought of Alexander Hamilton and John Marshall, who showed how government might judiciously intervene in markets to advance the genuinely liberal goals of a prosperous and free America.

Jean M. Yarbrough is a professor of government and Gary M. Pendy, Sr., Professor of Social Sciences at Bowdoin College. 

More than a Troll

More than a Troll

DeSantis bill signed in Brandon forces companies to slam brakes on COVID vaccine mandates

Florida lawyer representing health care workers called the vaccine guidelines a 'temporary victory'

Emma Colton | Fox News

Recent legislation signed into law by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is forcing companies to slam the brakes on coronavirus vaccine mandates for employees. 

"It appears at this point, the hospital is calling their staff back into work," Florida attorney Greg Crosslin told WJHG of Ascension St. Vincent’s Hospital calling for their staff to return to work after they were terminated for not getting the vaccine. 

DeSantis signed multiple bills regarding vaccine mandates on Thursday during Florida’s special legislative session. Under one of the bills, private employers must give workers the option of opting out of the vaccine mandate, including medical and religious exemptions.

"I told Floridians that we would protect their jobs, and today we made that the law," DeSantis said in a press release last week. "Nobody should lose their job due to heavy-handed COVID mandates, and we had a responsibility to protect the livelihoods of the people of Florida. I’m thankful to the Florida Legislature for joining me in standing up for freedom."

Ascension was facing a possible lawsuit after mandating the vaccine for employees back in July, WJHG reported. By last Friday, nearly 100 employees were fired for not complying with the mandate. 

Crosslin represented many of the terminated employees and said they received individual calls from the bosses and managers on Friday about the updated vaccine guidelines. 

"Telling them that they are to come back into work Monday, that Sacred Heart has made a decision they’re not going to continue the mandate in Florida in light of the new law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis," said Crosslin.

"Between the three facilities, it’s between 80 and 90" employees, said Crosslin.

Ascension CEO Tom VanOsdol also confirmed on Friday in a letter that the hospital group is rescinding the suspensions of those who refused the vaccine. 

"Yesterday, the Governor of Florida signed into effect Florida law HB 1B. HB 1B conflicts with The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Omnibus COVID-19 Health Care Staff Vaccination Interim Final Rule dated Nov. 4, 2021," VanOsdol said, Action News Jax reported. 

"In order to to be compliant with federal and state laws, Ascension Florida will be rescinding the suspensions of associates who were suspended pending their compliance with the Ascension Florida vaccine policy. All associates will be required to continue to comply with our infection control protocols. Once we have clarity regarding the application of HB 1B and CMS IFR, suspensions may be reinstated."

Crosslin added that there is still uncertainty over the federal mandate and that the employees could face termination in the coming months. 

"This is only a temporary victory. They could still be facing termination for vaccine mandate all over again in January," said Crosslin.

Walt Disney World also confirmed to Fox Business last week that it paused its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for its employees. 

"We believe that our approach to mandatory vaccines has been the right one as we’ve continued to focus on the safety and well-being of our cast members and guests, and at this point, more than 90% of active Florida-based cast members have already verified that they are fully vaccinated," a Disney spokesperson said. "We will address legal developments as appropriate."

An internal memo also outlined that the pause will remain in effect as the company "assesses the new state laws protecting workers from vaccine mandates," FOX 35 Orlando reported.

DeSantis signed the bills in Brandon, Florida, in a thinly veiled jab at President Biden. 

"We were here to celebrate a great city in the state of Florida, a freedom city, and it's important that when you have the federal government overreaching, like Joe Biden's doing, that we signed legislation to protect Floridians," DeSantis previously told Fox News. "Doing it here in Brandon I think is especially meaningful because I think people here really appreciate it."

The event was briefly interrupted by supporters of DeSantis who chanted, "Let’s Go, Brandon!" 

The phrase "Let’s go Brandon" went viral last month following an NBC interview with NASCAR Xfinity Series driver Brandon Brown. Fans of NASCAR were chanting "F--- Joe Biden" during the interview, and in an apparent attempt to steer the interview away from politics, reporter Kelli Stavast said they were chanting "Let’s Go Brandon" in support of Brown. The phrase has now been chanted at sporting events, concerts and protests across the county to show displeasure with Biden’s administration and policies. 

Can The FBI Be Salvaged?

 

Can The FBI Be Salvaged?

Victor Davis Hanson, The Daily Caller

The Washington, D.C.-based Federal Bureau of Investigation has lost all credibility as a disinterested investigatory agency. Now we learn from a whistleblower that the agency was allegedly investigating moms and dads worried about the teaching of critical race theory in their kids’ schools.

In truth, since 2015, the FBI has been constantly in the news – and mostly in a negative and constitutionally disturbing light.

The fired former Director James Comey injected himself into the 2016 political race by constantly editorializing on his ongoing investigation of candidate Hillary Clinton’s email leaks.

In a bizarre twist, the public learned later that Comey had allowed Hillary Clinton’s own private computer contractor – CrowdStrike – to run the investigation of the hack. The private firm was allowed to keep possession of pertinent hard drives central to the investigation. How odd that CrowdStrike’s point man was Shawn Henry, a former high-ranking FBI employee.

During the Robert Mueller special investigation, the FBI implausibly claimed it had no idea how requested information on FBI cell phones had mysteriously disappeared.

It was also under Comey’s directorship that the FBI submitted inaccurate requests for warrants to a FISA court. Elements of one affidavit to surveil Trump supporter Carter Page were forged by FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith, who later pleaded guilty to a felony.

The FBI hired the disreputable ex-British spy Christopher Steele as a contractor, while he was peddling his fantasy – the Clinton-bought dossier – to Obama government officials and the media.

Former FBI general counsel James Baker was reportedly the subject of a federal investigation. He allegedly conducted prominent meetings both with media outlets that later leaked lurid tales from the Steele dossier. He also met repeatedly with the now-indicted Perkins Coe attorney Michael Sussman.

Comey himself, through third-party intermediaries, leaked to the media his own confidential memos detailing private meetings with President Trump. His assurances both to Congress and to Trump that the president was not the current subject of FBI investigations were either misleading or outright lies.

In sworn testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Comey on some 245 occasions claimed he could not remember or had no knowledge of key elements of his own “Russian Collusion” investigation.

Comey’s replacement, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe, was fired for leaking sensitive information to the media. He then lied on at least three occasions about his role to federal attorneys and his own FBI investigators.

McCabe is now a paid CNN consultant who often has offered misleading information on the Russian collusion hoax that he helped promulgate.

Former FBI director and special counsel Robert Mueller conducted a 22-month, $40 million wild goose chase after some mythical “Russian Collusion” plot. When called before Congress, Mueller claimed he had little or no knowledge about Fusion GPS or the Steele Dossier – the twin sources that birthed the entire collusion hoax.

FBI lawyer Lisa Page was removed from Mueller’s investigation, along with her paramour FBI investigator Peter Strzok. Both misused FBI communications, revealing their pro-Clinton biases during their investigations of “Russian collusion,” while hiding their own unprofessional relationship.

Mueller himself staggered their firings and delayed explanations about why they were let go from his investigation team.

When the FBI arrested pro-Trump activist Roger Stone, it did so with a huge quasi-swat team – to the tipped-off and lurking CNN reporters.

The FBI repeated such politicized performance art recently when they stormed the home of Project Veritas director James O’Keefe. The agency confiscated his electronic devices on the grounds that he had knowledge of the contents of the allegedly lurid missing diary of Joe Biden’s daughter. The FBI – an apparent retrieval service of lost Biden family embarrassments – also did not disclose that it had possession of Hunter Biden’s laptop at a time when the media was erroneously declaring the computer inauthentic.

O’Keefe was accosted in the pre-morning hours by a crowd of FBI agents, wielding a battering ram, who pushed him out of his home in his underwear.

The time and location of the FBI raid, as in the Stone case, were leaked to the media that cheered the raid shortly after it was conducted. A federal judge recently stopped the FBI’s ongoing monitoring of O’Keefe’s communications.

Wall Street Journal columnist Holman Jenkins recently detailed other FBI lapses such as downplaying evidence that former Olympic gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar was a known and chronic molester of teenage gymnasts.

The agency also extended its witch hunt against the innocent researcher wrongly accused of involvement in the anthrax attacks of 2001.

One could add to such misadventures the mysterious leadership roles of at least 12 FBI informants in the harebrained kidnapping scheme of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

We can also cite the agency’s inability to follow up on clear information about the dangers posed by criminals as diverse as the Tsarnaev brothers, the Boston Marathon bombers, and the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

For its own moral and practical survival, the FBI should be given one last chance at redemption by moving to the nation’s heartland – perhaps Kansas – far away from the political and media tentacles that have so deeply squeezed and corrupted it.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.

New York Times and FBI collusion

FBI has a history of prompting favorite news sources of their doings, remember Roger Stone's FBI arrest with NBC cameras rolling in the darkness of early morning. These are department plans, not rogue FBI agents taking action.

 New York Times and FBI collusion

Leak of Project Veritas Files to New York Times Should Trigger Probe: Former Prosecutor

Zachary Stieber, Epoch Times

The Department of Justice’s inspector general should investigate how The New York Times came into possession of files from Project Veritas shortly after the FBI raided the journalist outfit, a former federal prosecutor says.

FBI agents recently raided homes linked to Project Veritas, including the home of its founder, James O’Keefe. The NY Times messaged Project Veritas about the pre-dawn raids as they were wrapping up, lawyers for the nonprofit said in a court filing.

The search warrants were signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave, an appointee of fellow judges. U.S. District Judge Analisa Torres, an Obama nominee, halted them on Nov. 11.

Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy says that decision may stem from the apparent leak to the NY Times. He said the judge should be infuriated by the apparent leaks and should immediately take action.

“The judge should order the SDNY’s Biden-appointed U.S. attorney, Damian Williams, to provide the court, immediately, with affidavits detailing communications with the media from every prosecutor, FBI agent, and support staffer who is either involved in the investigation or has had access to the items seized from the current or former PV officials,” the National Review writer wrote in a column, referring to Project Veritas and the Southern District of New York.

He also called for Attorney General Merrick Garland to refer the matter to Department of Justice (DOJ) Inspector General Michael Horowitz for a “thorough investigation.”

“Garland and Horowitz should announce that the Justice Department will conduct the investigation requested by the court, and Horowitz should be given the affidavits so his office can hit the ground running. Judge Torres should ask for periodic updates to stress to the Justice Department and FBI that the court is troubled by the government’s apparently pretextual exploitation of coercive judicial processes in order to fuel media coverage. That coverage has imperiled the constitutional rights of PV members to freedom of the press, due process, privacy, and assistance of counsel,” he added.

Project Veritas lawyers said in court filings that the government leaked details of its investigation to the NY Times, noting how queries were sent to O’Keefe shortly after the predawn raids, which took part on two different days.

Additionally, NY Times stories about the searches “included information that could have only come from the government,” one filing stated.

“It’s clear that The New York Times was leaked the information from the federal government about the raids,” Harmeet Dhillon, one of the lawyers, told The Epoch Times.

The NY Times also published an article based on what it described as internal Project Veritas documents, including a series of memorandums written by a lawyer for the group about how to conduct legal journalism.

That publication was met with shock by some, who noted that Project Veritas is currently engaged in a lawsuit against the NY Times.

Project Veritas sued the paper last year, asserting several of its articles were defamatory. A motion to dismiss the case was rejected by a judge in March, who found that NY Times writers deceptively interjected their opinions into the articles.

While it’s not certain the privileged documents were leaked by prosecutors or the FBI, the publication came shortly after the government began drawing from seized electronic devices.

The leaks are a major reason a special master should be appointed to sift through the records and separate out privileged ones, Project Veritas asserts.

In filings Monday, the lawyers demanded the government respond to whether officials leaked the information.

The FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the SDNY, the Department of Justice’s inspector general, and an NY Times spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment. The NY Times reporters who wrote the stories either couldn’t be reached or did not return messages.

The NY Times does not say in its story how it got the privileged documents. The story about the raids sourced “witnesses and people briefed on the matter” and included a quote from an FBI spokesman.

The FBI confirmed the raids to The Epoch Times in an earlier email but declined to say why they were carried out, and against whom.

The raids were said to be part of a government search for a diary belonging to Ashley Biden, President Joe Biden’s daughter. Project Veritas says it was given the diary by two people but decided against publishing it because it could not confirm its legitimacy. The diary was ultimately passed onto local law enforcement in Florida, the group says. The National File website previously published what it says is the diary.

Will Chamberlain, a lawyer who co-publishes Human Events, called the apparent collaboration between the FBI and the NY Times a “scandal” and said Adam Goldman “should be subpoenaed tomorrow and forced to reveal his criminal source.”

“I didn’t even think about the fact that PV is currently in litigation with the New York Times. Makes it all the more appalling that the NYT would be publishing Veritas’ privileged communications,” he wrote on Twitter.

School board president's illegal parent dossier

 

Arizona school board president kept sensitive personal information on protesting parents, documents suggest

Tyler O'Neil, Foxnews

Parent and school board candidate Amy Carney called the dossier 'retaliation'

More than 600 parents in Scottsdale, Arizona, are demanding the resignation of the school board president after a shocking revelation. 

The president, or possibly his father, appears to have kept a dossier on 47 parents who dared to speak out against his policies at school board meetings — a dossier complete with Social Security numbers, background checks, a divorce paper, mortgage documents, trade certifications, and screenshots of Facebook posts.

"I'd call this retaliation," Amy Carney, a mother of six and candidate for the Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) governing board, told Fox News on Thursday. She said, "the list of parents targeted in the drive appears to be anyone who has spoken out about anything against our district publicly or online."

Fox News has examined the dossier but is not making all of it public in order to protect the privacy of the parents involved.

Carney told Fox News that more than 650 parents have signed a petition demanding that SUSD Governing Board President Jann-Michael Greenburg resign in the wake of the scandal.

The Scottsdale Independent first reported on the "Greenburg Files," an extensive opposition-research-style dossier of parents who spoke up at school board meetings on issues ranging from COVID-19 restrictions to critical race theory. Greenburg reportedly revealed the digital dossier – stored on Google Drive – in August, when he sent a screenshot of an image from the drive to resident Kim Stafford in an email.

The Google Drive shows four people tied to the account: Mark Greenburg, the president's father, is the owner of the drive; Jann-Michael Greenburg; a person with the email address belonging to SUSD governing board member Zachary Lindsay; and a Scottsdale woman who has yet to be identified.

Neither Mark Greenburg nor SUSD responds to Fox News’ requests for comment. The National School Boards Association, of which it appears SUSD is a member, did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment either.

"I categorically deny having anything to do with any of this," Jann-Michael Greenburg told the Independent. He did not respond to Fox News' request for comment. Lindsay also denied having any involvement or knowledge of the drive. He told the Independent that the email address is a personal address of his, but that it currently has 160,000 unread emails.

Despite Greenburg's denial, the active link to the site became private around 11 a.m. on Nov. 9, after the Independent called the family. Furthermore, parents have said that Greenburg's Facebook profile and his website have disappeared.

The dossier includes 18 folders marked CAN-Network, a reference to the Community Advocacy Network, a group of parents that formed last year advocating for in-person learning and against mask mandates. It refers to parents as "wackos."

The dossier also includes videos showing a man taking photographs of parents and children in the hours before a school board meeting. "Somewhere around here we have a private investigator who's writing down all of their plates," the man says in the video. "They don't know it's me … I covered up my license plate."

Parents also highlighted a video from the dossier in which a speaker says, "I really want Edmond to die. I’ll be so happy, I’ll have a f---ing party," alluding to a vocal parent whom Greenburg has sued for defamation.

The petition calls for Greenburg's "immediate termination."

"There is no legitimate purpose for any of these background checks, deeds, marital records, financial documents, professional certifications and more to be curated, stored, and shared in such a manner by Mr. Greenburg," the petition states. 

Amanda Wray, an administrator of the CAN Facebook group, argued that Greenburg had engaged in cyberstalking. According to Section 13-2923 of the Arizona Revised Statutes, anyone found guilty of cyberstalking can be fined up to $1,000 per infraction and sentenced to one year in jail. 

Arizona House Rep. Joseph Chaplik also called for Greenburg's resignation.

"As a Scottsdale parent and member of the community I am calling for the resignation of Jann-Michael Greenburg," Chaplik said in a statement. "The evidence of his cyber-stalking and spreading of an enemies list should be the last straw for his fellow board members and I expect them to join me in this call."

Shiry Sapir, a mother of three and candidate for Arizona superintendent of public instruction, also called for his resignation. 

"They're not on the same side as us," Sapir told Fox News in an interview on Thursday. She recalled a hot-mic situation in which Greenburg said "Jesus f---ing Christ, you people," twice during parents' public comments. 

"I think he knows his time is up," Sapir told Fox News. "I think, come tomorrow, we're going to hear something. There's going to be some criminal investigation," she predicted. "I hope our attorney general does something about this. He needs to."

Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich did not respond to Fox News' request for comment by press time.

Sapir noted the stalking behind the Greenburg Files and wryly added, "And we're the domestic terrorists?"

California’s failed mandates

 

California’s failed mandates offer some lessons for President Biden’s vaccine mandate

The Biden administration could save America from a lot of regulatory, legal and political fighting over its proposed COVID-19 vaccine mandate by recognizing how this mandate approach failed in California in the past.

Kenneth P. Green, Reason Foundation

As everyone who has access to a television or the internet knows these days, the Biden administration recently opened a new front in its war on COVID-19 and many people are quite unhappy with it.  “The president directed OSHA to write a rule requiring employers with at least 100 workers to force employees to get vaccinated or produce weekly test results showing they are virus-free,” the Associated Press reports. Rather than try to mandate that individual American adults get COVID-19 vaccines, the federal government is trying to use workplace safety laws to strong-arm the nation’s employers to do the job for them.

With debates about the constitutionality of President Joe Biden’s move, threats of lawsuits flying before the rule has been drafted, and many citizens questioning the federal government’s overreach, it is important to note that what’s happening now looks similar in some ways to the big government playbook laid down by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) in Southern California back in 1990. The district, as friends and enemies called it, was ground zero for aggressively expansive government public health regulations in Southern California.

In the halcyon days of the late-1980s and early-1990s, California had severe problems with ambient air pollution and traffic congestion. Although a vast swath of industries had been forced to reduce their air pollution emissions (or leave California entirely) in order to combat the menace, one last stubborn source of emissions remained: the dreaded, selfish, “single-occupant vehicle” drivers who would drive by themselves in their very own cars over California’s gridlocked freeways to get to and from work. About 70 percent of total emissions in the South Coast Air Basin at the time came from “mobile sources,” mainly cars and light trucks, and that percentage was rising. At the time, it was estimated that by 2010 mobile sources would contribute 95 percent of carbon monoxide emissions, 80 percent of oxides of nitrogen (an ozone precursor chemical in vehicle emissions), and 40 percent of what were then called “reactive organic gases” — the photochemical smog that covered the Los Angeles skyline at the time.

The dreaded drivers and rideshare-resisters were deemed a sufficient evil that SCAQMD issued a rule to require employers with over 100 employees to find ways to discourage solo-commuters and encourage their employees to carpool, vanpool, or take mass transit to and from work instead. In some ways, it’s similar to the approach that the Biden administration is taking to force the vaccine-resistant into the vaccinated carpool lane.

In 1988, the SCAQMD developed Rule 1501 which required large employers (of over 100 employees) to increase the average vehicle ridership (AVR) of their employees to 30%, 50%, or 75% depending on such things as transit availability in their regions, and the district’s expectations about their ability to achieve such targets. The average vehicle ridership at the time was 1.13, or basically, one person per vehicle. To give you a flavor of the rule’s specificity, the first version of Rule 1501 called for: 

“…employers with 100 or more employees to develop and implement a trip reduction plan for those employees who report to work between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m. These employers would be required to designate a trained transportation coordinator to develop and implement the trip reduction plan. This plan would include an inventory of current measures used by the employer to increase AVR, a verifiable estimate of the current AVR at the worksite, and a list of incentives the employer would commit to undertake which could reasonably be expected to achieve the AVR target within 12 months of plan approval.”

The requirements of Rule 1501 grew more stringent over time, ultimately requiring the region’s employers, specifically via the personal authority and certification of the company’s executive officer— to submit complex, rigidly standardized rideshare plans to SCAQMD. (We’re talking about full, four-inch binders with prescribed color-coded tabs and a signed letter by the company CEO.) The requirements also included submitting the results of a week-long ridership survey of employees (to be conducted every six months) that met a district-specified 75-percent-response rate from employees who commuted in the previously mentioned time slot.

As two of my doctoral advisors, the University of California-Los Angeles’ Martin Wachs and the University of Southern California’s Genevieve Giuliano, demonstrated, the onerous rules created a new job description of “employee transportation coordinators” and an entirely new class of professionals. Ultimately, many employee transportation coordinators would wind up representing the government and other rideshare-promoting groups more than their own company’s interests. And many of them went on to work at state air pollution agencies once they moved on from their private-sector origins.

As was the case for many environmental regulations, the employer mandates pioneered locally in California by aggressive air pollution control districts would subsequently be adopted at state and federal levels. In 1991, Federal Clean Air Act Amendments and the California Clean Air Act later ratified the district’s approach. The Federal Clean Air Act required that areas with ozone emissions grossly exceeding the Federal Ambient Air Quality Standard for Ozone must require employers of 100 or more employees to achieve a 25 percent increase in AVR levels above a 1991 baseline level by the end of 1996. The 1991 California Clean Air Act reflected the federal mandate but added more specific requirements that severely polluted areas achieve an average of 1.5 or more persons per passenger vehicle during weekday commute hours by 1999. Finally, the California Air Resources Board approved a guidance document that included employer-based trip-reduction measures as strategies to be pursued by air districts in their attainment programs in 1991.

As I noted in my doctoral dissertation back in 1994, Regulation XV was wildly unpopular with large companies in Southern California and while it was not as objectionable to most employees (who could mostly ignore it or accept subsidies that companies were forced to offer them), it was, nonetheless, one of the most hated environmental regulations in California history.

Thanks to California’s Brown Act, the state’s pioneering sunshine law that requires public access to government meetings, employers, trade associations, and other regulatory critics could regularly vent their spleens about Regulation XV at public hearings of the SCAQMD governing board and the California Air Resources Board. Those review boards, with members appointed by the major political parties and governor, were influenced by the negative public relations stemming from these meetings and eventually watered down subsequent versions of the rule.

The change was also spurred by data emerging that showed the employer rideshare mandates weren’t working. For example, as my doctoral research showed, Hughes Aircraft Company, with over 40,000 employees in the region, spent up to $1 million per year to implement massively complicated rideshare incentive programs, only to see single-occupant commuting actually increase. Ultimately, Rule 1501 was de-fanged, and weakened, renamed as the innocuous “Rule 2202,” and largely disappeared from sight as a major bone of contention in California air quality regulations. There is a cautionary note here, however. Government regulations are much like vampires: they rarely die, they just go underground for a while before emerging again at a later date.

Using employers to coerce employees to overcome public resistance to government fiats is not new, but it is an ill-advised way for the government to exert its will under the cover of public health and safety rules. If the Biden administration moves ahead with employer-vaccination mandates through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, it seems certain the backlash will continue to grow. Opposition to California’s rideshare mandate led to what may have been the first real popular revolt over an environmental public health regulation in the United States.

Mandates didn’t work for California’s environmental regulators then, and won’t likely work for the Biden administration now. President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate, no matter how well-intentioned to fight the pandemic, can only serve to further politicize and undercut public trust in workplace health and safety regulations and regulators. As legal analyst Walter Olson writes at Reason.com, Congress has armed OSHA “with grossly overbroad powers” but “courts have frequently struck down OSHA actions.” The Biden administration could save America from a lot of regulatory, legal and political fighting over its proposed COVID-19 vaccine mandate by recognizing how this mandate approach failed in California in the past.