We find ourselves in some pretty disgusting times, dear reader.  Vile, really.  We live in an age of cowards.

So the great and powerful Oz, i.e., Google – the supposedly benign, algorithmically neutral, don’t-be-evil behemoth that catalogues, categorizes, and ultimately curates the sum of human knowledge – has finally, with the kind of reluctant shame you see on a dog that’s just eaten a whole block of cheese, admitted the truth: the Biden administration, in its senilic and paternalistic wisdom, directly leaned on Google to silence voices it deemed inconvenient.  Unhelpful.  Wrong.  “Disinformation.”  You know, like the vaccine causes myocarditis and did nothing to “slow the spread,” or the border is wide open, or that girls can’t be boys.

Let that sink in.  Not a suggestion.  Not a polite inquiry.  This was pressure, the kind of squeeze that a government with the full weight of its regulatory and punitive power can exert.  Censor this.  Throttle that.  Make sure these people, these dissenters, these conservatives with their problematic narratives, are shoved down the memory hole so far they’ll need a spelunking team to find their last blog post.

And if this particularly revelation gives the dear reader a queasy sense of déjà vu, like you’ve had to sit through this rancid movie before, it’s because you have.  Remember when Zuckerberg’s little social experiment, Facebook, coughed up a similar censorious hairball?  Admitting that the FBI, acting as the Praetorian Guard for the executive branch, leaned on them, too?  It’s no longer a conspiracy theory when the conspirators confess.  It’s a pattern.  A methodology.  A systemic and deliberate strangulation of the First Amendment, carried out not by jackbooted thugs in the streets, but by smooth-talking apparatchiks in Zoom meetings with Big Tech VPs.

This was the federal government, the very entity ostensibly bound by the Constitution to protect our freedoms, acting as a shadowy editor-in-chief for the entire digital public square.  It’s a grotesque, even perverse inversion of principle, where the state secretly deputizes monolithic corporations to do its dirty work, to perform the kind of viewpoint-based censorship that the government itself is explicitly forbidden from doing.  It’s a shell game played with our most fundamental rights, and the pea, it turns out, was never under the shell to begin with.

We are now faced with the undeniable, bone-chilling reality of a completely corrupt presidency that weaponized both federal agencies and corporate power to systematically dismantle the marketplace of ideas.  This was a full-frontal assault on the bedrock premise of the entire American experiment.  An administration that so feared the free and unfettered speech of its own citizens that it had to resort to back-channel coercion to suffocate dissent is not just misguided.  It was, by its very actions, proving itself to be the most profoundly and philosophically anti-American in the nation’s history.  The Biden administration were not governing a republic of free people; they were managing a database of compliant subjects, and woe to the record that returns an error.  The mask is off, and the face beneath was a chilling rictus of authoritarian rot.

N.P.: “Stayin’ Alive” – Royal Republic