Project Veritas’s new exposé by political bias at Facebook reminded me that Scott Adams said a year ago that Big Tech would make a Trump loss a 100% certainty.
Last year, Scott Adams created something called the “Slaughtermeter,” which was his mental tally of how badly Trump would be slaughtered in the upcoming 2020 election. It’s a straight-line meter that looks at events on a given day and, using that day as a metric, determines where Trump is on a sliding scale of election success. A zero on the Slaughtermeter would mean that Trump’s chances of winning in 2020 are zero, while a one-hundred would mean he is certain to win.
On May 24, 2020, Adams was very pessimistic about Trump’s chances of winning the election. His pessimism was because social media and other tech companies, all of which are leftist from the top down, were already showing that they were determined to use their massive power to prevent Trump from winning again.
I have downgraded the slaughter meter from a hundred and forty percent, where I said to myself the competition for presidency is so weak that I couldn’t imagine any situation other than Trump dominating the election. I’ve reset that to zero. My current thinking is that the president has no chance of reelection now.
Adams’s starting point was the way in which YouTube routinely blocks entirely or demonetizes videos that say things that support Trump or challenge his opponents:
There is a topic that I can’t mention that is removed from YouTube whenever an individual is mentioned in the positive. I can’t even say the name of the person because these videos will be removed from the internet. Now I don’t have much interest in that actual topic, I don’t even have an opinion on it and I’m not really informed, but it is true that we now live in the world in which a major platform can completely stop a topic and it’s okay. . . it’s okay. It’s legal apparently you can make an entire topic leave the news and it’s okay. Now in what world can you ever expect a fair election where the social media people do not put their finger on the thumb? Well, I would say that’s pretty unusual, we see people like Dave Rubin being demonetized . . . I’d say a hundred of my videos were demonetized, if I ask the reasons for it — and I haven’t — I’m sure there would be some reason that didn’t sound very convincing to me, but the things demonetized coincidentally are the same things that would be the most damaging to the Democrats. Might be a coincidence but I don’t know.
Adams explained that the shield behind which the social media giants operate is so impenetrable that even he, with his fame, wealth, and connections, cannot prove if he’s being deliberately censored. All he can do is suspect that something’s going on.
As an example of the way in which YouTube puts its thumb on the scale, Adams discussed what was then a hot topic: The video of Pelosi slurring her words, and therefore appearing drunk or demented, which YouTube removed because it was “doctored.” Adams pointed out the innumerable other doctored videos that stay on the platform. Also, there there are readily available examples of the original video so that people can draw their own conclusions about whether Pelosi was actually slurring or not. YouTube’s/Google’s problem with the video, obviously, wasn’t the doctoring; it was that it made Nancy Pelosi look bad.
To step away from Adams’s 2019 discussion for a moment, think back just a few days. Carpe Donktum created a funny little video pointing out CNN’s massive bias. The starting point was an adorable viral video showing a black toddler and a white toddler hugging each other on the street, at which point, as part of their play, the black child ran down the street with the white child in happy pursuit. Carpe Donktum clipped just the running portion and imagined a fake CNN chyron that would claim a racist toddler was terrorizing a terrified black toddler. The Carpe Donktum video then resets to reveals the original video. Only a moron, or a Twitter content controller, would be incapable of understanding that this is a satirical political commentary.
President Trump retweeted the video — and Twitter responded by pulling the video on the ground that it was “manipulated.” This power to pull manipulated videos is ideally intended to protect the public from true, Stalin-esque propaganda that erases true images to replace them with skillful and indistinguishable fakes. (A good example of Deep Fake, Stalin-esque propaganda is the way the mainstream media promulgated the “fine people” hoax to make it appear that Trump was praising white supremacists.) Twitter’s attack on Carpe Donktum’s obvious political satire has nothing to do with protecting the public from deep fakes. It’s pure political censorship.
It was only thanks to serious pushback resulting from Trump’s and Carpe Donktum’s high profiles that Twitter reinstated the video:
It was this video, you may have seen it
pic.twitter.com/I7Br8DsPCp— Carpe Donktum
(@CarpeDonktum) June 23, 2020
But back to Adams’s 2019 disquisition about the social media giants and the upcoming election. After explaining that he routinely finds himself shadowbanned or demonetized, Adams got to the point about Big Tech’s ultimate goal, which is to prevent Trump’s re-election (starting at 12:39 in the above video; emphasis mine):
So, if you go back to pre-2016 the social media companies didn’t see what was happening. In other words, they may have been trying to you know put their finger on the scale a little bit. But the thing that these social media companies didn’t see coming is what I call the “Island of Misfit Toys” Trump supporters. All over were this weird collection of . . . I’ve just weirdos yeah and oddballs, and I would put myself squarely in the center of that population because nobody really saw me coming, right? No, nobody really saw that a cartoonist would start spending all this time talking about Trump’s persuasion abilities which would probably change thousands of votes.
[snip]
Now, multiply me by all of the other misfits — and I say this with love because I’m putting myself in this category — there was this weird spontaneous outgrowth of misfits who were unusually effective. The thing about all the misfits — and, again, I’m including myself in this group — is that many of the misfits were super influential.
[snip]
I think it caught everybody by surprise. Everybody thought Hillary would, you know, just waltz into the office. But that surprise factor doesn’t exist for this next election. Consider, if you will, Silicon Valley. They’re all about a/b testing, and releasing the new version, and continuous improvement. Do you think that they’re gonna get caught off guard again? There isn’t any way that the platform owners will be caught off guard again. They won’t be caught off guard again this time. They’re going to be prepared and they’ve had a lot of time to prepare. Four years of the smartest people in the world trying to figure out how to hide behavior. Then, nobody can find you. Keep in mind it’s not too hard to hide because there’s no access. Even I, with a tremendous amount of pull and resources — I have no visibility on whether my social media traffic is real or manipulated.
[snip]
So, here’s the bottom line: I’ve moved the Slaughtermeter to zero because the current situation is that the social media platforms do absolutely have enough influence to change an election. Is there anybody who doesn’t think that’s true? Is there anybody who doesn’t think social media can determine the election if they were determined to do so? I don’t think anybody believes that, right? It’s clear what they want to happen, which is Trump losing. It’s clear they’ve had four years to fix their systems so that there are less obvious, more subtle, more effective. . . . Four years of technical development, the smartest people in the world. Do you think they’re gonna lose this time? Maybe. I mean, anything’s possible.
Well, I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think you give the smartest people in the world, who are super motivated. . . . How motivated are the social media platforms? Not a little bit motivated. Super, super motivated. Smartest people in the world, [they] know exactly the problem, they know exactly the levers to move. Four years to figure it out.
You think you’re gonna beat that? You’re not, so the current situation is the social media has the levers. We can’t see them. They can push them. It’s clear which way they’re going to pull the lever.
No chance of the president winning this election under the current conditions. So, a lot of things would have to change for him to have be really any shot because the whole democratic process is broken down.
When Scott Adams made the above statements, he was assuming, based upon what little evidence he had available, that things were happening behind the scenes at social media outlets to game the election.
Today, Project Veritas released a whistleblower video showing that, at least within Facebook, Adams’s suspicions were correct. Between biased algorithms and fanatic anti-Trump employees (all of whom quite obviously graduated within the last decade or so from America’s entirely Marxist colleges and universities), Facebook is deliberately and systematically censoring pro-Trump, anti-Democrat content, while promoting anti-Trump, pro-Democrat content:
(And yes, it’s ironic that I’m using YouTube’s platform to link the video. I was unable to find an embed code for the video on Project Veritas’s website. However, if YouTube yanks this video, you can find it here.)
The Department of Justice recently announced that it intends to interpret Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to allow the social media giants (which were little babies, not big monsters, when the act was passed) to be sued for anti-trust violations. The DOJ is also opening the way to suits for defamation and libel. Currently, tech giants cannot be subject to civil actions because, in 1996, Congress assumed these sites were bulletin boards, and therefore not responsible for content. Twenty-four years later, though, to the extent they’re controlling almost all conversation in America, they’ve become publishers and should not be able to hide behind the Communications Decency Act.
I’m worried that the DOJ’s action is too little, too late. Unless Attorney General Barr has antitrust cases already in the pipeline, this is just a future threat. My sense is that a future threat is meaningless to the Big Tech/Social Medica companies. Indeed, if anything, it will cause them to double down on getting Biden elected because that will protect them completely. And if their gamble fails . . . well, they’ve already committed past antitrust violations, so future conduct won’t change their risk.
We are at a very dangerous time in American history, with the threat of a totalitarian technocracy working to support a fascist American government. And I use the word “fascist” deliberate. The leftists who’ve been spat out of academia for the last 50 years don’t intend to give up their money and do not want a communist-style takeover of the means of production. Instead, they want a purely fascist situation, which envisions government and big business working together to control the American population — and to make sure that Americans buy products from those crony businesses. Obamacare, which forced Americans to buy insurance from private companies, was a trial run, and Justice Roberts’ Supreme Court gave that kind of unconstitutional government force a complete pass.
In November, vote as if your life and freedom depend on it because they do. This election isn’t about “a little bit left of center versus a little bit right of center.” This election is truly about a constitutional, small government/individual liberty America versus true fascism.
As an added incentive for taking the election seriously consider that, while the current batch of American fascists aren’t interested in world domination, as Hitler was, they’re certainly race-obsessed. That should frighten us too. And any minorities who think, “Well, serves those white people right,” should think again. World War II ended almost as badly for the race persecutors as it did for the persecuted races.
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