21st Century Wire says…
Here is a glimpse into what Donald Trump’s ‘Great America’ might look like…
Just when we were coming to grips with Trump’s recent plan to ban all Muslims from entering the United States, he announces another challenge to American rights and freedoms. Yesterday, the Republican presidential candidate called for “closing down parts of the internet”, in order to protect Americans from ISIS.
“We’re losing people every day”, claimed Trump.
Mr. Trump then goes on with employ the neoconservatives’ rapidly decaying NLP bullying technique of demonizing anyone who opposes a fascist overture as being “politically correct.”
We can see a disturbing pattern forming here: Trump routinely waves off the First Amendment in favor of whatever new totalitarian measure he’s proposing that day. Not very “American” is it?
Here, he mocks any potential opposition to his radical move, stating:
“Some people will say, ‘Freedom of speech’! Freedom of speech!’… these are foolish people, we have a lot foolish people, we have a lot of foolish people.”
Watch Trump’s disturbing statement from Monday night:
Trump then goes on to tell Americans that they should defer any decisions on the future of the internet to fellow billionaire Bill Gates, with Trump stating, “We have to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people who really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them about closing that internet up in some way.”
This goes to prove a few things: by invoking Bill Gates who made his fortune by fixing a monopoly for his dysfunctional software, and not as an internet pioneer – Trump has no clue about the modern digital sphere post-Netscape, but also that he’s willing to turnover Americans’ future and legal determinations by sucking-up to bigger billionaire oligarchs than himself. Undoubtedly, Trump also has no clue (or does he?) that people like Bill Gates have other more over-arching social engineering agendas.
Far from being innocuous or innocent on this issue either, Hillary Clinton also weighed in on this same subject the day before by outlining her own Orwellian plan to ‘tackle the internet threat’, saying:
The Islamic State has become “the most effective recruiter in the world” and that the only solution was to engage American technology companies in blocking or taking down militant websites, videos and encrypted communications.
“You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘freedom of speech,’ ” Mrs. Clinton said in an hour-long speech and question-and-answer session at the Saban Forum, an annual gathering at the Brookings Institution that focuses mostly on Israel’s security issues.
In a reference to Silicon Valley’s reverence for disruptive technologies, Mrs. Clinton said, “We need to put the great disrupters at work at disrupting ISIS,” an acronym used for the militant group.
By ‘disrupters’, Hillary is calling for teams of government trolls to fight ISIS online. The joke of this whole concept is evident in two points here:
• The US government already employs armies of trolls, that are being used against innocent Americans and political dissenters.
• US and US-allied intel agencies like the CIA, MI5, MIT, Saudi Intelligence and Mossad are likely already involved in creating ISIS online activity. Obviously, no plans will be spoken of to deal with the underlying source of the problem.
In the end, both Trump and Hillary are saying the same thing. The Washington Post commented:
“Clinton spoke in grammatically correct sentences, but besides that, there does not appear to be much difference between Clinton’s idea and Trump’s idea.
So a few things about this rather disturbing Clinton/Trump joint [issues]:
1. In the name of all that is holy, political candidates should not use the word “disruption” ever again.
For all the talk about the higher ed bubble, the past year has made it very clear that if there was a bubble in anything, it was in people using the word “disruption” without having a clear idea of what it actually means. And as it turns out, the dominant theory of disruption appears to have a few holes in it.
There’s a longer essay that needs to be written about the ways in which Silicon Valley-speak is now bleeding over into political and policy discourse, but for now, I hereby propose #DreznersRule: when politicians start using a Silicon Valley buzzword, that’s the sign that the buzzword has lost its original meaning.
2. You don’t get to hand-wave “freedom of speech” complaints away.
As Sanger notes in his story:
[F]or most social media companies, keeping up with suspected radical postings — much less removing them — is a major challenge.
It is also a question with considerable First Amendment implications. Company executives say removing YouTube videos of beheadings is an easy call; removing critiques of the West, or calls for religious purity, is not.
SEE ALSO: Hillary’s Secret Weapon: Donald Trump
Over the past year, technology firms have made clear they do not want to be in the position of ideological censors. And Mrs. Clinton herself was a major advocate, as secretary of state, of programs that expanded Internet access to get around the censorship of repressive societies, starting with China.
This does not mean that there is no way that a policy can’t be crafted to better detect and defend against cyber-recruitment into terrorism. But simply mocking the First Amendment or decrying political correctness isn’t a policy, it’s an empty campaign slogan.
3. This isn’t really about the Internet. It’s about the message.
The Trump/Clinton proposal plays to an American tendency to believe that there are technological solutions to political problems.”
So here we’ve proven the following: two candidates, same agenda, different styles, different sales pitch, but in the end, Americans will get the same result.
Problem, Reaction, Solution. The reality is that by invoking the existential menace of ISIS, the state is only using this to fund and implement even more police state measures into their matrix.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Two dangerous people. Both are bad for a free society.
READ MORE 2016 ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Election Files
