Today the US Senate Commerce Committee is holding a rather bizarro hearing. Not only does it have a surreal and unreal air about it because of the bogus and contrived “social distancing” bullsh** that makes this into a not-very-well-produced Zoom meeting but surreal and unreal because there is literally nothing happening today in regards to the overt efforts by major tech companies to actively limit the political discussions that Americans are allowed to have. The pivot men in this circle jerk are Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Jack Dorsey of Twitter.

It is well documented that all three of those companies conspired in a major way during the 2016 election to help Hillary Clinton and hurt Donald Trump. The damage they inflicted did not stop at the top of the ticket. Facebook banned a GOP candidate, Elizabeth Heng, from running ads on Facebook because they showed the aftermath of Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia from which Ms. Heng’s parents had fled. Presumably, the ad made communism look bad. (Read our posts on Elizabeth Heng’s Facebook saga.) Google played with search results to push bad stories about Trump and to bury the criminality of Hillary Clinton. The Senate is getting involved in this the week before the election strikes me a lot like Failure Theater. Google and Facebook spread too much money around in politics and in the media (if Ace at Ace of Spades is to be credited, some major right-ish media outlets are substantial recipients of Google’s cash).

But the hearing was not without fireworks.

This is Ted Cruz going at Jack Dorsey. For the record, everything Senator Cruz says in his opening statement is true. It is not Russian or Chinese interference in our campaigns that are an existential threat to our republic. It is the conspiracy by Facebook, Google, and Twitter to use their monopoly power in social media to restrict what private citizens can communicate, even in direct messages to one another.

This is Senator Cruz’s grilling of Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Dorsey has that look of a guy who has just come down off a five-day high and finds himself naked, in a strange room, with a very satiated-looking male koala bear and a couple of dwarfs (NTTAWWT), and is trying to put together the pieces of how he got here. If fact, if you shift your face diaper to one side and inhale deeply (yes, I know this is potentially fatal), you can imagine you smell him.

Cruz is mostly interested in the saga of how Dorsey thought his company had the power to forbid Americans to share a couple of stories published by the New York Post detailing the hijinks of the on-going RICO violation that is the Joe Biden and his relatives and why they thought they had the right to lock a major newspaper out of its own account. Dorsey’s explanation of the so-called “hacking” rule is obvious bullsh**. If it had been invoked, nothing from Wikileaks would have been discussed. The clincher comes here when Dorsey says that Americans can share the New York Post’s reportage on the Biden family. The below video is cued up for your convenience.

Dorsey claims that Twitter allows the New York Post stories on the Biden family financial shenanigans to be sent by Twitter because they made a bad decision, and being the adults that they are, they have rectified the error.

This was flagged immediately by Abigail Marone of the Trump campaign fast response team:

Jack Dorsey of Twitter just told Senator Cruz that anyone could now share the NY Post’s bombshell stories on Twitter.

Dorsey is lying.

Twitter is STILL blocking the URL for the NY Post story about the Biden’s foreign corruption & China dealings. pic.twitter.com/1jiJWwhZCt

— Abigail Marone 🇺🇸 (@abigailmarone) October 28, 2020

Just to give Dorsey the benefit of the doubt, I tried to retweet the story:

I’m nothing if not fair and generous so, I decided to “give it another shot.”

“Potentially harmful.” To Joe Biden and the Democrats.

Ted Cruz had it right in his opening remarks. Twitter poses a direct threat to our republic. Jack Dorsey is either a pathological liar or an out-of-touch dupe. In this case, it makes no difference. He lied to a senator in a public hearing.  All things considered, I could get behind an effort by the federal government to destroy Twitter, and maybe whatever rises from the ashes would be bright enough to stay out of the censorship business.