Pun Salad

In my 2019 book, The Social Media Upheaval, I warned that the Big Tech companies — especially social media giants like Facebook and Twitter — had grown into powerful monopolists, who were using their power over the national conversation to not only sell ads, but also to promote a political agenda. That was pretty obvious last year, but it was even more obvious last week, when Facebook and Twitter tried to black out the New York Post’s blockbuster report about emails found on a laptop abandoned by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter.

The emails, some of which have been confirmed as genuine with their recipients, show substantial evidence that Hunter Biden used his position as Vice President Joe Biden’s son to extract substantial payments from “clients” in other countries. There are also photos of Hunter with a crack pipe, and engaging in various other unsavory activities. And they demolished the elder Biden’s claim that he never discussed business with his son.

The U.S. Justice Department and 11 states filed an antitrust claim against Google Tuesday alleging illegal monopolization. The lawsuit follows the release earlier this month of a voluminous report by the House Judiciary Committee arguing that the four major U.S. internet platforms—Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook —are monopolies and ought to be broken up. The suit against Google is the first of what will likely be many antitrust attacks on these dominant platforms.

The basic argument of the lawsuit is that Google possesses a monopoly over search engines and search advertising, which it maintains by entering agreements to make its search engine the default on many devices. This resembles one of the claims made 20 years ago against Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Yet the argument rests on a misconception about the creation and operation of network industries, which will condemn this case—and future ones like it—to failure under sensible interpretations of U.S. antitrust laws.

Or consider this report by Peggy Noonan on a recent exchange between the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer; the subject was yet another proposed covid-19 “stimulus” bill:

He [Blitzer] said it’s not about him but people in food lines. Mrs. Pelosi: “And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. And we represent them. We know them. We represent them and we know them. We know them. We represent them.” “Thank you for your sensitivity to our constituents’ needs.”

“I am sensitive to them because I see them on the street begging for food,” Mr. Blitzer said.

Mrs. Pelosi: “Have you fed them? We feed them.”

Nancy Pelosi presides over a chamber of politicians who vote on taxing and spending bills that transfer money from some Americans to other Americans – a fact that (inexplicably!) propels Ms. Pelosi to boast that she and her colleagues, not taxpayers such as Mr. Blitzer, feed poor Americans. On top of this appalling pretension, Ms. Pelosi expects CNN’s audience to believe that she and her Congressional colleagues “know” poor Americans in a way that non-politicians don’t.

As Peggy Noonan wrote about this interview, “It was bonkers.”

Facebook is demonetizing the Christian, political satire page “The Babylon Bee” after they published an article satirizing Sen. Mazie Hirono’s comments during the Amy Coney Barrett hearings in a fictional depiction.

The Bee’s CEO Seth Dillon announced the demonetization on Tuesday in a tweet, claiming that the big tech company pulled down the article based on a “regurgitated joke from a Monty Python movie.”

Oh, Jeffrey Toobin — let him among us with a free hand cast the first stone.

Toobin, a writer for The New Yorker and fixture on CNN, was participating in a role-playing exercise on a Zoom call with his magazine colleagues, wargaming election-night scenarios. Toobin was standing in for the courts when he suddenly felt compelled to badger the witness and accidentally caused his colleagues to witness the badger.

He believed — wrongly — that he had turned his camera off, and his private game of pickup five-on-one was broadcast, or Zoomcasted, or whatever, to his shocked and perplexed colleagues.