The Big Answer

To link to this article from your blog or webpage, copy and paste the url below into your blog or homepage.

The Amazon blurb says that The reign of Big Tech is here, and Americans’ First Amendment rights hang by a keystroke.

Amassing unimaginable amounts of personal data, giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple—once symbols of American ingenuity and freedom—have become a techno-oligarchy with overwhelming economic and political power. See Democracy—an American Delusion and Freedom of the Press—an American Delusion.

Googleplex HQ

Decades of unchecked data collection have given Big Tech more targeted control over Americans’ daily lives than any company or government in the world. In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri argues that these mega-corporations—controlled by the robber barons of the modern era—are the gravest threat to American liberty in decades.

Josh Hawley, official portrait, 116th congress

To reverse course, Hawley argues, we must correct progressives’ mistakes of the past. That means recovering the link between liberty and democratic participation, building an economy that makes the working class strong, independent, and beholden to no one, and curbing the influence of corporate and political elites.

Big Tech and its allies do not deal gently with those who cross them, and Senator Hawley proudly bears his own battle scars. But hubris is dangerous. The time is ripe to overcome the tyranny of Big Tech by reshaping the business and legal landscape of the digital world.

The Standard oil octopus was a monopoly that was a disease concentrating corrupt power in the hands of a few monopolists

As Hawley writes, "They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism. A century later, we are still living with it, and with its implications.

Big Tech, like Big Oil monopolies a century ago, represents today’s robber barons, who are draining prosperity and power away from the great middle of our society and creating, as they do, a new oligarchy

We suggest that the liberals discontinue writing opinions in the mainstream media—about anything. They no longer have freedom of speech. If they tell the truth, much of it will favor brave people like Hawley who is trying to save us from Big Tech tyranny, but they will end up cancelled by both Big Tech and woke Twitter Stormtrooper Trolls. They know this and won't risk it, so their opinions are often at least partially lies and always meaningless since it is merely the echo chamber of enforced liberal conformity, therefore they pan Hawley and bleat like scared little sheep while doing so. The remaining reviews are conservatives' opinions which end up in National Review, Fox News, Washington Times, and Newsmax (our favorite), and they are honest and not swayed by woke terrorism foolishness. So since only the right dares to be honest, exactly what use are liberals' reviews anyway? Exactly—NONE.

Here is what a genuine, honest review by a real person (not a woke-sheep coward) sounds like:

"The book is a beautiful defense of the common man and woman. Far from being the benefactors of social connection and freedom that Big Tech presents themselves to be, Hawley argues that they are actually robbing the American people not only of their emotional and mental well-being, but of their agency to self-govern and thus, their freedom. How could that be? Hawley builds a case that Big Tech is a direct descendent of the Gilded Age robber barons." (Source: a Book Review of The Tyranny of Big Tech, Caitlin Bassett, Mind Matters)

Here is another wise, thoughtful review (by Joe Allen in the Federalist): Josh Hawley Takes On The Tyranny Of Big Tech

"The rise of the new monopolists is one of them. Big Tech represents today’s robber barons, who are draining prosperity and power away from the great middle of our society and creating, as they do, a new oligarchy. They do it by siphoning off consumers’ personal data, employing a vast network of digital surveillance that tracks everything from a person’s website visits to his travel to the barometric pressure of his location. And they do it by gobbling up individuals’ creative contributions and work product, relentlessly relabeling information as “public domain” so they can feed it into their vast data machines, run by super-secret codes called algorithms.

The modern-day robber barrons of Big Tech are trying to run the country, negating our democracy and elections—they are greedy oligarchs burying our democracy 6 feet under

Big Data threatens to centralize power in the hands of a few (which is exactly what the radical left wants AS LONG AS IT IS THEIR HANDS) while undermining the independence and influence of everyone else. This is the rule by the elite installed by the robber barrons from a century ago. Monopolies took power from the people as it threatened liberty. Hawley wants to confront Big Tech and break up its power, like happened with Ma Bell. We need to end corporate liberalism's power over the people, and their greed which disempowers the citizens. We must break their parasitic monopolies, regain liberty and people power. See The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, by Tim Wu.

1889 in the Gilded Age: This is the Senate of the Monopolists by the Monopolists and for the Monopolists

"The effect is that Big Tech makes more and more money, while the working class narrows and declines . . . Meanwhile, Big Tech increasingly controls the channels of communication in this country, personal and political; . . . Both [Facebook and Twitter] suppressed the distribution of a New York Post report detailing illicit foreign profits by Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and alleging Joe Biden's potential involvement. The platforms suppressed the story until after the election was over." [which probably cost Trump the election]

Louis Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt first confronted the democratic threats posed by the great trusts of the Gilded Age—Tim Wu says it is high time we began trustbusting again

As Tim Wu says, "We have managed to recreate both the economics and politics of a century ago—the first Gilded Age—and remain in grave danger of repeating more of the signature errors of the twentieth century. As that era has taught us, extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding an appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership. Yet, as if blind to the greatest lessons of the last century, we are going down the same path. If we learned one thing from the Gilded Age, it should have been this: The road to fascism and dictatorship is paved with failures of economic policy to serve the needs of the general public." (Source: The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age, Tim Wu)

We've been led down the same garden path of a century ago; it leads to a few wealthy elite as dictators over starving citizens (ask Venezuela)

“In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press. … They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers. An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.” (Source: Congressman Oscar Callaway Quote, LibertyTree); and (Source: SCAN: 1917 Congressional Record Confirms Purchase & Manipulation Of The MSM, Above Top Secret); and (Source: Freedom of the Press—an American Delusion, The Big Answer

Do we have freedom of the press? In your dreams!

• Freedom of the Press—an American Delusion
• Unfreedom of the Press
• Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy (Institutions of American Democracy)
• Fake News in Real Context
• The True Story of Fake News: How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions
• Fake News: How Propaganda Influenced the 2016 Election, A Historical Comparison to 1930's Germany
• The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote
• American Pravda: My Fight for Truth in the Era of Fake News
• Weaponized Lies: How to Think Critically in the Post-Truth Era
• Blur: How to Know What's True in the Age of Information Overload
• Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics

The robber barons got so wealthy they got too big for their britches and became dissatisfied with becoming obscenely wealthy. With their wealth they got power and with all that power they were free to indulge their fantasies about the various changes they would like to see in the good old USA. This is what our Founders had feared. Change, in our democracy, is supposed to come from democratic sources like electing people who will do the people's bidding. It is never supposed to originate from rich elites using their power to dictate to leaders and corporations anti-people policies and pro-elite policies. It was never to come from monopolies, such as railroads, steel, gas, oil, and banks a century ago, or Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and Microsoft in the 21st century.

The megacorporations wished to take the power from the common man, the people, the citizens, and give it to the corporate aristocrisy, making the U.S. a corporate republic. A Republic is a form of government in which a state is ruled by representatives of the citizen body. ... Because citizens do not govern the state themselves but through representatives, republics may be distinguished from direct democracy, though modern representative democracies are by and large republics. So politicians pretend to listen to the people but really only listen to the corporate aristocrisies, which, after all, are the main entities that finance their campaigns. (Source: Republic government, André Munro, Britannica)

So politicians pretend to listen to the people but really only listen to the corporate aristocrisies, which, after all, are the main entities that finance their campaigns—when all these parasites finish at the trough, will there be scraps left for us?

So, as noted, wealth leads to power, power leads to control, and in our pseudo-democracy, all this leads to lying, pretense, and corruption as the people and oligarchs all pretend to be good citizens playing by the rules, which they are—just not THOSE rules (law and order and the Constitution). They are playing by robber baron rules, the rules of buying influence, avoiding taxes (illegal), payoffs (illegal), threats (illegal), buyouts, predatory pricing (illegal), utilizing a monopoly to kill thousands of viable companies in order to get all the business for themselves (illegal). This is how a country grows if it has Big Tech cancer infecting it, killing healthy "cells," when it should be growing because thousands of viable companies are succeeding and thriving.

The industry that built the country, firing the engines of growth and prosperity, expanding industrialization to its limits, was the railroad industry

Until around 100 years ago, a single large company could completely control some major U.S. industries, like steel and oil. Passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act in 1890 eventually saw major U.S. monopolies break up (Standard Oil, AT&T and American Tobacco). (Source: What Are the Most Famous Monopolies?, Investopedia)

The problem with the anti-trust laws is that proof is required to find violations and prove culpability and force breakups for the public good. That wasn't too hard with railroads—their monopolies were obvious and brazen. By the 1880s the men who owned the railroads were the richest men in America. Like today's tech sector, the railroads developed with the helping hand of government. Legislatures obeyed the orders of the railroad companies. As was observed in 1890, "Business and politics are now inextricably mixed up." The Union Pacific Railroad was caught bribing members of the federal government, a crime so brazen that Louis Brandeis and Theodore Roosevelt started trustbusting.

By the 1880s the men who owned the railroads were the richest men in America. Like today's tech sector, the railroads developed with the helping hand of government

Railroad owners would greedily slash wages and increase hours to boost profits, so workers would strike or walk away or otherwise get public attention. You can see that these owners' corruption knew no bounds. And you can see that these owners' greed knew no bounds as well.

Biden is Kamala Harris' sock puppet; she is readying herself for the role of head aristocrat of the liberal elite, but many have noticed her inappropriate insane giggling and they'll surely choose someone else

It has escaped no one's attention that the railroads' owners were de facto ruling elite, and as every 21st century Republican can clearly see, the radical left are jockeying for that same position in this century, with accomplices in academia, Hollyweird, Big Tech and the media. In The Tyranny of Big Tech, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has presented a true, unadulterated representation of the actual truth of Big Tech's ability to censor truth and any information or thought which is in opposition to the sick, racist "Woke" mentality. We need emergency action or the USA will be of the Monopolists, by the Monopolists, and for the Monopolists. Also see the best book of the 21st century: Requiem for the American Dream: The 10 Principles of Concentration of Wealth & Power.

Big Tech started legitimately, but degenerated into a version of the Thought Police that makes Orwell's 1984 seem like a tea party