CHAPTER 10 THE MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

Breitbart News refers to the leaders of the high-tech industry as “the Masters of the Universe.” Former attorney general Jeff Sessions used the moniker in 2014, likely as an homage to Tom Wolfe, who characterized the Wall Street titans of the 1980s as “the Masters of the Universe.”¹ Either that, or the former attorney general is really into He-Man.

The sobriquet for the Big Tech elite stuck because it fits: never in world history have so few anonymous, unelected people had so much power. The Masters of the Universe have the ability to control and manipulate the vast majority of information flow that takes place in the United States. If “knowledge is power,” then what is it if you have near-total control over what knowledge people acquire?

Silicon Valley is also, unfortunately, a hostile place if you’re not on the left. Famed tech investor Peter Thiel—cofounder of PayPal and a Facebook board member—has said that “Silicon Valley is a one-party state.”² You can guess what party he was referring to. I don’t know of anyone who would refute him.

So, what does it look like when all of our technologies are controlled by people with the same ideology, particularly if it’s an ideology that’s susceptible to woke hysteria and inclined to engage in censorship? Well, you get a lot of hysteria and censorship.

Since I’ve been on national radio, I’ve asked nearly every elected official I’ve had on my show about the threat Big Tech companies and their inordinate control over American minds poses to democracy. Every one of the politicians has expressed at least some level of concern about this fact, but none have been able to successfully curtail their power. Donald Trump didn’t make any progress in this department (he exasperatingly referred to Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Amazon as “MAGA” in 2020).³ The tech elite boomed during the Trump years, dragging the stock market skyward with them. This appeared to make the former president personally proud. He lavished praise on the Silicon Valley super elite as he took credit for the bull market that preceded the pandemic.

Silicon Valley spreads millions of dollars on politicians and thought leaders every year, lining the pockets of Democrats and media figures alike. Even conservatives were quickly bought off. National Review, for example, is a subsidiary of the National Review Institute, which received money from Google⁴ (CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed this when asked by the House Judiciary Committee).⁵ National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry wrote an article for Politico literally titled “Don’t Break Up Big Tech”; nowhere in the article does he disclose that his organization had received money from Google. Unconscionable, but not uncommon.⁶

While our elected officials have stood by and let Big Tech get bigger than any industry ever in the history of the world, the Silicon Valley elite were gradually ramping up crackdowns on conservative content. Here are a few lowlights, delineated by platform, all of which predate the massive purge of conservatives from the Internet in January 2021 just after the Democrats took control of the Senate and just prior to Biden’s inauguration (I’ll address that later):

Twitter:

• • Twitter has used the tactic of shadowbanning, particularly against conservatives since 2016.⁷ (CEO Jack Dorsey has admitted to Congress that Twitter was “unfairly filtering” hundreds of thousands of accounts, but also maintains that Twitter does not “shadowban anyone based on political ideology.” “Shadowbanning” is the expression used when a blacklisted poster’s content does not appear in the feeds of their followers unbeknownst to the poster and/or the follower. The tactic was thought to be used primarily to marginalize spammers, but it was turned against conservatives. Leftist outlet Vice reported that Twitter had shadowbanned multiple top conservatives.⁸
• • Twitter has banned other prominent figures, most of whom are conservative. The highest-profiles bannings were of Alex Jones and InfoWars and former Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos.⁹ Most of these were rooted in accusations of hate speech, a category apparently so broad that it includes the statement that “men are not women,” for which Twitter banned feminist writer Meghan Murphy in 2018.¹⁰
• • In March 2019, Twitter suspended a contributor to the conservative Washington Examiner for tweeting “learn to code,” a phrase frequently used to mock many journalists’ advice to unemployed blue-collar workers, during a debate about tech-related unemployment.¹¹
• • In July 2020, Twitter blocked Breitbart out of our account for four days after we posted live-video footage of anti-establishment doctors discussing the coronavirus and lockdowns.¹² Breitbart had aired footage of a group of physicians called America’s Frontline Doctors who held a rally in Washington, D.C., where they raised questions about the medical community’s response to the pandemic. Though there was hours of content on a range of issues, most controversially, several doctors enthusiastically endorsed hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. One even (inaccurately) called it a “cure.” Breitbart never endorsed any of the content discussed by the frontline doctors; we merely aired the footage and transcribed parts of it. Twitter locked us out until we deleted the content.
• • Also in July 2020, Twitter came under fire for blocking a tweet from President Trump, but not tweets from Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei that called for Israel’s destruction.¹³ Khamenei often calls for “the elimination of the Zionist regime” and uses highly aggressive language about Israel and the Jewish people. By contrast, in June 2020, Twitter had labeled a straightforward tweet from the president as a violation of their “[r]ules about abusive behavior… specifically, the presence of a threat of harm against an identifiable group.” Here’s the tweet: “There will never be an ‘Autonomous Zone’ in Washington, D.C., as long as I’m your President. If they try they will be met with serious force!” As of early 2021, many of Khamenei’s tweets were still online while Trump has been banned for life.

Facebook:

• • In the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections, Facebook banned 251 anti-establishment accounts and removed 559 more pages, accusing them of “coordinated inauthentic behavior.”¹⁴ They’ve done similar purges before other elections worldwide.
• • Facebook keeps a “hate agents” list of content producers who are on the verge of getting banned. As of May 2019, the list was heavily weighted with conservatives, including Candace Owens.¹⁵
• • In 2019, Project Veritas reported that Facebook routinely suppressed conservative pages—a tactic they called “deboosting.”¹⁶ According to a whistleblower, Facebook “deboosted” several prominent conservative pages, but targeted relatively few aligned with the Left.¹⁷ According to a whistleblower, Facebook tagged pages for deboosting without notifying their owners, effectively leaving them with no knowledge or recourse.
• • Facebook began testing a “news” section in fall 2019, after its previous iteration was accused of spreading fake news.¹⁸ Through the new feature, Facebook funneled millions of dollars to establishment media outlets to license their content, again to the detriment of independent news.¹⁹
• • In 2020, Facebook built an “Oversight Board” to oversee content bans (the idea was hatched by anti-Trump Harvard law professor Noah Feldman), and packed it with leftists including a member of George Soros’s Open Society project.²⁰ There are apparently no conservatives on the “Facebook Supreme Court.”
• • Extreme far-left content, including calls for violence, are common on Facebook. One such group, dubbed “The Base,” remains active despite calls for “militancy to intensify.”²¹

Google:

• • According to internal chats obtained by the Daily Caller, Google employees discussed suppressing search results for conservative sites like Breitbart and the Daily Caller immediately following the 2016 election.²²
• • In audio leaked to Breitbart News, Google discussed “steering” the conservative movement “away from the more sort of nationalistic incendiary comments, nativist comments” following the 2018 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).²³
• • Weeks later, Google circulated a memo titled “The Good Censor,” arguing that tech platforms needed to move away from the “American tradition” of free speech to a more European model that encourages “safety and civility.”²⁴ The document, leaked in its entirety to Breitbart News, explicitly cited the 2016 election as well as recent elections in Germany as reasons for the shift. The internal report also showed that government requests to censor content on Google’s platforms were increasing. The blacklisting business was booming.
• • In January 2019, Breitbart News revealed that YouTube, which is owned by Google, has deliberately suppressed search results for videos containing controversial terms, including “abortion,” on its platform.²⁵ Google CEO Sundar Pichai had recently told Congress that the company did not “manually intervene” on particular search terms.
• • A Google insider later told Project Veritas that YouTube suppresses content from conservative PragerU and independent videographers Dave Rubin and Tim Pool.²⁶
• • Project Veritas reported in July 2019 that one thousand Google employees signed a petition to blacklist Breitbart from Google’s ad service.²⁷ Their sentiments echo the goals of left-wing activists such as Sleeping Giants, who target the advertising revenue of right-wing news sites and personalities.
• • According to a 2019 audit of Google search results conducted by researchers at Northwestern University, Google’s search results overwhelmingly favor left-leaning, mainstream media outlets.²⁸ Of the twenty news sites most commonly featured in Google’s “top stories” section, only one was somewhat conservative (Fox News). Google is one of the most influential drivers of traffic to online news sites.

The other tech giants who have less direct control over the news you consume aren’t much better:

• • An analysis of Wikipedia highlighted by a former Wikipedia-editor-turned-whistleblower revealed that the Internet encyclopedia’s articles on American politicians relied on mostly leftist media.²⁹ Not only is Wikipedia one of the most trafficked information websites in the world, but inaccurate information posted there appears in “knowledge panels,” which are blocks of general information on a person or topic that appear prominently at the top of Google searches and on Facebook.³⁰
• • In 2017, Apple banned conservative social media brand Gab (during the purge of conservatives form the Internet following the January 6 riot at the Capitol; it also banned Parler) from its App Store, claiming they did not adequately suppress “objectionable content.” According to a statement posted to Medium, Apple’s App Store Review Team “found references to religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, or other targeted groups that could be offensive to many users.”³¹ Yet Apple is also one of the most tolerant of China’s human rights abuses. It was listed in a study that concluded it relies on Uyghur slave labor.³² Apple has been criticized for sending user data to the Chinese.³³
• • Though Amazon thus far has resisted the urging of the Sleeping Giants to blacklist Breitbart, they did remove conservative journalist Mike Cernovich’s media-bias documentary Hoaxed from the Prime Video page.³⁴ (They also blacklisted Parler from their cloud servers in what was one of the more shocking developments in the 2021 purge.)³⁵

Examples of pro-establishment, anti-conservative bias are endless. Yet whenever a tech platform does not expand their blacklists, they are treated as though they are evil right-wingers. The best example of this: when Facebook listed Breitbart as one of two hundred sources eligible for their Facebook News feature, establishment journalists were apoplectic.³⁶ No one on the right threw a tantrum because CNN was included, though maybe we should have.

Big Tech had developed all sorts of weapons in the aftermath of 2016, and they would be brought to bear on the 2020 election. Everyone should have seen this coming. As reported exclusively by Breitbart News and our top tech reporter, Allum Bokhari, Google vice president Kent Walker stated in a tearful all-hands company meeting just after the 2016 election that the company intended to make populism and nationalism a “blip” or a “hiccup” in the march toward “progress.”³⁷

When people on the left make declarations like this—and they actually have the power to make their vision a reality—I tend to take them seriously. And Google did have that kind of power, especially if the other tech powerhouses were simpatico. Search engine expert (and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden voter) Dr. Robert Epstein, the senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, said that he believed Google shifted a full 6 million votes or more in the 2020 election toward Joe Biden. The real number might be closer to 15 million, he says.³⁸ “Based on the data that we’re collecting, I would say that if what we’re seeing is present nationwide they are probably shifting this year in this election about 15 million votes without anyone’s awareness, except for what I’m doing, without leaving a paper trail for authorities to trace,” Epstein told Tucker Carlson back in October. The researcher claimed that he and a team of about six hundred field agents had analyzed about 1.5 million searches and said that “we’re finding very substantial pro-liberal bias in all ten or at least nine out of ten search results on the first page of Google search results, not on Bing or Yahoo though.” Epstein had told me in a 2018 interview that Google “could shift ten percent of the voting population of America with no one knowing that they had done this, and without leaving a paper trail for authorities to track.”³⁹

One method, Epstein emphasizes, is that Google’s autocomplete suggestions when you begin typing a term into their search bar appear to have been manually altered to protect Democrats from negative searches.⁴⁰

Epstein found other shocking tactics used by Google. “We also found what seems to be a smoking gun,” Epstein told Tucker Carlson.⁴¹ “We found a period of days when the vote reminder on Google’s homepage was being sent only to liberals—not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days.” Epstein had hundreds of field agents deployed across battleground states collecting hundreds of thousands of data points.

We at Breitbart experienced Google’s apparent manipulation firsthand. Google began purging Breitbart’s content since the 2016 election. Our search visibility in July 2020 versus 2016 was down 99.7 percent (that means the likelihood that you find a Breitbart article when doing a routine Google search was almost zero). Google emphatically denies that there is political bias in their search engines.

On April 4, 2016, Breitbart ranked in the top ten search positions (the first page of Google search results) for 355 key terms. By July 20, 2020, that number was down to one search term. We had nearly 17,000 terms in the top 100; that number dropped to around 50 by summer of 2020.⁴² All of this happened despite Breitbart working diligently with industry experts to optimize our position in search engines.

Overall, our Google traffic was down about two-thirds over that time period. We believe most of the remaining third of the traffic was due to searches with the term “Breitbart” in it. If you didn’t use the term “Breitbart,” it was unlikely you’d see any Breitbart results, even if we were one of the Internet’s subject area authorities (think issues like immigration, Donald Trump, and media bias, to name a few).

On May 5, 2020, Google killed all of Breitbart’s traffic on stories about Joe Biden.⁴³ We went from tens of thousands of impressions on searches for “Joe Biden” to literally zero. Google had flipped a switch and turned off the traffic.

To reiterate: if you want to search for “Joe Biden” or “Biden,” the chances of you getting a Breitbart article are virtually nil unless you add the word “Breitbart.”

This appeared to be a concerted effort by the Masters of the Universe to ensure that Breitbart’s content was not accessed by Google users, thus protecting Joe Biden before the general election.

Google search traffic to Breitbart News from the search term “Joe Biden” from July 2019 to July 2020. Gray = clicks. Black = impressions. (Image credit: Breitbart News)

A search engine expert with decades of experience in the industry told us in a July 2020 interview that he’s never seen anything like this:⁴⁴

I’ve never experienced such a wholesale removal of rank and visibility on specific concepts on a site as I have seen being applied to Breitbart. Removal is the key, not dropping in rank, which would be an organic devaluing. These ranks are just simply gone, overnight, while other topics have been untouched.

The sheer fact that there are thousands of pages of Breitbart content that reference Biden that were ranking before May 6, that now have no rank or impressions on search is a sign of manipulation, not algorithmic devaluing.

No kidding.

According to DOJ, Google controls a staggering 88 percent of the U.S. search market.⁴⁵ That’s what you call a monopoly. And this monopoly is seemingly working hard to suppress Breitbart’s reach.

These aren’t the only data points that suggest manual suppression. The percentage of traffic to Breitbart from Google is 9 percent; other leading publishers see an average of 30–50 percent of their traffic from search. And it’s not just Breitbart that is squeezed like this. Publicly available data on search traffic from Amazon-owned Alexa.com reveals that conservative news outlets get a far, far lower percentage of their traffic from Google than establishment and left-wing outlets.

Percentages of website traffic from Google, via Alexa web rankings. Gray = media sources with conservative or libertarian-leaning editorial stances. Data is a six-month average as of July 7, 2020. (Image credit: Breitbart News)

In fact, they literally prioritize sites that plagiarize Breitbart ahead of our own content. Even scoops and exclusive interviews are hidden deep within Google’s results while clickbait copy/paste sites are promoted above us in search results.⁴⁶

If you search for a Breitbart headline verbatim, you still might not ever see a Breitbart story appear in your results.⁴⁷ Breitbart News reporter Allum Bokhari described the phenomenon on November 2, 2020, the first time we covered it at Breitbart:

Even when the exact headline of a Breitbart News article is typed into Google, search results will frequently return results to obscure websites instead of Breitbart itself—sometimes websites that scraped Breitbart’s content without permission.

For example, we conducted a Google search for the following Breitbart News original article: “Joe Biden Touts ‘Most Extensive & Inclusive Voter Fraud Organization in History of American Politics,’ ” by Kyle Olsen.⁴⁸ The top search result is from a website called Geopolitics News, which plagiarizes both the headline and the full content of the article—complete with Olson’s bio.⁴⁹

The second result is a story from Snopes, a left-leaning “fact checker,” which purports to “debunk” the Biden gaffe.

Since Breitbart put out an extensive report on this phenomenon, Google appears to have adjusted their algorithm so the plagiarism sites don’t appear quite so high, so often. But(!)—they appear to have found a new way to use their search engine to advance their preferred political narratives. As of February 2021, if you search “Joe Biden Touts ‘Most Extensive & Inclusive Voter Fraud Organization in History of American Politics’ ” (a literal Breitbart.com headline), while the Breitbart article with that exact headline is the fourth result, the top result is a Reuters fact-check titled “Fact check: Clip of Biden taken out of context to portray him as plotting a voter fraud scheme.” (Here’s Biden’s exact quote: “We have put together, I think, the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics.” At Breitbart News, we described the Biden remark as a “slip of the tongue,” not as some actual admission of massive fraud. We were having fun with the story, unlike the joyless fact-checkers at Reuters.)

As of early 2021, if you copy and paste the entire lede sentence of Olsen’s article into a Google search bar, the front page of your results won’t include the Breitbart story. However, a website called NaturalNews.com, which plagiarizes the Breitbart article without our permission, shows up toward the top of the list.

Suppressing Breitbart harms the national discourse; I believe that the electorate is more poorly informed as a result of Google’s decision when it comes to their search algorithm. But it also slows the growth of the conservative news business by unfairly depriving us of traffic and buzz.

The Masters of the Universe view this as a positive, no doubt.

The question becomes, if Breitbart is oppressed, arguably the biggest conservative new media platform, then how are voters who get their news online going to get their information? Evidently, they get it from CNN, the New York Times, Vox.com, et cetera. No “philanthropist” can cut a check big enough to benefit Democrat causes and candidates that can compete with Google et al. if they choose to pick winners and losers. Once Google (apparently) began to institutionalize political bias in their search results, it was the game changer the flailing establishment media needed.

Facebook actually beat Google to the punch in terms of suppressing Breitbart. After a 2017 study by Yochai Benkler, a professor at Harvard Law School, showed that Breitbart dominated the right-wing media sphere in the 2016 election, we saw our reach begin to diminish. The study was widely discussed in 2017. And it probably was the reason why in January 2018, again seemingly overnight, Breitbart’s Facebook traffic fell. (Facebook consistently denies suppressing conservative voices.)

As of election day 2016, Breitbart was competing with CNN and the New York Times, Washington Post, and Huffington Post for most influential news outlets on the world’s largest social media platform. No one else was close. We were going toe-to-toe with the biggest corporate media giants in the country, and arguably winning. In early 2018, we fell from the top ten publishers on Facebook to outside of the top twenty. At the same time, CNN’s engagement surged about 30 percent.⁵⁰

And we’re supposed to believe all of this was a coincidence?

Democrats were no doubt thrilled, and Republicans were unable to do anything to stop Big Tech. This hurt Breitbart, but it was also a dry run for what they would do before Trump ran for reelection.

In October 2020, when bombshell information about Hunter Biden was reported by the New York Post and others, the censorship machine was immediately spun up. Silicon Valley was ready.

The Masters of the Universe had been waiting for this moment for four years.

Game On

On October 14, 2020, the New York Post reported Hunter Biden introduced a top official from the corrupt Ukrainian energy company Burisma to then–Vice President Joe Biden.⁵¹ Vadym Pozharskyi, a purportedly high-ranking adviser to the board of Burisma, thanked Hunter profusely in an April 17, 2015, email and asked for “advice on how you could use your influence” to help the company. Hunter Biden had been on the board of Burisma since April 2014 and was paid a reported $83,000 a month to hold that position.⁵² He joined the company around the time his father, then the U.S. vice president, visited Kiev to show support for the government.⁵³ The emails (evidence of the meeting) were found on a laptop that apparently belonged to Hunter Biden; the laptop had been allegedly dropped off at a Delaware computer repair shop in 2019 and had never been retrieved. The store owner, according to the Post, made a copy of the material on the laptop and then turned it over to the FBI.⁵⁴

This meeting was a direct contradiction of Joe Biden’s claims that he had never discussed Hunter’s business endeavors with him.

Part of the reason this story was such a bombshell is that the Biden family was involved in all sorts of seemingly dirty deals throughout Joe’s time in public office. While Joe himself managed to remain fairly clean, at least in the public’s eye, several others in the Biden clan appeared to make a robust amount of cash on the family name.

Let me introduce you to the Biden Five, a term coined by Breitbart senior contributor and the author of the book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, Peter Schweizer:

Frank Biden, Joe’s youngest brother:

• • His businesses received millions in taxpayer-funded loans, including for companies that operate overseas.⁵⁵
• • His renewable energy companies based in Costa Rica and Jamaica got taxpayer-backed loans, even though he had no background in renewable energy.⁵⁶
• • One of his businesses also got sweetheart multimillion-dollar grants to construct charter schools.⁵⁷

Valerie Biden, Joe’s sister:

• • Valerie’s business bagged millions running Joe’s political campaigns, which typically did not have credible challengers.⁵⁸
• • She got these gigs despite not having any other significant accomplishments as a political consultant; Schweizer referred to this as legal graft.⁵⁹

Ashley Biden, Joe’s daughter:

• • StartUp Health, a company cofounded by Ashley’s husband Howard Krein, scored Obama administration support after a White House meeting. He had no business plan or website, but got an Oval Office sit-down anyway.⁶⁰
• • While he was vice president, Biden made a surprise appearance at their annual conference, according to the source.⁶¹
• • Krein advised the Biden campaign on coronavirus.⁶²

James Biden, Joe’s other brother:

• • James’s firm landed $1.5 billion in government contracts to build homes in Iraq, though he had no background in construction or international development.⁶³
• • It was reported just after the 2020 election that James Biden is under federal investigation for his role in a bankrupt health-care firm.⁶⁴

And last but not least, Hunter Biden, Joe’s son:

• • Hunter launched a multibillion-dollar investment fund with backing from a state-run Chinese bank ten days after flying with then–Vice President Joe on Air Force Two to China in 2013.⁶⁵
• • Hunter received a million-dollars-per-year deal with a corrupt Ukrainian energy company even though he had no background in energy.⁶⁶
• • Hunter reportedly flew to capital city Astana to explore a business deal with Kazakhstani oligarchs (Breitbart reported on a photo of Joe, Hunter, and one of the oligarchs posing together in D.C. restaurant Café Milano).⁶⁷
• • Devon Archer, Hunter’s business partner, was convicted for his role in defrauding the Oglala Sioux Indian tribe, which is the poorest tribe in the country.⁶⁸
• • Hunter received $3.5 million as part of a deal with Russian oligarch Yelena Baturina; she is connected to organized crime.⁶⁹

None of these people had much expertise, if any, and they all made lots of money nonetheless. Though seemingly improper, all of this appears to be legal.

This is the pattern with the Biden family, and regular consumers of conservative news were aware of this.

But those weren’t the type of people who needed to be persuaded by the information Schweizer unearthed in 2018 or the New York Post in 2020. The Post’s story was particularly important because it not only revealed alleged Biden family corruption and a media cover-up, it exposed Joe as a stone-cold liar.

And the Biden campaign wasn’t even denying the story!⁷⁰

In fact, similar stories about Hunter Biden and Burisma had been reported in establishment outlets like the New York Times going back half a decade.⁷¹

The Masters of the Universe censorship machine clearly knew this, but they would not tolerate a Trump victory.

“Blip.” “Hiccup.”

So they kicked their censorship machine into overdrive.

It was “game on.”

Facebook suppressed the story, “reducing its distribution” while its super-neutral third-party fact-checkers vetted it.⁷² This is incredibly dishonest and devious. This shut down all of the story’s momentum on the platform.

Twitter followed suit by blocking the story with an even more ridiculous explanation, stating that suppressing it was “in line with our Hacked Materials Policy.”⁷³ There was no evidence the emails had been hacked. Allegedly, the information was retrieved from the laptop after it was left at a Delaware repair shop.

(John Paul Mac Isaac, the computer technician whom Hunter Biden hired to repair his laptop, claims that Twitter destroyed his business by portraying him as a hacker.⁷⁴ He maintains he obtained the information about the Bidens legally through his business’s abandoned property policy. He is suing Twitter for $500 million in punitive damages.)⁷⁵

The nation’s fourth-largest newspaper remained locked out of Twitter for two weeks leading into the presidential election, despite the fact that the report did not appear to be obtained through hacking, nor was its accuracy substantively challenged.⁷⁶

Millions upon millions of voters were prevented from seeing this accurate story likely because it just so happened to make the Bidens look really, really bad.

The day after news of the Burisma meeting broke, October 15, the New York Post broke another bombshell: the contents of more emails from the trove purportedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop that were arguably even juicier.⁷⁷ These emails seemed to show that Hunter had a provisional equity agreement for an endeavor with the now-defunct Shanghai-based conglomerate CEFC China Energy Company, where the “big guy” would get a 10 percent stake. One of the emails released by the Post contains the following text:

At the moment there is a provisional agreement that the equity will be distributed as follows:

20 H

20 RW

20 JG

20 TB

10 Jim

10 held by H for the big guy?

We don’t know if “H” stands for Hunter. Nor do we know that “Jim” refers to Jim Biden, Joe’s brother (more on him shortly). “TB” might be Tony Bobulinski, who was copied on the email. Bobulinski was a former Biden ally who turned on him, ultimately feeding a trove of documents to Senate investigators.⁷⁸ We also don’t know that the numbers refer to percentages of equity (though the six lines in the email add up exactly to 100). And we don’t know who the “big guy” is or if he was ultimately cut in.

But we do know what it looks like.

Anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows exactly what it looks like: corruption extended to the highest echelons of the American government.

Twitter memory-holed the report detailing Hunter’s dealing with the Chinese energy company.⁷⁹ Sohrab Ahmari, the Post’s editor, tweeted, “Twitter is censoring us—again. This is what I—an editor at America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, founded by Alexander Hamilton—get when I try to post our follow-up story on Hunter’s financial shenanigans with the Chinese regime.” Ahmari included a screenshot of a notification that “[y]our tweet couldn’t be sent because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”

The news media played their part in the censorship campaign as well. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas released audio of a CNN conference call where network president Jeff Zucker spiked the New York Post’s story personally, saying it would be going down “the Breitbart, New York Post, Fox News rabbit hole of Hunter Biden.” Others on the call are heard agreeing with their puppet master boss.⁸⁰ CNN’s general counsel David Vigilante is heard saying that “we should be awfully careful” with the story.⁸¹ CNN political director David Chalian agreed that the story shouldn’t be touched, stating that that “Senate Committees looked at and found nothing wrong in Joe Biden’s interaction with Ukrainians.” (This is a distortion. A Senate report released in September 2020 stated that “Hunter Biden, his family, and [business partner Devon] Archer received millions of dollars from foreign nationals with questionable backgrounds.” This includes Ukraine. The report found that Hunter “made millions of dollars” from his association with Burisma “while Joe Biden was vice president and the public face of the Obama administration’s Ukraine policy.”)⁸²

With only weeks left until the election, the media merely had to run out the clock and make sure the story didn’t become fully engrained in our cultural consciousness. In order to do that, they would need more than just the “he was hacked” lie. So, they dusted off a trusty device: blame the Russians.

Yes, the Democrat Media Complex attempted to portray actual evidence of possible actual corruption uncovered by a legitimate newspaper about the soon-to-be-president as Russian interference. According to the Hill, fifty deep state intelligence officials warned that the Post’s bombshells could be Russian disinfo.⁸³ The establishment press took the narrative and ran with it.⁸⁴ NBC News, the Washington Post, the Washington Post again, Politico, the New York Times, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, CBS News, CNN, Rolling Stone, Business Insider, Newsweek, USA Today, Mother Jones, Vox, and more all indulged the Democrat disinformation campaign in order to protect the Bidens and the tech elite.

Politico ran the headline “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say.”⁸⁵ The headline is wildly misleading. Here is the lede sentence of the story: “More than 50 former senior intelligence officials have signed on to a letter outlining their belief that the recent disclosure of emails allegedly belonging to Joe Biden’s son ‘has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.’ ” “Has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation” is not proof that it’s actually Russian disinformation.

The Atlantic’s David Frum tweeted, “The people on far right and far left who publicized the obviously bogus @nypost story were not dupes. They were accomplices. The story could not have been more obviously fake if it had been wearing dollar-store spectacles and attached plastic mustache.”⁸⁶

Wikipedia labeled the story “debunked” and a “conspiracy theory” after initially censoring it.⁸⁷ They even added the story to an article on “Russian interference in the 2020 United States elections,” even though this itself was a baseless hoax.

After the election, Joe Biden mocked Fox News’s Peter Doocy for asking if it was all Russian disinfo, stating categorically that it was: “Yes, yes, yes. God love you, man. You’re a one horse pony,” Biden said, apparently inventing a new equine species.⁸⁸

All of these “hot takes” were fake news (a “hot take” is a quickly informed commentary tailored more toward generating attention than accuracy). It was another hoax to benefit the Left.

As it turns out, Hunter Biden had already been under investigation since 2018 for exactly this type of corruption, including tax evasion.⁸⁹ The Justice Department had been looking at Hunter for, among other things, his shady Chinese business dealings.⁹⁰ For one, he had apparently received a 2.8-carat diamond from the aforementioned CEFC company’s founder, and it is unknown if he paid taxes on it.⁹¹ News of the investigations came out—you guessed it—just after the election. “I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs,” Hunter said on December 9, 2020. Attorney General William Barr had instructed the Department of Justice not to disclose any info to that effect so as to not interfere with the election. NBC reported on December 11, 2020, that Hunter had allegedly failed to disclose $400,000 of income from Burisma from 2014.⁹²

If only Barr had leaked three simple words: “Not. Russian. Disinformation.” Perhaps Trump would have won.

None of this should have surprised anyone because these scandals are consistent with prior reporting on flagged transactions involving Hunter Biden and foreign oligarchs, as confirmed by years of suspicious activity reports (SARs) filed by banks. The Senate Finance Committee report on Burisma from September 2020 exposed transactions involving Hunter and a Russian oligarch with mafia ties, Elena Baturina.⁹³ Later reporting revealed that Syrian businessman Hares Youssef invested millions in another one of Hunter’s firms.⁹⁴ Hunter himself admitted to the New Yorker that he received a “large diamond” from Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming back in 2019.⁹⁵

Maybe Ye is simply a generous guy who didn’t want anything in return.

Court documents from 2018 showed hundreds of thousands of dollars flowing to Hunter from Burisma through a pass-through LLC.

And Chinese corporate records show that Hunter had been a board member of Chinese investment firm Bohai Harvest RST since its founding in 2013. Hunter’s attorney, George Mesires, has tried to downplay Hunter’s financial stake in Bohai Harvest RST. In a statement posted on Medium, Mesires says Hunter paid $420,000 for his 10 percent stake—in a company with $2 billion in assets under management.⁹⁶ According to Steve Kaplan, a University of Chicago financial expert cited by FactCheck.org: “It is difficult to imagine, if not incomprehensible, that a 10% stake in those economics is worth only $420K.”⁹⁷

And it’s equally hard to imagine that the potential value of this stake would diminish under a Biden administration.

According to Hunter’s Secret Service travel records, which were obtained by Judicial Watch, he took 411 trips across 29 countries between 2009 and the middle of 2014.⁹⁸ That includes twenty-three flights into or out of Joint Base Andrews—home to Air Force One and Air Force Two. Did any of the journalists who sought to suppress the Hunter Biden story as Russian disinformation investigate exactly where Hunter was going on these trips and with whom?

It didn’t matter to the people who had an election to win and a public to misinform.

Hunter said he never spoke to his father about business. But he revealed to the New Yorker that he introduced his father to his Chinese business partners during an official visit in December 2013.⁹⁹

So Joe was lying.

Were there any other meetings between Hunter and a foreign oligarch that he discussed with Joe? Or are we simply to believe that Joe Biden had never, ever spoken to his globetrotting son about his international businesses? Aside from that one time…

Consistently the American public has been told that Hunter Biden was pure as the driven snow. Joe Biden called his son “the smartest guy I know.” Dr. Jill (Ed.D.) and Joe both expressed confidence that Hunter had done nothing wrong.¹⁰⁰ And, of course, Joe said he thought it was all Russian disinformation.

None of this was fact-checked. None of this was framed as lies.

It was the factual story that was censored across the same Big Tech platforms that had been cracking down on conservatives for years.

Game Over?

So, the question is: Did it work? Did the suppression of the Hunter Biden story by the establishment media and the tech oligarchs swing the election?

According to data compiled by the conservative Media Research Center, absolutely. The MRC surveyed 1,750 Biden voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, which were reported in a Newsbusters.org article titled “SPECIAL REPORT: The Stealing of the Presidency, 2020,” which revealed startling data. Some key findings:¹⁰¹

• • 35.4 percent of Biden voters were unaware of credible allegations that Joe Biden had sexually assaulted Tara Reade when she was on his Senate staff. (Joe Biden has denied Reade’s allegations, which are unproven.)
  • ◦ 8.9 percent of those surveyed told the MRC they would have changed their vote if they had been aware of it
• • 45.1 percent of Biden voters were unaware of financial scandals involving Joe and Hunter.
  • ◦ 9.4 percent of those surveyed told the MRC they would have changed their vote if they had been aware of it.
• • 25.3 percent of Biden voters said they didn’t know that GovTrack had found that Kamala Harris had the most left-wing record in the Senate.
  • ◦ 4.1 percent of those surveyed told the MRC they would have changed their vote if they had been aware of it.

Other data also found broad ignorance of Trump’s political victories, specifically rapid economic growth, booming jobs numbers, advances toward Middle East peace, energy independence, and progress made toward a coronavirus vaccine. In conclusion, the MRC found that 82 percent of Biden voters were unaware of at least one of the three aforementioned anti-Biden narratives or at least one of five pro-Trump narratives. This all appears to have cost Trump votes.

In total, the MRC survey showed that a whopping 17 percent of Biden voters would have switched their votes had they known about all eight items mentioned.

A Rasmussen Reports poll released shortly after the election revealed that most voters—including around a third of Democrats(!)—believed the media hid the Hunter Biden stories.¹⁰²

If these numbers are even close to accurate, this could have easily swung the election for Biden.

This is your election right here.

This is why Facebook and Google turned down Breitbart’s reach.

This is why the Masters of the Universe blocked the Hunter Biden bombshells.

This may well be why Joe Biden is president.

The establishment media and Big Tech oligarchs took control of the 2020 presidential election, and they did it legally and often in plain sight.

(Furthermore, with a diminished social media reach, each opportunity Trump had to make his own case to the public gained significance. Thus, the cancellation of the second presidential debate, ostensibly due to Donald Trump’s coronavirus diagnosis, was devastating to his reelection chances.¹⁰³ This meant that there was no foreign policy–centric debate in the entire general election cycle. This was disastrous fortune for Trump, who was largely responsible for the demise of the ISIS “caliphate” and the death of their “caliph,” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, among other highlights mentioned throughout this book.¹⁰⁴ The world was relatively peaceful during the Trump era, and America entered no new wars during that time. He lost out on his best chance to flaunt this record on the debate stage.)

Zuckerberg’s Mailboxes

Though it is apparent to me that the suppression of conservative-friendly stories and the elevation of hoax narratives that benefit Joe Biden were enough to swing the election on its own, the Masters of the Universe and the establishment media knew better than to count their chickens before they hatched. After all, they weren’t going to be blindsided this time around. They had to take other precautions.

Twitter altered their “retweet” functionality to slow the proliferation of viral stories.¹⁰⁵ They justified this as a means to stop disinformation online, but observers speculated this was an inelegant fail-safe that can be used in an emergency to diminish the reach of say, a story like the New York Post’s Hunter Biden bombshells.¹⁰⁶ Twitter reversed the policy shortly after the election.

Google continued to censor Breitbart articles on Joe Biden.¹⁰⁷ Networks continued to claim that legitimate scandals around Hunter Biden’s corruption were “unfounded and baseless.”¹⁰⁸ Joe Biden refused to take questions on the swirling controversies, and most of the media seemed to be perfectly fine with that.¹⁰⁹

Mark Zuckerberg made sure that he was able to restore his credibility with the world elite by doing his part to make sure Biden won. (Facebook had laughably been portrayed as a “right-wing echo chamber” in outlets like the Washington Post, despite evidence to the contrary.)¹¹⁰

Though there was no indication that voting in person was particularly dangerous relative to other “essential” activities in the COVID-19 era, the Democratic Party used the pandemic as an opportunity to institutionalize mail-in voting.¹¹¹ Though most any eligible voter can vote by mail, the more often people vote by mail, the better Democrats perform in elections.

This is reminiscent of MTV’s “Rock the Vote,” which rose in popularity throughout the 1990s. Though a superficially nonpartisan campaign, it was designed to appeal to young people who vote overwhelmingly Democrat. It was all a ruse.

Zuckerberg pumped in hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for “safe” election administration. Local elections offices were able to apply for money from the Center for Tech and Civic Life, funded by a $350 million donation from Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.¹¹²

Sounds noble. But upon scrutiny, the funds were a de facto get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort for Democrats. (Nothing Zuckerberg did was illegal, as far as I can tell.)

The centerpiece of the effort was COVID-safe “drop boxes.” These were bins that look like aluminum public trash cans, strewn randomly throughout the country, largely unprotected and unguarded. These made it easier for people to “safely” turn in their mail-in ballots. Critics of the plan like Newt Gingrich have said that a high number of these drop boxes were placed in precincts that favor Democrats, particularly ones that were likely to be close races.

Newt was correct to raise the red flag. After all, the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center funded dozens of these drop boxes in Democrat areas themselves.¹¹³ This is as sure a sign as any that drop boxes were installed specifically to help the Democrats.

Phill Kline, the director of the Amistad Project of the conservative Thomas More Society, broke it down as follows:¹¹⁴

Zuckerberg paid for the election judges; he purchased the drop boxes—contrary to state law; he ordered the consolidation of the counting facilities; Zuckerberg paid the local officials who boarded up the windows to the counting room; Zuckerberg money purchased the machines, Dominion and otherwise; and Zuckerberg money was contributed to secretaries of state, like Michigan’s Jocelyn Benson, who has fought transparency in this election.

Perhaps Zuckerberg came up with an (ostensibly nonpartisan) way to squeeze out a few extra crucial votes for the pro–Big Tech Democrats.

Maybe he’ll have finally redeemed himself for not stopping the Right from succeeding on his platform.

Tech Titans Triumph

I believe the Masters of the Universe were the single biggest deciding factor in the 2020 election. From the combination of President Trump and the Republicans’ failing to curtail their monopolistic powers, the constant manipulation of their platforms to benefit Joe Biden, and Mark Zuckerberg’s mystery cheat-by-mail boxes, I think I have a made a strong case.

Joe Biden certainly is behaving as though he might agree. Big Tech’s loyalty is being rewarded with important jobs in the administration (and look for Biden admin alumni to find cushy gigs in Silicon Valley when they exit, too).

Jeff Zients, a former Facebook board member, is Biden’s COVID czar. Erskine Bowles, a former Facebook board member, advised the transition. Jessica Hertz, formerly a government affairs executive at Facebook, served as the Biden transition team’s general counsel.¹¹⁵

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft were also quickly placed in the Big Tech/Big Government revolving door.¹¹⁶ During the transition, for example, Amazon hired Jeff Ricchetti, brother of White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, to lobby for them.¹¹⁷

Silicon Valley (and the rest of corporate America) stroked huge checks for Biden’s inauguration.¹¹⁸

After Biden’s election win, the convergence of the national security establishment and the Masters of the Universe began to reveal itself. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines both worked for the consulting firm WestExec, which Blinken cofounded with Michèle Flournoy, a former undersecretary of defense under President Obama.¹¹⁹ Google hired WestExec to help them land valuable Department of Defense contracts. WestExec also had a partnership with Jigsaw, Google’s in-house think tank, according to the Intercept.¹²⁰ In addition, Blinken disclosed that he worked for Microsoft and Facebook.

From a Reuters report from December 2020: “Google’s former Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, a billionaire who is a Silicon Valley titan, has been making personnel recommendations for appointments to the Department of Defense—as the company tries to pursue military contracts and defense work, according to three sources.”¹²¹ When Biden was sworn in, Schmidt was appointed to lead a government panel on artificial intelligence. I made contact with Schmidt’s team in an effort to confirm the Reuters report; they declined to comment.¹²²

Despite the fact that Joe Biden was inaugurated with elevated unemployment rates (January 2021 data showed jobs actually declining!), a partially shuttered economy, and a seemingly worsening pandemic, Biden announced that he would introduce an immigration bill immediately.¹²³ (Breitbart calculated between the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, Trump’s border wall, and other initiatives that create jobs, Biden killed about 70,000 jobs on his first day in office.)¹²⁴ Access to cheaper labor via lax immigration rules has always been the top priority for the Masters of the Universe, especially Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the pro-amnesty group FWD.us.

Looks like Joe Biden knows where his bread is buttered.

The Purge

The last act of the Trump presidency was like the last scene of The Godfather. Or the first scene of The Children of the Corn, depending on your preference. Once the narrative was set that Donald Trump was encouraging a coup, the Masters of the Universe struck Trump World and they struck them hard.

Trump was banned or restricted by Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Shopify, Reddit, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Google, and even his beloved and powerful Twitter page.¹²⁵

Donald Trump banned from Twitter, for life.

Regardless of your political viewpoint, it is quite frightening to see corporate America attempt to cancel the president of the United States, regardless of who it is.

Still, the Masters of the Universe always had the knives out for Trump and finally they thought they were morally justified in sending him to the gulag.

Many Trump supporters were also caught in the crossfire, particularly those seen as supporting the challenges to the Electoral College vote.

This is particularly ironic since several Democrat congresspeople went out of their way to avoid calling Donald Trump “President.” Representative Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) called him “the Grand Wizard of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” implying tens of millions of his fellow Americans actually voted for a Ku Klux Klansman.¹²⁶ (Many of them twice.) “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley doesn’t refer to him as “President,” either; she says he is merely the man “occupying the Oval Office.”¹²⁷ So brave! So clever!

Facebook removed all “Stop the Steal” content.¹²⁸ “Stop the Steal” was the rallying cry for those who believed Joe Biden was not legitimately elected. “Stop the Steal” leaders Sidney Powell and General Michael Flynn were also blacklisted.

This is particularly outrageous because the last time Big Tech did a blanket content ban like this, it was of the accurate Hunter Biden scoops from the New York Post.

Arguably more alarming, though, was a quick and ruthless Twitter purge of countless thousands of pro-Trump accounts.¹²⁹ This appeared to be a mass blacklisting of otherwise platform-less citizens. Top Republicans saw their followings diminish rapidly. Mike Pompeo observed that follower counts for Democrats like Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer soared during this time, while Republicans Tom Cotton and Kevin McCarthy saw theirs fall through the floor.¹³⁰ I personally detest Twitter and rarely tweet, but it was nonetheless shocking when I lost 25 percent of my followers in a matter of a couple of days without any explanation.

The blacklisting was met with near-universal praise from the liberal side of the aisle. Hollywood rejoiced.¹³¹ Joe Manchin (D-WV), seen as perhaps the most moderate Democrat in the Senate, thanked Twitter for canceling the president.¹³²

The social media start-up Parler, which had become a safe space for conservative social media users, was targeted with the heat of a thousand suns over calls for violence that appeared on the platform. (Twitter, at the time, still allowed accounts openly supportive of Antifa to organize on their platform.)¹³³ Google blacklisted Parler from the Play store.¹³⁴ Apple blacklisted it from the App store.¹³⁵ And in a blow that took Parler offline entirely, Amazon, which rarely delves into the political hysterias of the day, booted Parler from its web hosting servers.¹³⁶

All at once, Silicon Valley had decided to destroy MAGA, or at least try to. And it was all done in concert.

Despite that fact, a few on the left like journalist Glenn Greenwald and even German chancellor Angela Merkel warned that this crackdown on free speech might not be such a great idea.¹³⁷ Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador blasted Twitter.¹³⁸ Still, the blacklisting fervor only got more intense.

The establishment media got in on the censorship action as well. An ABC political editor called for a “cleansing” of Trump’s movement.¹³⁹ The Washington Post called for the media to shun Republicans who deny Biden’s legitimacy.¹⁴⁰ Simon & Schuster canceled Josh Hawley’s forthcoming book on Big Tech (Hawley was seen as the face of Senate Republican objectors to the Electoral College vote).¹⁴¹

CNN shamelessly began a campaign to get cable providers to drop Fox News, typically the highest-rated network on all of cable and CNN’s direct competition.¹⁴²

The canceling wasn’t merely limited to media entities, either. Payment processor Stripe shut down service to the Trump campaign.¹⁴³ Several major businesses, including Citigroup, Marriott, and Blue Cross Blue Shield, said they would stop donating to political causes.¹⁴⁴

Calls flooded in to break up the Masters of the Universe—all from conservatives who were headed out of power after years of doing nothing to stop their rise. Many of them even enabled it.

So, in a way, Joe Biden did have his “unity,” at least on the social web. Most everyone of prominence who remained “platformed” supported the new woke McCarthyism, or at least were going to keep quiet about it until the heat died down. Political opponents were no longer to be debated, or even tolerated. They were to be forced into submission.

The Big Tech oligarchs and their allies in the corporate media paid no mind to the fact that much of the country was appalled by what they were doing and still supported President Trump. The Rasmussen presidential tracking poll for January 11, 2021, showed Trump’s approval at 48 percent, right around where it had been most of his administration.¹⁴⁵

They weren’t convincing many of his voters. But that was never their intent. Our weaponized news media and social media giants have wanted to crush Trump, his movement, and American individuals who dare not conform to their vision of the world.