“Public-Private” Partnerships are Corrupt

God’s Word provides us with more knowledge than any of us could learn in a lifetime. I’m fact, I’d suggest it provides us with more knowledge than all of humanity could learn throughout eternity. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep mining it for everything we can learn from it. Thus, I’d suggest it would be worth our while these days to dig into Scripture to develop a theology of the Censorship-Industrial Complex (see below for the article by Margot Cleveland at the Federalist). Christians should be leading the way in developing ideas about to deal with this clear and present danger.

Of course, the partnership of government with industry is nothing new; neither it its threat to liberty. President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about the Military-Industrial Complex in the 1950s; we did not listen very well. The Budgetary-Financial Complex, the partnership between congressional appropriators and Wall Street, has been in place since Congress created the Federal Reserve in 1913. And the Regulatory-Rent Seeking Complex, the partnership between regulators and businesses seeking profits through government rather than markets, has been alive and well since the passage of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was passed in 1890.

Yet Americans–and American Christians–have just sat around watching these partnerships continue as if God has no problem with corruption. Margot Cleveland does a great job of describing the problem of the “public-private” partnerships in her article:

How Trump Derangement Gave Birth to the Censorship-Industrial Complex

by Margot Cleveland

The Biden administration may have abandoned plans to create a “Disinformation Board,” but a more insidious “Censorship Complex” already exists and is growing at an alarming speed. 

This Censorship Complex is bigger than banned Twitter accounts or Democrats’ propensity for groupthink. Its funding and collaboration implicate the government, academia, tech giants, nonprofits, politicians, social media, and the legacy press. Under the guise of combatting so-called misinformation, disinformation, and mal-information, these groups seek to silence speech that threatens the far-left’s ability to control the conversation — and thus the country and the world.

Americans grasped a thread of this reality with the release of the “Twitter Files” and the Washington Examiner’s reporting on the Global Disinformation Index, which revealed the coordinated censorship of speech by government officials, nonprofits, and the media. Yet Americans have no idea of the breadth and depth of the “Censorship Complex” — and how much it threatens the fabric of this country.

In his farewell address in 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned against the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power” via the new sweeping military-industrial complex. Its “total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — [was] felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government.” Replace “military-industrial” with “censorship,” and you arrive at the reality Americans face today.

Origins of the Censorship Complex

Even with the rise of independent news outlets, until about 2016 the left-leaning corporate media controlled the flow of information. Then Donald Trump entered the political arena and used social media to speak directly to Americans. Despite the Russia hoax and the media’s all-out assault, Trump won, proving the strategic use of social media could prevail against a unified corporate press. The left was terrified. 

Of course, Democrats and the media couldn’t admit their previous control over information converted to electoral victories and that for their own self-preservation, they needed to suppress other voices. So instead, the left began pushing the narrative that “disinformation” — including Russian disinformation — from alternative news outlets and social media companies handed Trump the election.

The New York Times first pushed the “disinformation” narrative using the “fake news” moniker after the 2016 election. “The proliferation of fake and hyperpartisan news that has flooded into Americans’ laptops and living rooms has prompted a national soul-searching, with liberals across the country asking how a nation of millions could be marching to such a suspect drumbeat. Fake news, and the proliferation of raw opinion that passes for news, is creating confusion,” the Times wrote, bemoaning the public’s reliance on Facebook.

Read the rest at the Federalist.