President-elect Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles sent a message last week ordering presidential nominees to refrain from posting on social media as Senate confirmation hearings are scheduled to begin. This wise advice is Susie Wiles at her best.
“While this instruction has been delivered previously,” she wrote, “I am reiterating that no member of the incoming administration or Transition speaks for the United States or the President-elect himself. Accordingly, all intended nominees should refrain from any public social media posts without prior approval of the incoming White House counsel.”1
As background on social media, the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign of Barack Obama revolutionized political strategy by leveraging social media platforms, particularly Facebook, to engage voters, organize grassroots movements, and secure unprecedented financial contributions. Social media played a direct role in increasing engagement and turnout.
It also marked a turning point in modern political campaigning, demonstrating how social media could be harnessed for grassroots precinct-level organizing, fundraising, and direct communication. Over the next decade, left-leaning Silicon Valley ideologues – blindly devoted to progressive liberalism – ‘captured’ social media platforms and pioneered a type of cultural dominance by top-down activists, thereby embedding reprobate values into American culture.
Although Elon Musk in 2022 broke the monopoly of social media tycoons, purchasing Twitter for $44B, social networking conglomerates continue to diligently organize and display partiality for Leftist ideological supremacy in America’s public square.
Last week, David Samuels [born 1967], editor of County Highway and literary editor of Tablet, authored a profound and insightful piece titled, How Obama Built an Omnipotent Thought-Machine, and How It Was Destroyed.2
He writes that Obama’s social media machine, in essence, evolved from grassroots organizing, fundraising, and communication in the early 21st century to “censoring dissenting opinions on everything from COVID, to DEI programs, to police conduct, to the prevalence and the effects of hormone therapies and surgeries on youth, large numbers of people began feeling pressured by an external force that they couldn’t always name …
“Catchphrases like ‘defund the police’, ‘structural racism’, ‘white privilege’, ‘children don’t belong in cages’, ‘assigned gender’ or ‘stop the genocide in Gaza’ would emerge and marinate in meme-generating pools like the academy or activist organizations, and then jump the fence – or be fed – into niche groups and threads on Twitter or Reddit …
“America’s large cultural systems, from education, to science and medicine, to the production of movies and books, were all visibly failing, as they fell under the control of this new apparatus.
“[And with this new technology and advantage] Obamacare was followed by the Iran deal, which was followed by Russiagate, which was followed by COVID. Messaging around the pandemic was the fourth and most far-reaching permission structure game that was run by small clusters of operatives on the American public, resulting in the revocation of the most basic social rights – like the right to go outside your own home, or visit a dying parent or child in the hospital.
“COVID also proved to be an excuse for the largest wealth transfer in American history, comprising hundreds of billions of dollars, from the middle and working classes to the top 1%. Most ominously, COVID proved to be a means for remaking the American electoral system, as well as providing a platform for a series of would-be social revolutions in whose favor restrictions on public gatherings and laws against looting and public violence were suspended due to manifestations of ‘public opinion’ on social media.
Asserting that every form of totalitarianism is unique Samuels showed that oppressive rule, centralized power, and the consequences of unchecked power merely lurk around the next corner if unaddressed.
COVID-19 was the unmitigated appropriation of totalitarian power and control by subversive government bureaucrats and Blue State governors manipulating public opinion through its allies of Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Media; all in collusion with Big Government.
The Centers for Disease Control cooked the books – with seven out of ten pharmaceutical companies spending more on sales and marketing than on research and development – whereas Dr. Fauci deluded the American people and even lied during Congressional hearings.
An iniquitous schemer, Fauci should be held accountable for the detrimental disruption of the American culture with such baseless decrees as mask mandates, outlawing singing in church [liquor stores, marijuana distribution centers, and abortion clinics were designated ‘essential’, while churches were deemed ‘non-essential’], stay-at-home orders, and 6-feet ‘safe’ distances, in addition to the autocratic overreach, technological surveillance, propaganda via social media, and suppression of dissent so typical of habitual totalitarians like him.
Fauci’s actions, and those of others of similar pernicious persuasion, likely provided the catalyst that brought President-Elect Trump back to power.
Twisted catchphrases like those mentioned by David Samuels won’t however be the last to be fabricated and contrived in order to manipulate public opinion.
H.L. Mencken aptly observed that “the urge to save humanity is almost always a false face for the urge to rule it.” A quick survey of the nearly 6,000 years of recorded human history will reveal that oppressive regimes and tyrannical rulers are part and parcel of human behavior.
Lust for unchecked power, abyssal abuse of authority, and unflagging suppression of freedom and faith are the distinctive traits of the enemy, the one coming to “steal, kill, and destroy.”
Previously sequestered over multiple decades behind the four walls of the church building, Gideons and Rahabs now have entered the public square of America.
David Lane
American Renewal Project
1. nypost.com/2024/12/30/us-news/trump-team-orders-all-intended-nominees-to-stop-posting-on-social-media-ahead-of-senate-confirmations/
