This has been face-hammer week. In fact, it’s been a face-hammer year.Part of the main duty of OffGuardian is to troll through the masses of media output and try and pick up patterns. Sometimes the patterns are subtle, a gentle urging behind the paragraphs. Sometimes they’re more like a sledgehammer to the face.

From “flatten the curve” to “the new normal” to “the great reset”, it’s not been hard to spot the messaging going on since the start of the “pandemic”. And that distinct lack of disguise has carried over into other topics, too.

We pointed out, a few days ago, the sudden over-use of the phrase “domestic terrorism” preparing us for what is, almost certainly, going to be a truly horrendous piece of new legislation once Biden is in office.

Well, the buzz-phrase doing the rounds in the wake of Donald Trump being banned from the internet is “the new definition of free speech”…and variations on that theme.

The chief constable of Dorset Police has urged lockdown protesters to accept that “now is really not the time” for freedom of speech and the right to assembly.

Chief Constable James Vaughan was speaking after the controversial arrest of two women for, seemingly, being recorded leaving home more than once and “sitting on a bench”, in an incident the police now allege was “stage-managed” by lockdown protesters, as one of the women is a Covid sceptic — although she denies any pre-planning.

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Chief Constable Vaughan’s zero-tolerance attitude towards protesters differs markedly from that shown by British police leaders towards Black Lives Matter activists, who have been allowed to break lockdown rules largely unmolested throughout the pandemic — in part, London Police Commissioner Cressida Dick admitted in June, because officers are afraid to enforce the law against them.

Democrat Commies in Oregon are again preparing more bills with which to assault their citizens during the upcoming legislative session.

And, as usual, everyone must watch these bills carefully because we know that, if it goes well in Oregon, other Democrat Communists throughout the country will push these same kind of bills through their own states.

House Bill 2238 says that it is only clarifying the Governor’s authority to use property during emergency. But, what does this mean?

Always… repeat always… read the bill to see what it is actually telling you!

The bill will expand the Governor’s powers whenever she decides to declare an emergency.

The Oregon state legislature is currently considering a bill which would allow for the Governor to seize, use, or possess any private property during a state of emergency.

HB-2238 is supposedly meant to clarify the “Governor’s authority to use property during an emergency.” There are already provisions in place to allow for limited use of private property by the state government, but this bill seeks to drastically expand these. As proposed in HB-2238,

“Whenever the Governor has declared a state of emergency, the Governor may issue, amend and enforce rules and orders to:
1) Control, restrict and regulate by rationing, freezing, use of quotas, prohibitions on shipments, price fixing, allocation or other means, the use, sale or distribution of food, feed, fuel, clothing and other commodities, materials, goods and services;

Steven Donziger’s story is that of a single man battling a powerful corporation over its devastating pollution of the Amazon region – and paying a terrible price. Here, he speaks exclusively to RT.com about his ordeal.

As a law graduate from Harvard, a contemporary of Barack Obama, there’s an expectation you would be exempt from the abuses of the US state.

However, things have played out differently for Steven Donziger.

He’s been under house arrest for over 500 days, despite being convicted of no crime. He has been disbarred and vilified, had his bank accounts frozen, and now faces up to five months in jail. He is forced to wear a GPS device strapped to his ankle, and in order to leave his two-bedroom home in New York he needs permission 48 hours in advance.

Donziger, speaking to RT.com from his seventh floor Manhattan apartment, says: “I can’t even go get the mail in the lobby. What’s happening to me has never happened to any other person in America for even one day.”

Despite Angela Merkel’s difficult relationship with President Trump, the German Chancellor made it clear that she is outraged over the decision by Twitter, Facebook, and Google to collectively banish the president from the Internet in the final week of his term.

But Merkel’s statement, which attracted much attention in the U.S., was far from the only statement by a world leader recognizing the enormous power grab made by Big Tech, and the need to reverse that power grab with new regulations, new laws, or even entirely new online platforms. Leaders from all over the world joined in to express the same sentiments, and Revolver has compiled many of them into a list below. But keep in mind: No doubt even more leaders are thinking the same thing, and have only stayed quiet to avoid irritating the incoming BidenHarris Administration.

Over the last decade, a small group of billionaire philanthropists have quietly moved into to seize control of key nodes of media, government policy, and education. They claim that they are merely trying to ‘fill in the funding gaps at struggling news organizations’ – especially in the wake of the coronavirus ‘pandemic.’ By far, the biggest player in this network is the Gates Foundation.

In short, Gates has long used his foundation’s charitable veneer to steer and shape the public discourse on global health. In the case of COVID and vaccines, it is believed that Gates is using his billions to parlay both access and favorable news coverage.

A recent investigation conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reveals a number of disturbing findings which point to a multibillion dollar network of information control and narrative management – with Bill Gates squarely at the center.

Facebook and Instagram unblocked Trump’s accounts on Friday, although, following the ban of the POTUS pages last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that the bans would not be suspended until at least the 20 January Inauguration Day for President-elect Joe Biden.

Returned his pages, Trump, however, has been denied by the company the status of US president, marked instead on Facebook as "Political Candidate" despite that he is legally the POTUS until after the 20 January Joe Biden inauguration.

What is DNS? When you type a site name, it is meaningless to a computer. Your computer sends the site's name to a DNS server and the DNS server then tells your computer what IP address the site is at, and your computer then accesses that IP address. Having the IP address work correctly has to be set up on purpose. Normally you cannot just hit a site's IP and have it load. This site is an exception. This site's IP address is 82.221.129.208 and when you hit only that number, it still loads the most current page.

Other than self-government such as peaceful anarchy or voluntarism, government in every circumstance is structured to manage and control the people by force. This is regardless of what particular type of governing system exists; whether a democracy, a constitutional republic, an oligarchy, or confederacy; whether it may be socialistic, communistic, fascist, or a monarchy. These and any other of the many forms of governance are all based on power and control over the masses. This has always been, and the people themselves have not only allowed this to happen, but have purposely structured these systems of rule.

It's been obvious for a long time that the best way to stop the rise of right-wing extremism in America that everyone's so worried about today is not to pass a bunch of authoritarian laws, but to reverse the policies of soul-crushing neoliberalism and domestic austerity which led to Donald Trump. Instead of doing this, the next president is already pushing a Patriot Act sequel and reducing the stimulus checks he'd promised the public before he's even been sworn in.

The Department of Justice has announced it’s mounting a full-scale operation to arrest and charge people who broke into the Capitol on January 6.

There will be a wide-ranging menu of charges, starting with criminal trespass, and moving all the way to weapons possession, theft of National Security data, assault, and sedition.

The DOJ list of charges is meant to impress the American people.

Of course, an impressive DOJ list could have been leveled against thousands of people who participated in Antifa/BLM-led burning, looting, theft, and assault across the US over the past six months.

But that didn’t happen.

There are only about 133 million registered voters in this country and we know that more than 80 million voted for President Trump in this last election. Yet, the Marxist Left wants you to believe that Sleepy Joe won the election, and some even try claiming it was by a landslide.

To solidify their Coup d’état, and before the people can get over being shell-shocked and start to react, they have made several moves to Fundamentally Transform this country into a Communist State.

Their first move is to attempt to remove President Trump before Joe takes office by either invoking the 25th Amendment or by convicting him in another impeachment trial. For their own paranoid reasons, the Marxists feel that Trump has the ability to stop this treason sometime during the next week.

Joe Biden has the people who took over the Capitol on Jan. 6 figured out. In just two days, he had them pegged for “a bunch of thugs, insurrectionists, white supremacists, and anti-Semites, and it’s not enough.” Not enough? He also said they were “domestic terrorists.” Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsay Graham, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, “Squad” leader Cori Bush and plenty of others agreed that they were domestic terrorists. Even the mayor of Orlando says so, and DC mayor Muriel Bowser called the occupation “textbook terrorism” so that clinches it.

Curiously, there is a federal definition of domestic terrorism, but it isn’t a crime. There is now tremendous pressure to change that, and depending on what kind of law takes shape, there could be huge implications for dissidents.

With the hysteria over the Capitol Building dustup Wednesday hogging the news, I think it’s important not to allow the Georgia runoff elections to be buried and forgotten about, because how a majority of liberty-minded Americans view what happened in Georgia will determine the impact it will have on America’s future.

If conservatives and libertarians throw up their hands in despair and view the Georgia elections as the final death knell for liberty in this country, they might just end up being right. But if they view them as a clarion call to return America to its founding conservative-libertarian roots, they might also be right. What is needed right now is clear thinking and a great deal of action.

Google owned Youtube has removed any new content from President Trump’s account and suspended his channel from posting any content for at least a week, claiming that the channel violated its policies for “inciting violence.”

This comes after all mainstream social media decided to banish Trump and take away his freedom of speech.

“After careful review, and in light of concerns about the ongoing potential for violence, we removed new content uploaded to Donald J. Trump channel and issued a strike for violating our policies for inciting violence,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement to reporters.

Monday on Fox News Channel’s “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” host Tucker Carlson opened his program by condemning Apple, Google and Amazon’s effort to shutdown Parler.

Carlson maintained such a coordinated effort violated U.S. antitrust law.

Wikipedia editors on Tuesday locked the page for President-elect Joe Biden’s pick to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division after users attempted to add reference to a 1994 letter she authored suggesting Black people had “superior physical and mental abilities.”

Parler, a social networking service praised by many followers of the U.S. President Donald Trump, sued Amazon.com Inc on Monday, blaming its Web hosting service for violating antitrust law by suspending its account.

In a charge filed with the U.S. District Court in Seattle, Parler announced Amazon's decision to effectively shutter its account was "apparently motivated by political animus" and "apparently designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter."

Parler is attempting a court order requiring Amazon to restore its account, and preventing it from suspending services it had contracted for. It is further seeking unspecified triple damages.

Twice failed presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton is waging all out war on Trump supporters. Clinton labeled Trump supporters “white supremacists” and “domestic terrorists” in a Washington Post op-ed.

The Democrat-media complex is using the chaos at the US Capitol last week as a pretext to label Trump supporters domestic terrorists.

Critics of Silicon Valley censorship for years heard the same refrain: tech platforms like Facebook, Google and Twitter are private corporations and can host or ban whoever they want. If you don’t like what they are doing, the solution is not to complain or to regulate them. Instead, go create your own social media platform that operates the way you think it should.

The founders of Parler heard that suggestion and tried. In August, 2018, they created a social media platform similar to Twitter but which promised far greater privacy protections, including a refusal to aggregate user data in order to monetize them to advertisers or algorithmically evaluate their interests in order to promote content or products to them. They also promised far greater free speech rights, rejecting the increasingly repressive content policing of Silicon Valley giants.

A few Big Tech companies acted to remove social media platform Parler over the weekend, but it seems to have found a new company to help try to keep its website operating.

On Monday, Parler registered its field and server to be hosted by Epik, an internet web hosting company known for working with right-leaning websites. Gab, another social media platform popular with conservatives, also uses Epik. A web domain search reveals that Parler is now registered with Epik.

Facebook announced on Monday it is excluding all content that includes the expression “stop the steal” ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

The company published a statement announcing it was removing content containing the phrase that was practiced by supporters of President Donald Trump to question the integrity of the 2020 general election. Trump fans held many rallies across the country called “Stop the Steal” following the Nov. 3 election.

America has essentially been at war, nonstop, since the weeks after the 9/11 attacks. Those “forever wars,” as they’re now commonly called, have been both truly distant from and eerily close to us, far away and yet a deeply embedded part of American life. And here, to my mind, is the strangest thing: those rare figures who, as citizens (or in one case an outsider), managed to reach into the heart of the American-war and national-security states and reveal something of what was actually being done in our names have suffered grim fates indeed.

The Department of Justice is working to build sedition and conspiracy charges against some of the rioters who stormed the Capitol last week, the top federal prosecutor for Washington, D.C., said Tuesday.

Michael Sherwin, the acting U.S. attorney for D.C., said in a press conference that he has assembled a team of national security attorneys to explore some of the harshest charges his office could pursue in the wake of the riot that overran the Capitol and left five people dead Wednesday.

"Just yesterday, our office organized a strike force of very senior national security prosecutors and public corruption prosecutors," Sherwin told reporters. "Their only marching orders from me are to build seditious and conspiracy charges related to the most heinous acts that occurred in the Capitol."

Sedition charges can carry prison sentences of up to 20 years.

Patriot Act 2.0 will be rolled out with a lot of mindless bleating about white supremacists and fighting fascism, and the actual policies and laws put into place will have virtually nothing to do with any of those things. They will be geared at preventing the revolutionary changes that need to be pushed for in the United States by the American people.

Listening to US politicians and pundits the last few years you’d assume it’s been raining actual 9/11s and Pearl Harbors in America 24/7.

“Our democracy has been attacked!” screamed the political establishment that just forced you to choose between Donald Trump and Democrat Donald Trump for president.

Saying there’s been an attack on American democracy is like saying there’s been an attack on Kazakhstan’s fjords.

GoFundMe will no longer let users raise money to travel to political events that could turn violent, the company said Tuesday, after Trump supporters used the site to raise money for last week's attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The world's biggest social fundraising platform is joining the growing chorus of businesses condemning the attempted insurrection and cracking down on the inflammatory rhetoric spread by President Donald Trump and his supporters. GoFundMe will "remove fundraisers for travel expenses to a future political event where there's risk of violence by the attendees," a company spokesman told The Washington Post on Tuesday, adding that GoFundMe has removed "numerous" fundraisers intended to raise money for travel expenses in the wake of the violence.

Twitter has suspended more than 70,000 accounts since Friday that were primarily dedicated to sharing QAnon content after last week’s violence in Washington when supporters of President Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol.

QAnon backers have pushed conspiracies on social media that include the baseless claim that Trump secretly is fighting a cabal of child-sex predators, among them prominent Democrats, figures in Hollywood and “deep state” allies.

Facebook has deleted Iran’s state media Press TV page off its platform Tuesday without any warning or explanation, according to the broadcaster.

Facebook told the outlet that Iran’s international English news network is not eligible to be on its site, Press TV said in an article.

Press TV had 4 million followers before the page was taken down.

“Facebook deletes Press TV's main page without any warning or explanation,” the news outlet tweeted.

In a Monday night blog post, Twitter laid out all the latest details of a historic purge that started with the permanent suspension of President Donald Trump. Isn’t it odd how none of those considerations emerged during the summer when United States cities were literally burning as a result of countless violent protests and frequent riots?

According to a report by ZeroHedge, the Great Purge, which is a big tech censorship campaign rivaled only by that of Nazi Germany’s, has begun. With the suspension of 70,000 accounts since Friday, the crackdown on dissent and those who know they are being lied to propagandized is here. The Orwellian dystopia we were all warned about has arrived.

Political elites worldwide have criticized big tech companies for banning President Donald Trump from their social media platforms.

At present, the president has been banned from Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, and Instagram.

Twitter permanently removed Trump’s account, saying that his recent posts were in violation of the “Glorification of Violence Policy.”

German Chancellor Angela Merkel called Twitter’s ban on Trump “problematic,” and said that freedom of opinion is an essential right of “elementary significance,” her spokesperson, Steffen Siebert, said on Jan 11.

“This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators—not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms,” Siebert said.

But make no mistake. There has been a coup attempt in America this week. The globalist American regime has effectively overthrown Donald Trump two weeks early, and is now moving to secure its power.

Real coups are not clumsy mob attacks adjacent to lawmakers. Real coups, above all, are about control: Control of communications, control of bureaucracy, and above all, control of military power. And in the past few days, it is President Trump’s enemies who have seized control of all these things.

The most obvious sign of the unfolding coup is the most memorable: The suspension, and then banning, of the President’s Twitter account. After this ban was handed down, a flurry of other tech companies rushed to follow suit.

Right now, the single most existential threat to free speech in America is the rise of financial deplatforming. If conservatives want to preserve the ability to think and speak freely in the decades to come, they must act to prevent the country’s most powerful financial institutions from imposing a brutal censorship regime on the entire country.

Lenin never actually said “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which to hang them,” but that apocryphal quote exactly describes the present-day hapless Republican party’s relationship to Big Tech and the left. In Congress and across fifty state legislatures, the GOP’s shortsighted support for laissez-fair economics is allowing left-wing corporations to plot their destruction.

Just days ago, Twitter shocked the nation and international community alike by purging Donald J. Trump from its platform. Like hyenas, Big Tech companies attack in packs, and Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat, YouTube, and payment processor Stripe all quickly followed suit with their own bans and restrictions on the President.

This dramatic full-spectrum “un-personing” of the President of the United States from the American digital communications infrastructure marks a clarifying inflection point in Americans’ understanding of what kind of country they live in, and who or what ultimately controls it. Big Tech’s deplatforming of Donald Trump also marks a dark culmination to the war that Big Tech declared on free speech, the internet, and Trump supporters alike, most infamously revealed in a leaked video of Google senior executives reacting hysterically to Trump’s 2016 win and vowing “never again.”

After rigging the elections and staging the January 6th false flag “riot” at the capitol building in D.C., Democrats have some horrifying plans to roll out in their quest to achieve a full-blown Orwellian nightmare future for America… or at least what’s left of it.

With the rule of law now utterly rejected by every layer of the judicial system in the nation — including SCOTUS — there is no longer any controlling legal authority which will halt the rapid advance of the Left’s most ambitious agendas. And with Democrats now proving they can steal elections right in front of us, even with overwhelming evidence literally recorded on video cameras as the ballot counting crimes took place, they know nothing can stop them from fulfilling their most crazed visions of a Marxist society rooted in authoritarianism, censorship and lies.

Even without access to his megaphone platform of Twitter, President Donald Trump is still as brazen as ever as his tenure in the White House enters its waning days.

Amid threats of a second impeachment and spurned by one-time congressional allies after last week’s violent assault on the Capitol, the outgoing president is vigorously taking on the social-media companies that have banned him from the platforms that have been instrumental in rallying his supporters.

In other words, Trump seems to have no intention of resigning — in any sense of the word.

In the aftermath of the riots on Capitol Hill last week by President Donald Trump’s supporters, who believed that there was widespread election fraud that cost Trump a second term, Cumulus Media has issued a memo aimed at its conservative talk show hosts ordering them to stop suggesting that the election was stolen or they would be subject to termination.

In a memo reported by Inside Music Media, Brian Philips, executive vice president of content for Cumulus and its program syndication arm Westwood One, wrote “We need to help induce national calm NOW,” and that the company “will not tolerate any suggestion that the election has not ended. The election has been resolved and there are no alternate acceptable ‘paths.’ ”

Phillips then warned hosts of the potential penalty for disobeying the order.

“If you transgress this policy, you can expect to separate from the company immediately,” he said.

Facebook announced on Monday it is removing all content that contains the phrase “stop the steal” ahead of President-elect Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

The company issued a statement saying it was removing content containing the phrase that was used by supporters of President Donald Trump to question the integrity of the 2020 general election. Trump supporters held multiple rallies across the country called “Stop the Steal” following the Nov. 3 election.

The social media company said that the move is an attempt to remove content that “could incite further violence during these next few weeks.” Content will be removed under the company’s Coordinating Harm policy.

An international outcry over tech censorship is underway, as political leaders from Mexico to Europe voice their alarm at the unchecked power of Big Tech, following the purge of President Donald Trump by the Big Tech Masters of the Universe

A video of a Trump supporter crying at an airport after learning he’s on the no-fly list is circulating online.

In the video posted to Twitter on Monday, a man is seen walking through an airport terminal while audibly crying.

Twitter, however familiar the platform has become, remains forever a private entity, a corporate body that cannot claim to legislate or in this particular instance rule over our realities by shutting out certain voices and/or certain ideas. Such powers are far too great for any one individual or corporation to exercise without oversight and lawful recourses. One does not simply suspend a democratically elected president’s opinions on the basis that they clash with the CEO’s own personal views and interests.

With absolutely no explanation former Congressman and Presidential Candidate Ron Paul has been blocked by Facebook.

Biden has announced plans to roll out new domestic terrorism laws in the wake of the Capitol Hill riot.

“Mr. Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them,” Wall Street Journal reports.

Did you know that Biden has often boasted about being the original author of the US Patriot Act?

The first draft of the civil rights-eroding USA PATRIOT Act was magically introduced one week after the 9/11 attacks. Legislators later admitted that they hadn’t even had time to read through the hundreds of pages of the history-shaping bill before passing it the next month, yet somehow its authors were able to gather all the necessary information and write the whole entire thing in a week.

This was because most of the work had already been done. CNET reported the following back in 2008:

Power can only be checked by power, and because President Donald J. Trump and the Conservative Movement ™ didn’t oppose the emerging Totalitarian Left when they had the chance, the Historic American Nation is about to suffer real tyranny under the boot of our corporate and political rulers. The good news: the Capitol Hill protest and its subsequent repression was another step in the radicalization, not of the Dissident Right, which already knows the score only too well, but of the mass of ordinary American patriots.

We are up against demons.

Democrats in both the US House and Senate are drafting legislation to classify “Make America Great Again” rallies as “domestic terrorist activity.”

They are literally criminalizing their opposition.

And they are trampling the Constitutional right to freely assemble!

With the left and their assistants in big tech on the hunt to destroy conservatives everywhere, former ESPN talker Jemele Hill is once again reviving the theme of Russian election interference.

Despite the fact that no evidence has ever been revealed showing the Russians having an outsized influence on the 2016 elections, the Atlantic referenced it in a Sunday tweet.

“The Russians created chaos in the 2016 election by flooding our social media networks with misinformation and racial division. If this coup attempt isn’t dealt with harshly, America’s enemies will know they can weaponize white people to do their bidding without consequence,” she wrote.

In my article yesterday – “The Storming of the Capitol”: America’s Reichstag Fire? – I said this [my emphasis]:

Although there is not yet any talk of legislation [in response to the Capitol Hill riots], it’s certainly true there are whispers of purges and other measures to “protect the constitution”.

That quote did not age well, indeed it was wrong from the moment it went to print. Because, as it turns out, there has actually been “talk of legislation” for weeks – even months. Soon-to-be-President Joe Biden promised a new “domestic terrorism bill” back in November, according to the Wall Street Journal.

That is why you’re seeing so much usage of the phrase “domestic terrorism” in the last couple of days.

It’s the meme-phrase. The primary talking point for this whole exercise. It was underlined in all the memos sent out to all the media outlets.

Parler founder and CEO John Matze said his company is “prepared to take full legal action” after several big tech companies suspended the social media network from their services, according to an email.

John Matze, Parler’s founder, told The Epoch Times in an email that he believes Apple, Google, and Amazon had acted in bad faith and that the social media platform is considering legal action.

Responding to accusations that Parler was enabling “threats of violence and illegal activity,” Matze said these companies are using recent events to “go after Parler,” even though “there is no evidence Parler was used to coordinate the events.”

“Parler has no groups-style feature and Facebook was the number one tool for coordinating meetups for that event,” Matze said.

Campuses across the United States have become ground zero for silencing free speech. Universities founded to encourage diversity of thought and debate have become incubators of intolerance where non-sanctioned views are silenced through bullying, speech codes, “free speech zones,” and other illiberal means.

The quote above is from The Silencing: How the Left is Killing Free Speech, by Kirsten Powers. Several conservative and libertarian authors have written about the cancel culture, but I wanted to get her perspective because she’s a liberal who worked for Bill Clinton. She says exactly what I hoped she’d say: true liberals should be fighting this nonsense. Throughout the book, she refers to the postmodernists who want to stifle speech as the illiberal left.

At the end of our previous episode, we saw this quote from postmodernist bigwig Herbert Marcuse, describing the policies needed to (ahem) restore freedom of thought:

Google has just banned Parlar App and Apple has declared it will do the same giving them 24 hours. Twitter’s permanent ban on Trump shows that it is by no means a mere platform but is a political agenda in and of itself. Facebook has also banned Trump. For all the community guidelines are just a smokescreen. They are determined to try to prevent him from ever running for anything again or to use the internet to organize even a 3rd party. Meanwhile, the House will move to impeach Trump on Monday in a move to discredit him and all those who voted for him.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has already destroyed his state’s economy by shutting down small businesses or otherwise severely limiting their operations in an ill-conceived attempt to combat COVID-19. As his flailings have so far failed to achieve the impossible goal of stopping a highly-contagious virus dead in its tracks, the New York state legislature is currently moving forward with a bill to grant him even more power.

A bill being introduced in the New York State Assembly would allow the governor and other health officials to detain anyone suspected of being a “carrier” of a contagious disease, like the coronavirus. The legislation is sponsored by Assemblyman N. Nick Perry and was previously introduced in 2015 due to Ebola virus, but never passed. The bill’s language says that if the governor “declares a state of health emergency due to an epidemic of any communicable disease” then the state can take steps to detain any individuals sick or suspected of being sick.

This past week saw a turbulent beginning of the end of the unprecedented term of President Trump. A rally in Washington supporting the president and calls to overturn the election turned violent. Protesters stormed both chambers of Congress and one was shot before being driven from Capitol Hill. Members of Congress returned to certify Joe Biden as president-elect. Meantime, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube took aggressive, new steps to clamp down hard on President Trump’s social media accounts. Among other objections, Twitter said President Trump violated policies in his video urging protesters to be peaceful and go home, because he reiterated claims about election fraud. Some welcome Big Tech’s crackdown; others say it’s a radical violation of free speech. It highlights a long-simmering battle over the control of information online. That’s the focus of our special investigation.

It is no accident that so much Big Tech fact checking and labels appeared in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Millions poured into the efforts behind the scenes. We continue our report on Big Tech censorship by Following the Money.

Whistleblower Zach Vorhies says his bosses at Google were devastated by President Trump’s unexpected victory. Then-CEO of Google’s parent company Eric Schmidt was a major donor and volunteer for Hillary Clinton.

Beyond political activism, Big Tech also stepped up control over public information. When coronavirus hit, Google directed searches to the World Health Organization, the very group criticized for “let[ing] China take charge" and praising the communist nation where the pandemic reportedly started. Then came the mask disaster. Taking cues from public health guidance last March, many declared face masks "are NOT effective.” And Facebook banned ads “selling medical face masks.”