Thursday, October 15, 2020

There Are No Rules When You're Fighting Hate

So now we know what we always knew. Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, hired a half-wit crackhead at quadruple the going rate to sit on their corporate board because his dad, Joe Biden, was the vice president of the United States. How yawntastic.

Joe Biden's little cherub, sleeping with a crack pipe in his mouth. Just the sort of person to be on the board of a Ukrainian energy company.

Here's what else we know, which we probably suspected, but slapped us in the face yesterday. Big Tech and the FBI, at the very least, are convinced that they're fighting hate.

The NY Post broke the story when it obtained the contents of a hard drive from an abandoned laptop because a computer repair store owner was horrified at the contents. He had given those contents to the FBI about a year earlier, but they didn't do anything with it.

The former vice president of the United States was clearly corrupt and the FBI did nothing about it. That's not the story.

When the NY Post broke the story, eager right-wing pundits on social media shared it. Until they didn't. Both Facebook and Twitter suppressed the story by blocking links, shutting down accounts and applying warnings to it. That's not the story.

The Story

Big Tech, most of the news media, academics and Federal government agencies are convinced they are fighting hate. From my own, current experience in a very large science and engineering organization, I can promise you that we are corporately convinced that we are fighting hate. Our HR and Public Affairs team can't stop talking diversity, inclusion and racial justice. 

Ten years ago we talked engineering and science, now we talk social justice. There's no evidence that hate exists within the organization or that it grew like kudzu over those ten years, but we still continue to get almost-daily lectures. No one has the courage to stand up against this. We all need the paychecks.

Getting back to Hunter Biden, the FBI had a choice to make. Given the hard drive, they could clearly see massive corruption at the top levels of the government, but they decided not to pursue the story. Why?

There are no rules when you're fighting hate. If they had applied the law in this case, it would have helped the Far Right, the side of hate. To not apply the law to people in power, but apply them to the Normals is immoral except when you're fighting hate.

Lesson Learned: So long as vast swaths of the country believe they are fighting hate, you cannot rely on anything even close to an even and fair application of the rules.

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