TYLER O’NEIL: The True Force Behind the ‘Censorship Industrial Complex.’

Benjamin Weingarten, editor-at-large at RealClearInvestigations, also attributed “the leading edge of all the attacks on Donald Trump as an avatar for tens of millions of dissenting Americans” to the administrative state and the “deep state” within it. (The “deep state” refers to bureaucrats who oppose the agenda of the duly-elected president.) These entrenched bureaucrats “felt most threatened that [Trump] would upend the uniparty foreign policy blob,” he said.

“You also had the tech companies identify that what happened in 2016 could never happen again,” Weingarten said, referring to both the Brexit referendum and Trump’s election victory.

“They kind of used the pretext of Russian mis-, dis-, and malinformation, grafting a Cold War paradigm” to define a new enemy—Americans who disagree with their agenda, he said. “We are the enemy that’s engaging in wrongthink that threatens to undermine their power.”

After 2016, “Big Tech platforms became perceived as—rather than vehicles for free and open discourse—now they needed to be weaponized as assets of this security state, essentially.”

And they were weaponized. But then Elon Musk took one of their weapons away and now he must be made to pay for that.