By John Ruberry
A theme coming out of Elon Musk’s release of the Twitter Files is that there is a three headed beast that seeks to be an overlord of us all, who I am dubbing Cerberus.
Why that name? According to Greek mythology, he was a vicious three-headed dog who guarded the underworld, the realm of the dead. Sometimes he was called the Hound of Hades. “Heads of snakes grew from his back, and he had a serpent’s tail,” Encyclopedia Brittanica tells us about Cerberus. If you are thinking of the hosts of The View now, then we are kindred spirits.
There is a nexus between the federal government, most ominously the FBI, the mainstream media, and Big Tech. Information is of course power, and the Modern Cerberus used that power to suppress and censor the Hunter Biden laptop story, as well as dissenting opinions on the COVID-19 pandemic. And probably many more topics.
In regard to second one, I regularly see CDC public service TV ads that tells us that COVID is a serious health threat if you suffer from other ailments, not so much everyone else. Earlier this year, self-appointed COVID expert Bill Gates said of the virus, “We didn’t understand that it’s a fairly low fatality rate and that it’s a disease mainly in the elderly, kind of like flu is, although a bit different than that.” Expressing such opinions on Twitter of Facebook would lead those social media giants to suspend or ban users from their platforms in 2020 and 2021.
The mythological Cerberus would devour and dead souls who tried to escape Hades. Let me rephrase it for our troubled times: the beast permanently banned them with no hope of appeal.
Moving from a prominent top federal government job to the media, and sometimes back again, is an old phenomenon, but it has accelerated lately–cable news is the culprit, and most of the participants in this transfer portal are Democrats. Jen Psaki comes to mind, as she has gone from working in the Barack Obama White House, to being a CNN contributor, then back to government as the White House press secretary under Joe Biden, then back to the media as an MSNBC contributor.
As for Big Tech, Andy Stone, the communications director at Meta, the parent of Facebook, declared on Twitter in 2020 that FB, in regard to New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story, would be “reducing its distribution on our platform” until it was fact-checked. I call that suppression. Prior to joining Meta, Stone was a longtime congressional staffer, working exclusively for Democrats.
Last week Musk fired Twitter’s deputy general counsel, Jim Baker, who may have withheld damaging details involving the FBI and its alleged role in suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop reports. Baker, when he was an FBI attorney, played a part in the Donald Trump-Russiagate collusion red herring. Before he joined, Twitter, Baker was a CNN analyst.
Benjamin Weingarten has more on what he calls the “revolving door between Democrat Deep State and Big Tech.”
Stifling the free flow of information is the stuff of totalitarian states. My wife was raised in the Soviet Union, she emigrated to the USA in 1991. An extreme example yes, but I was the one who told her that not only did the United States send men to the moon and safely return them to Earth–but did so six times.
There was an incarnation of Cerberus in the USSR.
John Ruberry regularly blogs at Marathon Pundit.
