Big Tech covers up Biden’s crack pipe giveaway
America’s information gatekeepers are the Democrats’ rapid-response unit
A throwaway line item in an otherwise innocuous spending package unveiled one way the Biden administration and the Democratic party sees “racial equity.” The Washington Free Beacon revealed a week ago that the Department of Health and Human Services would be distributing free crack pipes to drug users to promote hygiene and advance racial equity. The cost was around $30 million and the program is similar to what left-wing fiefdoms like Seattle and San Francisco already do.
The story had all the elements of tabloid gold — even better in clickability than the last Biden crack pipe story: Hunter’s laptop. Easily digestible in a single headline, sparing readers from grisly images of the president’s son getting a footjob, the story also succinctly validated everything we already knew about Democrats, their priorities and the left’s grotesque and fundamentally evil treatment of the black community.
“Equity” is, of course, intentionally and stridently divorced from “racial equality,” but in a way the party hopes you won’t notice. The equal society, a battle cry of the old school liberal, we now understand was the platform on which to build the equitable society. Equality, it turns out, was a bit too conservative in practice, was pretty much already in place and, for the left, nauseatingly in-step with the US Constitution.
Powered by grievance and emotional bullying, equity is vengeful and destructive. It is the chilling, green-eyed, incremental seizure and redistribution of all resources and opportunities based on fluid and ever-changing criteria determined by an elite few at the top of government and their corporate partners. But the word itself sounds so close to “equality” most people haven’t noticed — and if they did, assumed the two were synonymic and interchangeable.
They aren’t. At the risk of sounding like a Turning Point Ambassador or a one-eyed congressman, it really is only about socialism which, they tell us, totally sucks. What sucks more is that word, socialism, has been effectively defanged and means almost nothing to the younger generation, even right-wing zoomers who might be on board with things like socialized medicine.
Enter: equity, rolling off every tongue in the White House and casually inserted into every government document. Did it occur to anyone in the Biden administration that black people — the one vote they absolutely must control to maintain power, and the one group they purport to care about the most — might be offended when the administration reduces their plight to druggies and human sidewalk detritus? That the party’s token of appreciation for decades of blind support is gift baggies filled with drug paraphernalia?
Maybe. But that didn’t matter. Crack pipes for equity wasn’t a mistake, it wasn’t sloppy: this is just how they talk. They’re reminding you of the pervasive centralized planning in store for the future. A simple word like equity turns the horrendous into the routine; add “racial” and it becomes virtuous, cynically so. Crack pipe equity, property equity, credit score equity, cheeseburger equity, whatever: it’s always been the left’s endgame, despite their ability at times to shape-shift into softer renditions of evil.
The Free Beacon story revealed something more telling about the dirty age of institutional gaslighting we live in. Mainstream media, so-called “fact-checking” organizations and Big Tech immediately ran cover for the administration, with Democrat mega-donor Mark Zuckerberg again being the most shameless finger-wagging old biddy. Memes about crack cocaine got slapped with Instagram’s “Missing Context” warning. I scrolled past a Forrest Gump meme reading, “And just like that crack was safer than Ivermectin,” to be told by Instagram in alarming red type— “Independent fact-checkers say information in this post is missing context and could mislead people.”
To be fair, nothing gives me more joy than Instagram fact-checking memes, I just wish they’d apply the same standards to selfies. “Missing context — the angle this photo was taken is hiding multiple chins,” “Missing context — this image has been dramatically altered in FaceTune,” “Missing context — this is a post-workout pump, and he won’t look this swole in about an hour,” “Missing context — this is not his boat.”
Zuckerberg’s Facebook then used a fact-checking service no one has ever heard of, called Lead Stories, to censor the report as “false information.” Lead Stories, whatever the hell that is, was founded by a former CNN journalist and Democrat donor. Snopes, the last stop for wine-swilling cat ladies who couldn’t make it in news reporting, marked the story as “mostly false.” Their reasoning? Crack pipes were “just one of around twenty components of the grant program.” The Free Beacon, in the original report, mentioned several of those other components like syringes, vaccines and condoms.
The reaction was so swift it revealed America’s gatekeepers of information don’t merely have a liberal bent, they’re the Democratic Party’s rapid-response unit. Their involvement goes beyond lazily pushing out the Biden administration’s view of things or tossing soft-ball questions to that frazzled nincompoop of a press secretary — they put out fires for them. They are an integral part of maintaining a certain public image for the Donkey Party.
Increasingly, people are beginning to wonder how much of this is voluntary. As any newspaper man in Washington will tell you, nothing about this sort of assault against opposition newsrooms and commentators seems organic. It seems like marching orders.
This article originally appeared in The Spectator World in February 2022