You're probably quite familiar with the classic quote, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." It comes for a letter that Britain's Lord Acton sent to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1987. Power is indeed an aphrodisiac like no other. President Abraham Lincoln said it best when he said, "If you wish to see a man's true character...give him power." Another great president, Ronald Reagan put it another way, "You can tell one's character by how they treat the waiter" (no "server" these days). The point is power can give one the "big head" in nothing flat. Once upon a time I worked as a sports director at WJCL and we had a wonderful reporter who was loved by the whole news department and the rest of the staff as well. You could not have asked for a nicer guy who worked hard and did great reports always doing his homework. He'd been with us for about two years and an opening came up for a new news director. There were several applicants including the aforementioned reporter. When they asked us (the news personnel) who we'd like--it was unanimous, we thought said reporter was perfect for the job. He got it...and he was never the same, nor were we. The turnaround was stark and almost immediate. Within days he became a raving tyrant! Get!...Go!...Come!...Bring!...Do! Zieg Heil!!! It was amazing to see this transition to the proverbial "Hitler Complex." He posted "rules and regulations" with unrealistic times we HAD to be in the news room in a profession where when you're covering news stories and sports stories does not have a specific time to be in...we do know that there's a time when it could be "too late" to get a story on the air so we did pay attention to the clock in those cases. Long story short, he didn't keep the job very long--the Good Lord was looking out for us, he got a job in another market and we thanked our lucky stars and pitied his new victims.
Enter Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and--yes--Google. All have become waaaaayyyy too powerful and there seems to be no check on their influence, especially since all of them are owned and operated by left wing loons. How bad is it? They could literally swing the next election and they all, to a company and management position, hate Donald Trump with the proverbial passion. What's worse, they're not even keeping it a secret. And if you dare call them out, the crosshairs are on your forehead--perhaps in more ways than one. Case-in-point, former Google engineer Zach Vorhies who has turned the equivalent of states-evidence against his former employer. According to this week's The Epoch Times, a right-leaning newspaper (ironically just banned from Facebook pages) Vorhies has released nearly 1,000 documents which he says prove that the company, or at least some of its products, secretly boosts or demotes content based on their opinion if it's true or false while they are telling the world they are a "neutral" platform. The former Google software engineer Vorhies provided Project Veritas (another right-leaning outlet) and the Justice Department's anti-trust division which is now in the process of of investigating Google for their potentially anti-competitive behavior.
In a video posted August 14th Vorhies told Project Veritas "I thought that our election system is going to be compromised forever by this company that told the American public that it was not going to do evil." He went on to say that he saw, "They were intending to scope the information landscape so that they can create their own version of what was objectively true." Vorhies was no rookie at Google, he'd been there for eight years making jurt north of a quarter-million dollars annually. But unlike the ingrates who manage this companies, Zach loves his country saying while he had every financial reason to stay at the company and continue collecting his paycheck but instead, "..I could never live with myself knowing that they (Google) was scoping the information landscape so that they can create their own version of what was objectively true..." Vorhies went to Project Veritas a few weeks ago disclosing some documents and answering questions in shadow and having his voice disguised. But when he returned to work, Google demanded his badge and work laptop and multiple letters demanding he cease-and-desist disclosing "any non-public Google files."
What's worse, Vorhies feared for his life and posted on Twitter that if he was harmed all the documents he took would be made public. Google's next move was call the San Francisco Police to say Vorhies was mentally ill and officers actually were outside his residence and put him in handcuffs. Just Goonesville's--excuse me--Google's way of intimidating their employees--current and past--not to go rogue on the company. He's now decided to go public for his personal safety. The Epoch News story goes on to say, "The documents Vorhies provided previously, together with explanations and hidden camera recordings by Project Veritas of other Google employees, indicate that the company has created a concept of 'fairness' through which it infuses the political preferences of its mostly left-leaning workforce into its products. Several studies show Google News is slanted seriously left. Google denies there's any bias in any of their products." Psychologist Robert Epstein has been researching Google's influence on users has published research that shows if Google's placement of top search results can swing undecided voters. Epstein says just that "trick" alone was responsible for 2.6 million votes shifting in the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton. Epstein warns than in 2020 companies like Google and Facebook could shift 15 million votes which far outdistances of the margin of victory most candidates win by.
Fortunately Trump has been working on an executive order to address this issue...but it won't come a minute too soon.