Silicon Valley Archives - The Florida Capital Star

Commentary: Ruling Class Disturbance

January 24, 2024 Florida Capital Star Staff

The last few months have been interesting. We have started to see some very public disagreements among the world’s ruling classes. The gathering of elites at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, has long fascinated observers and become a lightning rod for criticism, becoming a bogeyman of the right, as well as the hardcore, anticapitalist left. It is a front-row seat to the thinking and priorities of the world’s most powerful people.

In Davos, the world’s media, academic, political, and financial elites spend a few days in luxurious surroundings, praising themselves and forming a consensus on solutions to what they deem to be the problems of the world. This includes everything from facilitating mass migration, tackling global warming by moving away from fossil fuel energy, and the need for economic redistribution to the poor and the third world, all through the corporatist idea of “stakeholder capitalism.”

Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Once Vaunted as the Best in the Word, Stanford University’s Wayward Record is Growing Infamous

March 21, 2023 Admin

Stanford was once one of the world’s great universities. It birthed Silicon Valley in its prime. And along with its nearby twin and rival, UC Berkeley, its brilliant researchers, and teachers helped fuel the mid-20th-century California miracle.

That was then. But like the descent of California, now something has gone terribly wrong with the university.

Flow of U.S. Intelligence Analysts into Big Tech Jobs Raises Alarm

January 25, 2023January 24, 2023 Just the News

As Congress and the courts delve deeper into federally sanctioned censorship by Big Tech, a troubling revolving door has emerged between the U.S. intelligence community and the Big Tech giants on the front lines of one of the fiercest battles over free speech in modern American history. A Just the News review of LinkedIn employment histories of senior Big Tech executives found that at least 200 former workers of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, National Security Council and Homeland Security Department have landed Silicon Valley jobs, many within content moderation units regulating supposed “disinformation” and disproportionately throttling news and opinion deviating from approved, left-tilting norms.

Commentary: Tearing Down the Silicon Valley Wall

April 29, 2022April 28, 2022 Florida Capital Star Staff

Elon Musk has finally managed to buy Twitter. And the moment he did, the enraged Left flipped out.

Abruptly leftists began trashing their favorite electronic communications platform as the domain of the nation’s elite, professional classes. Had they just discovered that they had been racists and privileged users all this time?

Commentary: Conspirators in Their Own Words

March 22, 2022 Admin

For the last five years, the Left—defined as the fusion of the mainstream media, Silicon Valley, the radical new Democratic Party, and the vestigial Hillary Clinton machine—has crafted all sorts of conspiracies to destroy their perceived conservative enemies.

Their method has focused on one major projection: alleging conspiracy on the part of others, which is a kind of confirmation of their own conspiracies to destroy their opponents in general, and Donald Trump in particular.

Victor Davis Hanson Commentary: Joe Biden and the Uses of Nihilism

February 1, 2022January 31, 2022 Florida Capital Star Staff

Chaos is the new, the intentional, normal. A pandemic of nihilism has been unleashed upon the land. As in Lord of the Flies, when laws, rules, protocols, traditions, and customs are mocked and dismantled, primitive human nature in the raw is unleashed.

Madness now reigns in every quarter, from the iconic to the irrelevant to the fundamental. Statues of Lincoln, Douglass, and Jefferson are toppled or defaced. The rules of capitalization have been altered. We are told that 1619, not 1776, was our founding date—and this by a “civil rights” activist-journalist who had no idea of the date that the Civil War began.

Quite quickly after the revolutionary boilerplate, America began reverting to its natural Hobbesian or Thucydidean essence. If you dispute that, look at looted packages along the Union Pacific tracks in Los Angeles. Try walking the nocturnal streets of Chicago or Baltimore. Visit the sidewalk homeless of San Francisco. Fly over our constipated ports. Drive into our empty new car dealerships. Pull up to our European-priced gas pumps. Shop in the emptying shelves of our Sovietizing food and discount stores. The common theme of the upcoming Super Bowl halftime show, apparently, is that the entertainers must have written lyrics threatening the police, denigrating women, using the N-word . . . and be worth $100 million.

Commentary: Platform Transparency Can Help Build Antitrust Cases

December 8, 2021December 7, 2021 RealClearWire

There is growing bipartisan concern over the power Silicon Valley’s oligopolies wield over American society. Amazon alone controls 72% of U.S. adult book sales, Airbnb accounts for a fifth of domestic lodging expenditures and Facebook accounts for almost three-quarters of social media visits. Just two companies, Apple and Google, act as gatekeepers to 99% of smartphones, while two others, Uber and Lyft, control 98% of the ride-share market in the U.S. Yet, for government to take robust antitrust action against Silicon Valley requires the kind of data it currently lacks: documenting the harm this market consolidation inflicts on consumers. A new RealClearFoundation report offers a look at how amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to require platform transparency could aid such antitrust efforts.

When it comes to Silicon Valley’s social media platforms, they have long argued that antitrust laws don’t apply to them because their services are provided free of charge. In reality, users do pay for their services: with their data rather than their money. Companies today harvest vast amounts of private information about their users every day, using that data to invisibly nudge their users toward purchases and consuming ads, or the companies simply sell that data outright.

GETTR CEO Jason Miller Welcomes Trump to Social Media World

October 22, 2021October 21, 2021 Peter D'Abrosca

Despite former President Donald J. Trump’s Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) announcing plans to become a rival of newly-launched social media site GETTR, the CEO of the latter firm welcomed Trump into the social media space.

“Congratulations to President Trump for re-entering the social media fray! Now Facebook and Twitter will lose even more market share. President Trump has always been a great deal-maker, but we just couldn’t come to terms on a deal,” Miller said in a Wednesday statement. “And get ready for the new platform features GETTR has on the way: live-streaming, GVision short videos and our GETTR Pay payments system capabilities. Exciting new additions that will provide our global customer base an even better user experience. Let the downloads begin!”

‘Zuckerberg Should Be in Jail:’ Molly Hemingway’s New Book Hits Back at Silicon Valley over 2020 Election

October 13, 2021 Peter D'Abrosca

Author and Senior Editor at The Federalist Mollie Hemingway held nothing back in her forthcoming book “RIGGED,” detailing the irregularities in the 2020 election.

One chapter of that book is titled “Zuckerberg Should Be in Jail,” referencing Facebook’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Mark Zuckerberg.

The Billionaire Space Race: A Competition Between the World’s Richest Men Is Resurrecting an Industry

July 26, 2021July 25, 2021 Florida Capital Star Staff

Jeff Bezos became the second billionaire to successfully reach outer space this month when his Blue Origin New Shepard spacecraft exited the atmosphere Tuesday, the latest development in the ongoing space race between Bezos, SpaceX’s Elon Musk, and Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson.

Branson was the first billionaire in space last week when he and several crew members aboard his VSS Unity spaceplane successfully flew to an altitude of 53.5 miles. His company Virgin Galactic, founded in 2004, is developing commercial spacecraft to be used in suborbital flights for those seeking a trip to outer space. Musk’s SpaceX, founded in 2002, has been at the forefront of the private space industry for over a decade, with Musk planning a mission to Mars as early as 2024.

DeSantis Signs Bill Curbing Censorship by Big Tech Companies

May 25, 2021May 24, 2021 Grant Holcomb

Yesterday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill, SB 7072, designed to limit the scope of Big Tech companies and their influence in Florida. The bill will fine companies $250,000 per day if they censor or suspend accounts for political candidates, with Disney World being a notable exception.

“This session, we took action to ensure that ‘We the People’ — real Floridians across the Sunshine State — are guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites,” said DeSantis in a release. “Many in our state have experienced censorship and other tyrannical behavior firsthand in Cuba and Venezuela. If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable.”

Commentary: My Company Won’t Cancel You, but Big Tech CRM Bully Salesforce Might

February 25, 2021February 25, 2021 Florida Capital Star Staff

by Craig Klein Salesforce has shut down the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) ability to send emails through their platform. Salesforce.com is a Silicon Valley-based giant in the enterprise software space with over $13 billion in revenue. The company was founded by Marc Benioff in 1999, who acquired Time Magazine…

War Room: Steve Bannon Gab CEO Andrew Torba Discuss Building a Christian-Centric Economy and Silicon Valley’s ‘Transhumanism Agenda’

February 22, 2021February 21, 2021 Julie Carr

Stephen K. Bannon talks to Gab CEO Andrew Torba on War Room: Pandemic radio show about the enslavement agenda of Silicon Valley, transhumanism, and de-coupling with companies that don’t share Judeo Christian values.