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On Monday, Google paid a $24.5 million bribe to President Trump.
The bag of cash was euphemistically described as a “legal settlement,” but in this dangerous political moment, we do ourselves no favors with polite obfuscation.
Google, like Paramount and Disney, decided that it was better to pay off Donald Trump than beat him in court. As an economic calculation, it makes sense — a few million dollars is a small price to pay to keep sweet with a despot using the levers of government to punish his enemies.
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If they can arrest James Comey, they can definitely arrest Google CEO Sundar Pichai. But the rest of us now have to live in a country that is much closer to oligarchy, thanks in large part to the quiescence of the tech bros who fashion themselves as defenders of free speech.
Tech to Trump: GTFO
On January 7, 2021, after laying siege to Congress in an attempt to nullify an election, the sitting president was kicked off of every major social media platform.
Six months later, Trump held a press conference at Mar-a-Lago to announce that he was suing Twitter and Facebook — whose pronouns are now X and Meta — along with Google’s subsidiary YouTube. For good measure, he also named CEOs Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sundar Pichai as defendants.
Trump whined that the platforms had violated the First Amendment by removing him six months earlier. Only the government can violate the First Amendment, of course, but Trump’s sparklemagic lawyers had a solution for that problem. What if the social media platforms actually became government agents because the government threatened them with retribution if they didn’t boot Trump and his pals? Sure, Donald Trump was the head of government when he got deplatformed, and there’s no evidence of any such threats. But Trump and his lawyers forged ahead anyway.
