The following is an excerpt from Sen. Ted Cruz’s new book “Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America.” It can be purchased here.
[Almost] as soon as Joe Biden became the presumptive Democratic nominee for president, the Democratic censorship machine kicked into overdrive. Evidently, the young woke staffers at Twitter communicated early and often with the young woke staffers on the Biden campaign — some of whom, we know, had come up in the same schools and went to the same cocktail parties (and did the same drugs and slept with the same men, women, or both). Throughout the fall of 2020, as we now know thanks to the bombshell release of the Twitter Files, Twitter was practically the PR team for the Biden campaign, censoring posts and removing whatever content might make it less likely that Biden would become president of the United States.
It’s no surprise that Twitter worked so hard to make sure that Joe Biden and his band of Cultural Marxists ended up winning the White House in 2020. These people shared beliefs about nearly everything, especially when it came to censorship and the danger that “free speech” could pose to the world. At the very least, they probably assumed that the hot rhetoric and threats of investigations that had been coming from the Trump White House — and Republicans in Congress, myself included — would stop once Biden took office. On the first point, at least, they would turn out to be exactly right. The second, not so much.
That is why, during the most heated months of the election, the woke staffers of Twitter worked so hard to please their overlords on the Biden campaign. They would do almost anything to stop people from attempting to look “under the hood,” so to speak, and figure out how the censorship machine of Silicon Valley was really working. They were able to do this, of course, because they knew that Jack Dorsey, their CEO, shared the same leftist politics that they did — something anyone could tell just by looking at the man’s strange facial hair, bloodshot eyes, and penchant for flowing robes and sandals. They never thought that anyone else would take over. Certainly not a “free speech absolutist” who would make exposing the company’s secrets one of his first orders of business.
Consider this email that was sent from one Twitter staffer to another on October 24, 2020, less than two weeks after the world had begun hearing about a mysterious laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s troublesome (and troubled) youngest son.
“More to review from the Biden team,” said one staffer, whose name is redacted even now. Below this person’s note is a list of five supposedly “offensive” tweets, which presumably related to the Hunter Biden scandal in some way. Of course, there’s no way to check.
Shortly after the email came in, someone at Twitter removed those tweets. Three hours after the request came through, that person responded with, “handled these.”
It sure looks like they were taking orders from the Biden campaign: the “Biden team” says jump, the Twitter staffers ask how high. No doubt they believed they would never get caught.
Clearly, Twitter had come a long way from the open, free-speech first platform that set the world on fire in the early decades of the twenty-first century. Looking at the sordid details of how it handled the Hunter Biden laptop story, and at how it made key decisions about other matters relating to free speech, reveals that Twitter — like other Big Tech companies, especially Google — was overrun by the same woke neo-Marxists who have taken over our universities, elementary schools, businesses, and countless other institutions.
But when it comes to Big Tech, the damage to our democracy has been far more severe. It has led not only to the indoctrination of countless American young people, but to the corruption of our public square and the rigging of our elections. Today, the very means by which most Americans get their news and interact with one another have been twisted and poisoned by partisan actors who believe it is their duty to spread radical leftist ideas far and wide, and to suppress any ideas that might compete with them, often under the cover of algorithms and other formulas that are too complicated for the average American to understand.
Ted Cruz has represented Texas in the U.S. Senate since 2013.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller.