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Civics: censorship “trust and safety” regime at Apple + political class

Revolver:

Five months after Richardson started at Apple, the company made one of the most ideologically aggressive cancellations ever when it banned Parler from its app store. While Apple works hard to obscure its decision-making process, Richardson was without a doubt central to that decision, and with her involved, it wasn’t a surprising one. In April 2022, shortly before she left, the company also committed itself to a ridiculous internal “racial equity audit.”

So, where did this person come from? Well, just looking at her tweets, one notices that Richardson doesn’t just have a habit of boosting left-wing causes. She has a noticeable preference for boosting senior figures from the Obama Administration itself — Valerie Jarrett, Arne Duncan, John Kerry, and so forth. Richardson was particularly active when President Trump dismissed acting attorney general Sally Yates for insubordination after she refused to enforce his executive order implementing a travel ban on several nations linked to Islamic terrorism.

This isn’t random.

After earning dual degrees in law from UC-Berkeley and in public policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School, Richardson spent three years working at a free legal clinic in the Bay Area. From there, she went to the Obama campaign, and after his election she joined the Justice Department as a top adviser to Eric Holder, eventually ascending to become his chief of staff.

Revolver suspects that for many of our readers, Eric Holder’s DOJ feels like it was a century ago. So, a quick reminder: Holder wasn’t just an Obama Cabinet member. Holder was one of the most aggressive ideological attack dogs of the whole Obama era.

Holder crushed Arizona’s SB 1070 anti-illegal immigration law, claiming it infringed on the sole right of the federal government to enforce (or totally ignore) immigration law. Holder dropped charges against the New Black Panthers who stood outside a Philadelphia polling place and menaced “white devils” with a billy club, since after all it only involved gross white kulaks facing threats and violent intimidation, rather than a member of America’s noble caste. Holder’s DOJ launched Operation Choke Point, which tried to curtail gun rights by pressuring American banks to deny service to gun dealers, on the flimsy pretext that such dealers had a higher risk of fraudulent behavior. Most disastrous of all, Holder’s DOJ harassed American police departments for their supposedly “racist” policing efforts, pressuring them into consent decrees that paved the way for the urban homicide explosion of the “racial reckoning” era.

All of Holder’s misbehavior climaxed with his oversight of Operation Fast and Furious, in which DOJ intentionally allowed more than 2,000 guns to be illegally smuggled to Mexico, one of which was later used in the murder of a Border Patrol agent. While he was deliberately sending guns to criminals in Mexico, Holder simultaneously insisted America needed stricter gun laws to stop crime. The scandal culminated in Holder becoming the first sitting Cabinet member in history to be found in contempt of Congress — the same offense that Steve Bannon faces prison time for. Of course, since Holder himself ran the Justice Department, he never faced any criminal charges for his behavior.