The Government Hustle

by Lee Smith

“We beat Pharma this year,” President Joe Biden told a Milwaukee audience on Monday. The crowd roared its approval. “And it mattered,” said the president. “We’re going to change people’s lives.”

But as anyone who has watched Wall Street the last 18 months knows, the pharmaceutical industry enjoyed a historic year, especially the manufacturers of America’s two main COVID-19 vaccines. Moderna forecasts earnings of $21 billion in 2022 for sales of its COVID-19 vaccine, while Pfizer predicts it’s on course to make $32 billion from its coronavirus shots.

But something really did change American lives during the first half of Biden’s term.

Each year Big Pharma spreads hundreds of millions of dollars around the halls of congress on both sides of the aisle to keep all of Washington, D.C. aligned with its interests. And the industry spends billions annually on advertising that ensures friendly coverage from a media starved for revenue. But thanks to the Biden White House, Big Pharma learned that all it really needs is a president who’s willing to mandate its products. It’s like having the key to Fort Knox.

Sure, there are a few more moving parts, but given the power of the federal government, it’s not hard to assemble a machine that prints money for friends. Court documents recently released in a case brought by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana on behalf of medical professionals censored by social media show how it’s done.

According to court filings in Missouri v. Biden, over 50 Biden administration officials advised employees from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube to muzzle vaccine skeptics and critics of the administration’s vaccine policy. The documents show that Biden’s censorship campaign was an administration-wide effort, ranging from public health agencies such as Anthony Fauci’s National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases and the Office of the Surgeon General to the Departments of State and Treasury, as well as the White House itself.

The social justice activists who staff social media platforms were generally eager to comply with the government’s demands to silence anyone who challenged the official COVID-19 vaccine script. But regardless, the fact is that the government has tremendous leverage over those platforms. Social media executives know that the government has the power to regulate their enterprises, which would destroy their financial models and drive them out of existence.

The Biden administration’s censorship campaign is fundamentally about money. As my Epoch TV colleague Brendon Fallon and I explain in the latest episode of “Over the Target,” Americans are right to be worried about the encroaching tyranny that censorship represents. The power that government and corporate monopolies have acquired over our lives emboldens them to take more.

But before we start to fret about the prospect of a looming one-world government keen to strip away our God-given rights, our First Amendment fight requires us to understand the nature of what’s right in front of us. It’s a hustle.

The so-called progressive faction of U.S. politics is nothing more than the enforcement arm of allied corporate interests that identify us as potential sources of their wealth. The Biden administration’s job is to help them extract it from us, so that corporations may in turn redirect that money into the progressive faction’s political campaigns.

The key players in what amounts to a criminal conspiracy to defraud the American public are political activists and federal agencies, social media, and prestige press organizations. Propaganda legitimizes the conspiracy by concealing the true intent of their operations.

For instance, according to Biden, “misinformation” about vaccines was “killing people.” But anyone with a shred of commonsense recognized early on that the vaccines were at best a failure—or else there would have been no need for booster shots. The danger posed by critics of vaccine mandates was rather that they threatened to dam Big Pharma’s cash flow. So Biden officials shut them up.

Once you see how the vaccine hustle worked, you’ll recognize the same pattern in virtually all of the Biden administration’s signature initiatives. For instance, it shows why the FBI was tasked to spy on parents objecting to what public schools were teaching their children: Biden’s corporate allies are mining school children for wealth.

Critical race theory (CRT) is a business. In fact, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s son-in-law Xan Tanner owns a company that pushes CRT into public school curricula.

Same with trans ideology. In showcasing the wondrous joys of transgenderism, the schools move vulnerable children along the assembly line, processing them into sterilizing surgeries and life-long medications that are worth billions to the medical industry and Big Pharma. Without public schools, neither the CRT nor the trans industry are viable businesses, so Biden sent federal law enforcement authorities to prevent parents from standing between progressive donors and their money.

It’s worth remembering that this corrupt confederation tying political operatives, federal bureaucracies, social media, and the press first combined forces in the war against Donald Trump and the American people. Russiagate started as a Hillary Clinton campaign smear job that facilitated the FBI’s illegal surveillance of the Trump circle. But then it became an instrument to destroy President Donald Trump.

In spite of the propaganda pushed by the press and social media, the issue wasn’t that he was racist, transphobic, or corrupt, never mind a Russian spy. Trump simply threatened the oligarchy’s power and wealth at its source when he promised to decouple U.S. interests from those of the Chinese Communist Party.

Eventually, the confederation succeeded in getting Trump out of the Oval Office by using the same tactics when it interfered in the 2020 election cycle. According to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, the FBI implied reports of alleged Biden family corruption likely to affect voters’ decision-making was “Russian disinformation.”

What the court filings from Missouri v. Biden make plain is that the censorship campaign is itself evidence of corruption at the highest levels of government.

First published in the Epoch Times.

Lee Smith is a veteran journalist whose work appears in Real Clear Investigations, the Federalist, and Tablet. He is the author of “The Permanent Coup” and “The Plot Against the President.”