Quelle surprise. Hillary Clinton may have exited electoral politics, but she and her network have hardly retired, at least according to Fox Business. An outfit called Accountable Tech has launched a campaign targeting Twitter advertisers in an effort to force Elon Musk into complying with the Big Brother-esque censorship regime created by the Department of Homeland Security and other social-media platforms.

If nothing else, this explains why Musk wants to drive subscriber models:

Accountable Tech spearheaded a letter to top Twitter advertisers as part of a larger pressure campaign demanding “non-negotiable” requirements for their business, saying that Musk’s takeover will further “toxify” the social media giant and directly threaten public safety.

“Twitter has outsized influence in shaping both public discourse and industry-wide platform governance standards,” the letter states. “While the company is hardly a poster-child for healthy social media, it has taken welcome steps in recent years to mitigate systemic risks, ratcheting up pressure on the likes of Facebook and YouTube to follow suit.”

“Musk intends to steamroll those safeguards and provide a megaphone to extremists who traffic in disinformation, hate, and harassment,” it continues. “Under the guise of ‘free speech,’ his vision will silence and endanger marginalized communities, and tear at the fraying fabric of democracy.”

Oh noes! Free speech is just a “guise” that “tears at the fraying fabric of democracy”! That fraying fabric seemed to hold up just fine last week, though, especially for Democrats that spent $53 million to boost “extremist” Republicans in primaries. As they had strategized, voters didn’t much care for candidates who focused on Donald Trump’s electoral grievances, which led Democrats to win elections that they should have lost — and delivered a very hard lesson to the GOP along the way.

So who and what is “Accountable Tech”? It’s allied with hard-Left orgs like Media Matters and Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, both of which signed onto the letter, as well as nearly two dozen other political-action orgs. It also has ties to the left-wing Beltway establishment, and to one figure in particular:

Accountable Tech is not a standalone organization. Instead, it’s a fiscally sponsored project of the North Fund, a nonprofit incubator closely tied to a billion-dollar dark money network managed by the Arabella Advisors consulting firm, Washington D.C. business records show.

The left-wing group is also closely linked to Hillary Clinton’s Onward Together nonprofit, which the failed presidential contender created following her 2016 loss to Donald Trump to allow her to be a part of the resistance.

In December 2020, Accountable Tech joined Onward Together as an official partner, according to a press release.

If Accountable Tech wanted to live up to its name, it would demand answers from tech companies as to why they suppressed legitimate reporting on the Bidens right before the 2020 election. They might also demand some “accountability” for biased speech policing on their platforms too, especially in terms of which flavor of election deniers get to express their denial, just to use one example.

That kind of accountability, of course, isn’t the purpose of “Accountable Tech.” They want to force speech platforms to quash viewpoints that dissent from the progressive-approved narratives in order to warp the democratic process in their favor. While social-media platforms remained in reliably progressive hands and the levers of power remained with Democrats — such as with DHS’ “disinformation policing” program — they could do that more subtly. Now that one big platform has momentarily escaped that control, they want to punish any heterodoxy by targeting advertisers who mostly just want to sell soap and cars for abuse.

It’s no surprise and only a mild disappointment to see the Clintons as part of that extortion effort. Hillary in particular couldn’t succeed in an open debate, and neither can progressives, without referees not just putting their thumbs on the scales but sending their opponents into a perpetual penalty box.

Accountable Tech and its allies don’t want free speech, and they don’t want a functioning democracy. They want control, and they don’t mind steamrolling everything else to get it. We’ll see if the world’s wealthiest man can and will stand up against that campaign.