Apple has run afoul of The Regime. Its crime? Being too successful.

But can the politically vengeful Biden DOJ be serious about taking down Big Tech writ large when they depend on it to censor wrong speech, amplify disinformation, and Get Trump?

Greetings from Las Vegas, “where’s there still not a plaque, or a signpost, or a statue of me in this town!” Still, it’s a great time to be in “The Meadows,” accompanied by frat boy lemmings in their golfing attire and indoor shades desperate to have a Hangover-like experience by night as they wager on March Madness by day. I feed off their delusional hope like the Chicago Machine feeds off the poor. I am a writer, observer, and investor. I don’t bet––not on sports, certainly not on stocks. I watch, I listen, I chat—garnering insight into the hive mind that shapes my investing decisions.

I deploy direct observation, evidence, logic, and panoptic awareness to help you navigate the prevailing groupthink and mediocrity. This has been a bit tricky of late with the party in power playing a weird, dysregulating, Socialist-sized role in the “business of America,” which, to quote Cal Coolidge, is still “business.”

“You have meddled in the primal forces of nature, Mr. Biden, and I won’t have it!” roars my inner Arthur Jensen.

This week, the Biden Department of Lawfare, (nee the Department of Justice, or DOJ) launched an anti-trust lawsuit against the most profitable company in the world (after Saudi Aramco) and, along with our ag products, America’s best leverage against Communist China: Apple Computer. You have to be smugly confident in your electoral chances come November to pick on Apple now, especially when nearly half of American investors own shares of the Cupertino juggernaut directly or indirectly through ETFs and mutual funds. In late September, the suburban pickleball ladies who’ll decide this existential election will take a gander at their 401Ks and decide whether the current occupant of the Oval Office made them even richer housewives. If belwether AAPL is down, they will likely be poorer, no matter how many of them followed The Crotty into Nvdia, Palantir, and Palo Alto Networks.

Here is the nanny-state justification for the DOJ lawsuit:

"Competition, not Apple's self-interested business strategies, should be the catalyst for innovation essential to our daily lives, not only in the smartphone market but in closely related industries like personal entertainment, automotive infotainment, and even more innovations that have not yet been imagined.”

So, the government, not Apple shareholders, decides what’s in the company’s best interests and how it should design its products? Interessante! The DOJ preposterously claims that Apple has tremendous market share not because its products are superior and consumers crave them––lining up around the block hours, often days, before they go on sale––but because of “exclusionary” tactics. Tell that to the millions of Apple users who adore their iPads, iPhones, Macs, and smartwatches more than their pets. Were they bullied into buying them? Hoodwinked? The jealous, power-mad Biden Leviathan knows full well that it’s Apple’s safe, dependable, and beautifully “curated” user experience––and seamless interlocking of hardware, services, and software––that draws the world to Apple products. Apple has replaced Coke, Levis, and McDonald’s as the quintessential symbol of American capitalist ingenuity. And this Administration wants to destroy what makes it great.

I vaguely remember a time when Apple had a tiny share of the phone market, let alone the smartphone market. Google Android phones were crushing it. Yet Apple didn’t ask Uncle Sam to cripple Android’s unique selling proposition––its open-source ubiquity. But the government now says that Apple’s unique selling proposition––its manicured, design-driven, walled garden––must be transformed into an untamed public park, with all the hedge trimmers and gardening tools put away, trash not picked up, and malicious gang bangers occupying the swing set. According to the DOJ, it’s unfair that Android users––which represent 70% of the smartphone market!––don’t experience the same aesthetic experience that Apple users do.

Oh, please. If you don’t like how your Android messages appear on an iPhone, or how another company’s smartwatch interacts with the iPhone, get an iPhone! Apple sells gorgeous pricey stuff to a cohort who yearns to buy or be seen with its gorgeous pricey stuff. The walled-garden experience is key to attracting and keeping this coveted clientele. Is Jimmy Choo now required to sell Buster Browns? Must St. Laurent sell Fruit of the Loom? Are the owners of prime real estate on Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive now required to rent at rates offered at Mall of America? If you want to sell your app through the popular Apple app store, then abide by Apple’s app store conditions. The vig is high because the audience for your stuff is higher. As Omaha Creighton Prep physics teacher Ron Bruno intoned, “There’s no free lunch in the universe.”

Fortunately for those who own Apple stock (full disclosure: I own a bunch), government anti-trust cases can take up to a decade or longer. In the interim, Apple’s money printing press keeps chugging along, netting billions on the overnight float alone, as Apple product owners stay gleefully locked into its communications, entertainment, payment, savings, and shopping ecosystem and expanding suite of innovative must-have tech.

Of course, that’s the government’s simplistic point. Apple is sticky. But, if that point is legit, then break up Alphabet (parent of Google) and every other must-have consumer product or service too. Once upon a time, Google built a better search engine. Most of us still use it, despite Mountain View’s transparent tipping of the scales against a host of Democratic targets: Trump, Republicans, conservative news outlets, the founding fathers, school board presidents, and parents who seek full disclosure on what their kids are being taught. We are not trapped within Google’s easy-to-use maw. There are competitors. Ditto for Meta (parent of Facebook, Instagram, and Whatsapp) as well as Amazon. We could leave all three. There would be a trade-off, naturally, but that’s for us to decide, not the government.

In terms of the Democrat prime directive to crush wrong speech and amplify lies and disinformation to win elections, Alphabet, Amazon (whose founder owns The Washington Post), and Meta are liberal national treasures. By comparison, Apple is harmless, beside the point. Almost everyone loves Apple, except IT geeks, and Android and Nokia phone users who snidely dismiss its “inferior tech.” Your average Apple store—whether in red, blue, or purple states—is filled with a cross-section of America: hip grannies, wannabe rap moguls, scruffy trust funders, aloof corporate types, pierced and tatted “influencers.” The diverse staff is kind, competent, and studiously offbeat but not repellant. Apple is the Taylor Swift of tech: perfectly designed to entice and deliver, with a wee bit of risk, but never so much that it offends. The company navigates the Charybdis and Scylla of today’s global political landscape with skill and aplomb, which might be its undoing.

Apple is not rigging anything, except perhaps its News product, which leans left. This failure to get its hands overtly dirty by tilting the scales towards “the party,” combined with its tendency to keep quiet and go its own way, has no doubt angered the Biden Regime, the most quid pro quo Administration since Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista. You can hear their Tammany Hall brains turning. “Who does Tim Cook think he is? Talking directly with the CCP without our approval?!”

Attacking Apple, though, makes political sense for an Administration that seeks to divvy up the American cake, Hyman-Roth-style, to its favored backers. It’s genius. The Dems can tell their rabid Bernie Bro and Riot Grrrrlll base that they are taking on Big Tech––there are also DOJ suits against Alphabet, Google, Meta, and others––without being serious about it. After all, The Regime depends upon Big Tech censorship and downranking to win elections. As the Media Research Center just confirmed, there have been 41 instances of “election interference” by Google alone since 2008, helping both Obama and Biden win the White House. The number of interferences is likely in the thousands––especially when you count Google’s and Facebook’s amplification of the Steele Dossier lies, the Trump-Russia collusion hoax, the strategically timed and treasonous intel chief disinformation about Hunter’s laptop, and, of course, the deep state paid directive to censor Republican speech, as The Twitter Files courageously revealed. Google’s “trust and safety team” (today’s Big Brother) is right now working overtime to ensure the “correct” political outcome is achieved in 2024. But Google’s Gemini AI tool just let the cat out of the bag, generating black Nazis and female popes, and equating Elon Musk with Adolph Hitler, revealing the depths of the pro-DEI anti-Conservative programming embedded in its code.

Alphabet, Meta, Snap, and the former Twitter (when it was in reliably censorious hands) are the propaganda wing of the Biden Regime. They can be counted on because the Regime has leverage over them. Should they run afoul of the Regime’s agenda to “Get Trump”, there’s always that Section 230 carve-out, protecting Big Tech firms from liability for content on their platforms, and allowing them to earn trillions in turn. If Section 230 Title 47 of the U.S. Code got overturned, Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snap, and Threads would experience a quick and ghastly death. The Maoist Biden Administration message is clear: “See what we are doing to Apple, Tik-Tok, Trump, and in the hounding of Elon Musk, owner of X? Toe the line, or you’ll be next.”

As with their open border, their outrageous spending, their nurtured homelessness, their smash-and-grab epidemic, and their still largely unpunished and far-worse Summer of Insurrection, Democrats and this Administration like things just the way they are. In their society of the spectacle––in which policing contrarian speech and demanding unearned “respect” towards the diversity-hired are paramount––it’s the simulacrum of doing something that matters, not solving problems. So, go buy your Google, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Snap. They are inextricably aligned with the Regime’s walled garden of total control. But if you own Apple, be worried. This deeply corrupt Administration needs a scalp. And Apple is low-hanging fruit.

NOTA BENE: Trump Media and Technology Group Corporation (ticker: DJT) debuts today. As investors take sides in the exploding Comms Wars, don’t be surprised if it trades with extreme volatility. The Biden DOJ will be watching with salivating interest.