As a small government Constitutional conservative, it is with no small degree of irony that I note my growing sense that we may very well need some government intervention to disempower Big Tech and its governing partisan ideology that has driven a singular and biased stranglehold on the internet’s conservative voices.
It’s been coming for a while, of course. Still, even those of us who predicted this Great Purge a decade ago are mainly aghast at the speediness of our great nation’s decline from being a strong, bold, and innovative land of the free, home of the brave to a cowering bunch of double-mask-wearing simpletons using their iPhones to search Google for “most violent ways to defeat capitalism and stuff.”
As I blogged last month, red states can “use state legislatures to establish state laws that protect a given state’s citizens from online censorship of lawful speech based on political affiliation.”
Despite Democrats and their activist media arm pushing narratives to the contrary, we are not one American state over which any party or president can “rule”; we are a republic and a union of republican states—each with its own constitution, its own laws, and its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches.
In this spirit of republicanism, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has announced a Floridian crackdown on Big Tech to combat its targeting of conservatives for silencing, bans, and other means of suppression of those they deem to be engaging in socio-political wrong think.
The states are the correct places to test new ideas. When states like Vermont and Massachusetts tried various models of universal healthcare, they failed. Abysmally. When states like California tried pushing green energy over common sense, their citizens experienced rolling brown and blackouts, raging fires, excessive state and local (property, etc.) taxes, water restrictions, and more. The state still couldn’t meet power demands without importing “dirty” power from nearby states. It’s probably best to let California work out the green agenda’s job- and economy-crushing kinks before inflicting their ongoing failures on the rest of us.
We should learn from these failed state experiments. If they work, let other states adopt them; and, if that works, we don’t need federal intervention or mandates/”nudges” because other states will happily and proudly follow suit. If these loopy commie plans fail at the state level, they will never succeed at the federal level.
I am endlessly amused by lefties claiming that we need bigger communes, a whole nation commune! A global commune! They tacitly admit that their communes didn’t work back in the ’60s (these peace and loveniks weren’t that happy about doing all the work for the lazy losers who did nothing but their drugs and women and still got their “fair share.”). It’s kind of like that old saw about Solyndra’s business plan: sure, we’re losing money on every solar panel, but we’ll make it up in bulk!
Republicans like DeSantis, are working not in a world that he wishes existed but in the world that actually does exist. In this world, his state’s citizens are being persecuted, silenced, and de-platformed for their political beliefs and American values by the Democrats’ Big Tech enforcement arm. And in this world, DeSantis, as the executive, supports legislative action.
At a press conference earlier today, DeSantis highlighted the importance of the issue.“What began as a group of upstart companies from the west coast has since transformed into an industry of monopoly communications platforms that monitor, influence, and control the flow of information in our country and among our citizens, and they do this to an extent hitherto unimaginable,” said DeSantis.“These platforms have changed from neutral platforms that provided Americans with the freedom to speak to enforcers of preferred narratives. Consequently, these platforms have played an increasingly decisive role in elections, and have negatively impacted Americans who dissent from orthodoxies favored by the Big Tech cartel.”DeSantis accused the tech giants of “clear viewpoint discrimination,” highlighting the censorship of Donald Trump and the removal of Parler from the internet and Apple and Google-controlled app stores.“The core issue here is this: are consumers going to have the choice to consume the information they choose, or are oligarchs in Silicon Valley going to make those choices for us? No group of people should exercise such power, especially not tech billionaires in Northern California.”
This really is the core issue for both the left and the right. Democrats, their media #FakeNews activist arm, and their Big Tech enforcers seem deluded enough to think normal Americans will suddenly become socialist zombies if only they watch enough MSNBC and read enough of the NYTimes.
Despite decades of “unintended” (but completely predictable) consequences of their myopic feel-good lunacy, the left really believes that a suppressed and forcibly silenced silent majority is somehow defused and not a political force. While that big lie may work in the Middle East, in China, North Korea, and even in Europe, my guess is that it won’t work here.
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