It's been a year since Kurt Schlichter published
his brilliant column at Townhall, and it has only been been proven even more true by recent events.
"Google's fascist witch-burning of an honest engineer for refusing to bow down at the altar of politically correct lies was the final straw, an unequivocal warning to conservatives that there's a new set of rules, and that we need to play by them. First they came for the tech geeks; we’re next. That means Republicans at both the federal and the state level need to rein in the skinny-jeaned fascist social justice warriors who control Silicon Valley – and, to a growing extent, our society – through the kind of crushing regulation of these private business that we conservatives used to oppose.
They're going to hate the new rules.
Now, the old rule for us conservatives was that businesses could do pretty much whatever they pleased, with minimal regulation, if they focused on maximizing profit and thereby rained benefits down upon society in the form of wealth and job creation. It was a good system, but, like all systems, to get benefits you have to meet certain obligations. For businesses, one obligation was to generally stay out of the cultural and political octagon.
But the Woke Weenies of Silicon Valley, flush with cash, power, and unearned smugness, decided that they just couldn’t keep on the sidelines and make their money. No, they had to make
change, as in,
changing us. They violated the most important of the old rules – they chose a side. In the past, when a company or even an industry crossed the line, it rarely made much difference. So some insurance company was outspokenly progressive? So what? The one exception was the mainstream media/Hollywood complex – its actions were extremely annoying (and destructive), but it had the First Amendment to protect it and we conservatives had alternate channels to get our ideas across.
Not so with the Googles, the Facebooks, and the Twitters. Their antics are not necessarily protected by the First Amendment, their internet monopolies choke out alternative channels, and, unlike the line-crossers of the past, they possess enormous amounts of personal information that can be used to manipulate, intimidate, and punish political opponents – you know, us. Worse, their leaders are evangelists of cultural Marxism, so these companies don’t even have the fig leaf of objectivity that the mainstream media has (or had) to constrain them.
Yet they still expect the same laissez-faire treatment as any other business even as they try to gut us politically. They discriminate against conservatives, they actively assist leftist partisans like Felonia von Pantsuit, and they aggressively silence conservative voices within their apps. They imagine that they can adopt new rules for themselves while keeping in place the old rules that prevent us from defending ourselves because of “free enterprise” or something.
Nah.
See, what leftists do not get is that
principles are part of
systems. Principles do not stand alone; they are nested within a system and together they make it function smoothly. Our system isn't some cultural cafeteria where you load up your plate with the principles you like and hard pass on the principles you don't. If you decide you don’t want to play your part in the system, you shouldn’t be shocked when the other participants make the same decision. “Free enterprise” means “enterprise generally free of government control,” and it’s stunning that the Silicon Valley people we hear are so smart don’t foresee that when their “enterprise” morphs into a partisan political campaign the people on the other side of the spectrum are going to leverage their own political power in response.
There’s sometimes a moment when a system is unstable because one participant has changed the rules, but the other side hasn't yet reacted – like the period after feminism demanded total female social equality with men, but men still generally picked up the check. That imbalance cannot persist forever; eventually the people on the other side feel like suckers, so they stop playing by the old rules. That’s when the new rules arise. And that's why conservatives now need to savagely regulate companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. We need to use our political power in Congress and red state legislatures to incentivize Silicon Valley to return to a system where its companies embrace political and cultural neutrality, or suffer crippling consequences.
Yeah, I know that heavily regulating private businesses is not “free enterprise,” but I don’t care. See, “free enterprise” is a bargain, and they didn't keep their part of it, and I see no moral obligation for us to be played for saps and forgo using our political power to protect our interests in the face of them using theirs to disembowel us. I liked the old rules better – a free enterprise system confers huge benefits – but it was the left that chose to nuke them.
So what are we talking about? Well, size matters, and Silicon Valley’s giants are just too darn big. Time to chop them up like old Ma Bell. Let's apply the antitrust laws that were made for taming just these types of octopod monopolies. For example, Google and Facebook’s tentacles have slithered into every corner of the web and strangled the competition. There was a word for that back in the day – what was it? Oh, yeah. “Monopoly.” The left used to like breaking up monopolies until its leftist allies starting controlling them. But the leftists don't control the executive branch. Since Attorney General Sessions isn't busy investigating the Democrats, maybe he can get his army of lawyers busy breaking up these enormous, bloated, anti-competitive conglomerates.
Remember, no corporation should be too big to fail – or nail.
Google previewed a future of conformity and fascism when it fired that engineer for talking about things that made social justice warriors sad. It's not hard to imagine that they'll soon try and silence the rest of us. One way is by weaponizing the information they maintain on all of us from search histories, purchases, and even email, information that gives leftist hacks incredible leverage to intimidate and extort opponents. “
Gee, Mr. Conservative, it’d sure be a pity if the world found out about your browser history involving brony and furry erotica….”
So we need legislation – at both the federal and individual red state levels – that will impose staggering, gut-wrenching monetary penalties for not only the active misuse of this information, but even for the mere failure to safeguard it – any failure to safeguard it. If the info gets out, Google gets slammed – hard. Call it the Citizens’ Data Protection Act – gosh, who could oppose protecting citizens’ data? – and impose huge civil and even criminal penalties for any disclosure of private information about a private citizen. Yes, that’s a strict liability standard – if a citizen's information gets out for any reason, Google pays through the nose regardless of fault. Now there’s an incentive to make sure our data is secure.
And what's also scary is their willful manipulation of the algorithms that determine what can and cannot be said and read. If you don't exist on Google, in many ways, you really don't exist at all. Well, that's intolerable. Our free society conducts its business on the Internet, and if one unaccountable, partisan group can decide what topics can and cannot be discussed, we no longer have a free society. We'd have a fascist one, and fascists are bad even if those fascists swill kombucha tea, bike to work at a Mountain View campus, and spew ridiculous mottos like “Don't be evil.”
So how about the Algorithm Transparency Act, a law that bans these big Internet companies from putting their fingers on the scale of discourse and requires them to make available online all of their operating algorithms? Yep, that would give competitors a peek at their intellectual property, but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make for transparency. And “transparency” means allowing an
army of Davids to dig through Facebook and Google’s code, finding out why things the tech leftists don't want you to know are getting buried, and then feeding that info to trial lawyers.
Oh yeah, that’s the other part of the equation. We need to empower individuals and/or consumer advocates to bring lawsuits seeking huge damages for the manipulation of information designed to silence or stifle disfavored points of view. And the great part is that enforcing it doesn't need to be a government thing. We can model it on the Americans with Disabilities Act – that’s the law that makes it so you can play a soccer game in a public toilet stall.
See, the government doesn't enforce disability accommodation laws; private citizens and their lawyers do, for money. When somebody finds a ramp with an angle that isn't perfect for people on Rascals, or a urinal that's too high for dwarves, they file a lawsuit to collect substantial penalties and, more importantly, grossly inflated legal fees. That's key – suing citizens must be able to recover their attorney’s fees from the tech companies. Let’s unleash the power of ambulance chasers on Silicon Valley’s tyrants!
Of course, the big tech corporations would immediately complain because everything they do would be scrutinized and they would constantly be under observation for any deviation. Great. Then they would know how conservatives in Silicon Valley feel.
Not exactly old school conservatism, right? Well, it’s not exactly old school America. Too bad. We liked the old system, but you tech twerps decided to change it. So be it. Too bad that, for some reason, you thought we wouldn’t change too.
Like I always say, you're going to hate the new rules.".......
And it is our job to make them hate those new rules.
Old rules, too, for that matter. There is already a law against fraud. It is fraud to entice users to open accounts without telling them they will be shadow-banned, harassed and censored for conservative viewpoints and conservative viewpoints alone.
And it is financial fraud to sell advertisers eyeballs without telling them you are suppressing traffic in the service of Leftist politics.
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| Bullies need the "Bully!"-treatment. |
