Trump (whom I briefly tagged with the “him who shall no longer be named’ sobriquet… read on) is no longer residing in the White House, but he certainly continues to occupy the brain pans of countless leftists, wholly rent free.
Given the attitudes the Left has regarding rent (see: eviction moratoria, “housing is a human right,” etc.), I might be tempted suggest that their offering up of that head-space real estate gratis would be them finally behaving in an intellectually consistent fashion, but we all know that they’d evict him with extreme prejudice if they could just manage to get their TDS under control. No, their unmanageable rage at the indignity of seeing the nation elevate him to the Presidency persists to this day, and probably for the balance of his life and beyond.
Dissatisfied with unseating him, they are now playing whack-a-mole wherever his voice and visage appear. Facebook has chosen to scrub all instances of an interview of him conducted by his daughter-in-law (where were they when Chris Cuomo was [redacted] brother Andrew’s [redacted] for his handling of the COVID pandemic in NY?) from the platform, declaring “any content “in the voice of Donald Trump” would be scrubbed from the social media platform.”
As I’ve noted previously, Facebook has the right to do this. I have the right to call Zuckerberg et al out for their illiberal and Stalinesque behavior, as I’ve done before and will do again. As Justin Amash recently noted, you can support the right of a private actor to do something and still think it’s a bad thing to do. It’s the equivalent of “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” But that’s yesterday’s news at this point – what interests me more is what I see coming next.
The Democrats are making a big show of regulating, or at least threatening to regulate, Big Tech over matters political. The Right has been barking about this as well, from a different but parallel aspect: both teams want these powerful platforms to change their behaviors in a way that benefits them.
But, Congress and the Parties aren’t all there is out there, and it is amply demonstrated by history that innovation is really good at outrunning government. Were I Trump, I’d see a golden market opportunity at hand, and the reports suggest that he does see it and is planning to exploit it. He’s been hinting at a new social media platform, and he recently launched a self-congratulatory website.
One of the dirty secrets of Congressional sausage-making is that the politicians we elect don’t write the laws that they enact. While that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone, the reality isn’t what we might assume, i.e. that gaggles of their staffers do the actual writing based on broad-brush directives from the elected ones. That’d be a fair assumption, given that’s how most stuff gets written in the corporate world.
The most sausagey part of the sausage-making is that the bills are usually written by the people they’re aimed at, i.e. the K-Street lobbyists representing the big, deep-pocketed corporations that the government purportedly watchdogs. Why would they willingly regulate themselves? To make sure that when the public makes noise about regulating, the outcome favors them over their competitors. If something’s going to happen, best take control of it and guide it to a better outcome for yourself, rather than engaging in Quixotic resistance.
This tells us a bit about what to expect should the Untethered Orange Id launch his own social media platform. Don’t for a minute assume that the Democrats are going to simply grind their teeth and chew their wasps while Trump resumes feeding his minions the red meat they so desire. Don’t for a second assume that Big Tech is going to just shrug shoulders at tens of millions of Trumpists (as well as many others either interested in what he has to say or annoyed with the left-tipping of the scales) flocking to some site that isn’t putting dollars in their pockets – or censoring the opinions they don’t like.
I expect that, should Trump launch his platform, we’ll see a sudden rush to regulating (and it might not even require Congress’s shadow-scribes to write new laws – the bureaucracies already have too much discretion) that platform into oblivion. Trump is their Trotsky, to be purged from history – past, present and future.
As I’ve warned in the past, calling for or cheerleading the regulation of social media platforms is a losing proposition. You’re not going to get the results you want, not when they’re the ones who’ll be writing the new rules, and certainly not with the current crop of Democrats in charge of things. There isn’t a gram of fidelity to the principles of liberty in the lot of them.
Of course, Stalin had it easier than the Terrible Tetrad and their Big Tech minions do. Despite their efforts, we continue to see what’s going on, and I think they recognize that reality. I think this is why they are running amok with tax-and-spend legislation and a geyser of partisan actions: they know they’re going to lose at least the House in 2022, and want to get their agenda locked in before gridlock.
As for Trump and his potential new platform? If it happens, what they did to Parler will seem kind and gentle in comparison to the regulatory hell they will heap upon Donny-Boy for his refusal to be Trotskied.
And, as for “him who shall no longer be named?” This ongoing attempt at erasure prompted my withdrawal from my earlier commitment to no longer mention his name – I shall not be complicit in this purge.
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How long before they deem posts about platforms being left leaning to be misinformation and thus scrubbed from their sites.