The War Against the Right

 From Buck Sexton at American Consequences:

Twitter blocked President Trump’s 88.6 million followers from liking or replying to his tweets over the weekend. The company claims this was simply a mistake, but there’s very little willingness on the Right to believe that any major social media platform operates in good faith anymore.

When Twitter blocked the controversial New York Post story about Hunter Biden right before the presidential election, it was the last straw. Nobody believes Dorsey, Zuckerberg, or Pichai (CEOs of Twitter, Facebook, and Google, respectively) when they say these decisions aren’t political. And now that the dam has broken, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube (which is owned by Google) aren’t hiding their intentions anymore. 

The social media giants of Silicon Valley are going all out to shut down ideas they don’t like from Trump, the GOP, and anyone who defies their online consensus.

Who determines what’s allowable in this new speech-police regime? Well that all depends… Even a few years ago, the social media giants claimed that there was no partisan censorship on their platforms. There were simply “algorithms” that determined what you saw. Other than explicitly illegal content, the promise of Facebook, Twitter, and Google was that they would operate as platforms, not publishers. 

But that myth has been shattered… Now there are “third-party fact checkers” who are brought in to stifle political speech on the Right. This is simply the laundering of censorship. Additionally, there are teams of Left-wing 20- and 30-somethings who are tasked with determining who has violated the “terms of service” on the platforms. 

These amorphous and ever-changing rules are just an excuse to purge disfavored speech, which is almost always conservative in its politics. The consequences of running afoul of these petty totalitarians are very real… They will shadow ban, demonetize, throttle, or even boot you off the site forever. Google, in particular, has the ability to decide that a public person should be effectively canceled from the Internet.

The social media giants are actually doing this. These aren’t conspiracy theories or concerns about what may happen… This is happening already. 

I’ve been sanctioned in recent weeks by YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram (which is owned by Facebook) for sharing my commentaries on COVID-19 lockdowns and how utterly disastrous and largely ineffective they are.

So for the crime of COVID wrongthink, I’ve been threatened with having my social media accounts suspended or even deleted. Never mind that my record of public predictions on the subject of, say, school closures is vastly more accurate than Dr. Fauci (the overrated clown). If you disagree with the establishment Left, you find yourself punished by some of the most wealthy and powerful corporations on Earth. 

This is only going to get worse… For all the noise that Trump voters have made about the suppression and censorship that the social media companies engaged in to help Joe Biden, nobody has really developed a plan of action.

Google isn’t worried about Republicans using a different search engine anytime soon. Some of these Internet behemoths are effectively monopolists within the market and are immune to outside pressure campaigns.

What this means in the short term is that freedom of speech is more a fiction than a reality in American life. You can say what you want to your neighbor in person or on the phone… But post the wrong thing on your Facebook page, and you too could be shadow banned. 

For now it mostly targets public figures – the “blue checks” on Twitter and Facebook – but the algorithms and terms of service are shifting the national conversation in ways that only benefit one side of the political aisle. (Read more.)

From First Things:

Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn v. Cuomo blocked New York State from enforcing capricious restrictions on houses of worship. Nearly all the justices agreed that these restrictions were unjustified by public health concerns. What's most remarkable about the decision isn’t its commitment to the Constitution, but rather the identity of the plaintiffs: traditional Christians joined Orthodox Jews—with an assist from the Muslim community—to uphold America’s core commitment to religious freedom. 

Far from a coalition of convenience, this may very well be a sign of an ascendant voter bloc, one that’s likely to shape politics for decades to come. That’s because the future of American elections isn’t likely to be about the exhausted old affiliations—Democrat vs. Republican, say, or the coasts vs. the heartland—that are crumbling before our eyes. Instead, as the Supreme Court case helps us understand, elections in future are likely to revolve around the struggle between two conflicting worldviews. 

The first, ably represented by New York’s Gov. Cuomo, sees religion as just another pursuit for which American society can make space. This is largely because the Cuomonists, if you’ll forgive the pun, believe, like William James, that we’ve no greater value than usefulness. Is religion good? Only if it helps us meet our earthly goals. “If the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word,” James once quipped, “it is true.” But if the hypothesis of God clashes with the hypothesis of the governor’s office, say, or the Democratic party, or any other equal organization or organizing principle, well, you should feel free to discard it.

This view of religion has become increasingly common these past five or six decades, especially among America’s elites. This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, as it takes the idea of liberal democracy to its logical extreme. To borrow an image from the Portuguese writer Bruno Maçães, imagine America as a hotel: You’re free to come and go as you please, and you can do whatever you want in your room as long as you don’t bother the other guests. And being a good hotel, it also has superb soundproofing, which means that it’s designed to keep all noisy chatter about God or virtue or truth from seeping out into the lobby and the halls. 

You can see why people find this approach appealing. Hotels are great, which is why we’re all delighted to check in from time to time and take a vacation from our own messy homes and neighborhoods. But while staying at a hotel is fun, living in one is sad and lonely, which helps explain why, even prior to the pandemic, a Cigna report calculated that the percentage of Americans who say they are lonely is up seven percentage points and is now at a whopping 61 percent. Put simply, as fundamental goods like community, faith, and tradition have become just another set of amenities to enjoy or discard at will in Hotel USA, two-thirds of Americans now report feeling irredeemably alone. 

That’s where the second worldview comes in. This one, represented aptly and loudly by the Catholics, the Muslims, and the Jews who took Gov. Cuomo to task, rejects the notion that America can afford to be politely indifferent toward faith. Instead, it sees faith as an essential element of the American experiment. There can be no free society that is not first a good society, and the best way we humans know to create good societies is through the precious institution of religious community. (Read more.)

Share