The last weeks events have shocked most people. Almost all serious politicians have condemned the attack on the Capital out of hand. Most do not make invalid comparisons with Antifa or BLM. They recognize that an assault on the Congress with the intent to disrupt proceedings is deeply anti-democratic. There is no doubt that many criminal charges will be laid. However, let us be clear, it wasn’t an attempted coup, much more like a disruptive riot, though with tragic consequences for both police and rioters.
However, it is the subsequent banning of Trump from Twitter, Apple, Google and Facebook that will have a greater lasting effect, unless it is rapidly undone. Even then, undoing won’t help. The Tech giants crossed a threshold when they imposed punitive censorship on the champion of tens of millions of Americans. And all this in the land of free speech. The CCP and the heirs of Stalin would be proud. Of course, the censoring of Trumps social media accounts won’t ultimately work.
Nevertheless, it represents a sharply hostile action by the left in the already virulent culture wars that beset the American public space. At least on the point of defending free speech, I am at one with Tom and Andrei. The most important amendment of the Bill of Rights of the United States is Article 1, the right of free speech. It underpins democracy and the very idea of liberty, which are at the heart of the founding values of the United States. The Supreme Court invariably supports free speech. The new conservative majority on the Court will absolutely guarantee that. It is almost certain that the first cases challenging the actions of Big Tech are already being prepared. Big Tech has clearly overreached. While they have built the most popular social media platforms and search engines, they don’t own the internet, any more than the New York Times owns all the printing presses.
Just as Fox News challenged, and then overtook CNN, so will this happen on the internet. Tens of millions of Americans, perhaps even a majority of those who are politically active, will be looking for new platforms and apps and sites to conduct their political discussions, and indeed to do much more. There will be many on the left and centre who will also be very disturbed by the actions of Big Tech. There are many on the conservative side of politics who have deep pockets. They may not be the darlings of Hollywood, but they certainly know how to build new tech platforms on the internet. Parler has made an immediate effort to be the alternative voice, but at least till now, Parler has been seen as far right, a minority interest at best. It is much more likely that the major media players like Fox News, which has become instantly energized by the actions of Big Tech, could lead a much broader approach to alternative social media platforms.
Fox has the name recognition and market presence to instantly become a major player in social media. The vacuum on the right for a major new social media platform won’t last long. Serious alternatives will emerge within a very short space of time. There is also the immediate impact on congressional politics. Any impeachment proceedings will be dead on arrival at the Senate. There is zero chance that enough Republicans would defect to convict Trump.
The overriding factor for Republicans will be defending free speech and that means standing together. This will probably be the pathway for the Republicans to win back the House of Representatives in 2022. They were only a few seats short in 2020. Defending freedom is a touchstone that will unite all Republicans and is a tailor made issue to drive political activism. I recall it was the Helen Clark’s Electoral Finance legislation of 2006 that provide the necessary impetus and energy to defeat the Clark government in 2008. It is obvious to anyone that things are much sharper in the United States.
Big Tech may have fired the first shot in this new intensive phase of the culture wars. But they almost certainly will not be firing the last shot.
No Minister 
LOL
(1) I do not remember all this pompus pontification when the Senate Hearings for the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh were disrupted in 2018. Nor after the riots that accompanied Donald Trump’s inaugeration in 2017.
(2) Funnily enough the disruption occurred when Josh Hawley was in mid stream objecting to certifying the electoral votes and this was the democratric and constitutional process that was derailed by these crazies – aint that an amazing co-incidence?
Of course the whole election has been “deeply anti-democratic”. Donald Trump had got around the Establishment and was able to speak to the “deplorables” directly with a message that resonated and it worked – but now he has been sent to Coventry and the Establishment are engaged in a Trump bashing par excellance to which he is unable to respond. They hope to keep their exclusive club exclusive a while longer, they being almost all the Mainstream Democrat party and the “Moderate” Republicans while the message has been sent out that any association with Donald Trump is future political poison.
What I find almost fascinating is the visceral loathing exhibited by those within the tent of New Zealand’s political class – I guess the idea someone who hasn’t been involved Politics since they cut their milk teeth can come in and take the highest political office at the ballot box has obviously rattled their cage
“Tens of millions of Americans, perhaps even a majority of those who are politically active, will be looking for new platforms and apps and sites to conduct their political discussions, and indeed to do much more”
Greatest news since sliced bread.
I hope that thinkspot run by Professor Jordan Peterson becomes one of those sites where high quality discourse can find a home and flourish. https://www.thinkspot.com/
Freedom of speech only works under shared values. For those who don’t share your values, it’s a weakness to exploit and a truce to break. It’s therefore unsustainable in the long term. There is no such thing as a genuine marketplace of ideas to produce ideal outcomes, just as the marketplace for beer doesn’t produce the best beer. When Bud Lite, which tastes something like dishwasher, is the world’s biggest selling beer, why would a free speech market produce anything other than Bud Lite speech?
I don’t think genuine free speech is going to last much longer in the United States. I’m left with hoping that Deplorables win, and the Left lose, the oncoming civil war.
Well that’s lovely but unfortunately it’s too little, too late, for several reasons.
First up, censorship really applies to government efforts to suppress free speech. These are private companies so I doubt that even SCOTUS can do much.
Having said that, there is a vast difference between a small baker refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding and vast, near monopolies like Google and Facebook – effective rulers of our modern, cyber public spaces – refusing speech platforms for voices to whom they are politically opposed.
Which brings me to this statement:
You and many other Right-Wingers, plus more than a few smug Lefties, have claimed that the Right can just go and build its own spaces, like Gab and Parler. In the last 24 hours Amazon Web Service has announced that they will refuse to let Parler run, which will effectively switch it off until such time as new server farms can be found. This is a far more effective tactic than simply refusing to sell the app itself on Google and Apple Store.
Such is their marketplace power, which effectively nullifies the free speech capabilities that would have existed in a free market. Given the multiplying power that is the networking of cyberspace – a far greater power than any previous market control exercised by the likes of Rockefeller or IBM in the physical markets of their heyday, – companies like Amazon, Google and even Facebook are untouchable by any private sector means. Any alternative would need to be almost OEM in total: nobody has pockets that deep.
At best the likes of Parler might be able to go after Amazon, Google and Apple under normal business laws around restraint-of-trade or some such, but again, where would they find the money to do that over the many years it would take in court. What smallish, growing business can survive that?
No, this is not censorship. This is Cancel Culture, which has been bubbling away in the Academic world for over a decade and which has now boiled over into the Corporate and Public world. It exists across media, entertainment, education and now politics and business. And the great, sad paradox of your post is that it is most clearly seen in this statement:
Unlike the Lefties pushing that line I’ve no doubt you’re not gaslighting us but truly believe that and are perhaps even proud of such legal sophistry.
But in 2020 millions of Americans watched small businesses in dozens of cities being destroyed by mobs in violent attacks, watched cops being told to stand down (because they were too systemically racist to be trusted to engage), watched their MSM describe these events as “peaceful protests”, “mostly peaceful”, “understandable” and so forth, and then watched their Democrat mayors and politicians, all the way up to Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris, gleeflully explain that “protestors should not let up”. No accusations of incitement there, let alone charges, and as the NYT gleefully explained, thousands of what charges were made were soon dropped, thanks to Democrat DA’s.
What was it that Weatherman Terrorist Bill Ayers once said as he walked from Court: “Guilty as sin. Free as a bird. What a great country”
Those millions also concluded that democracy was under attack, and a far more brutal and effective one.
And the Cancel Culture and “Censorship” that you now bemoan, was in full support of all that, empowered across almost all aspects of modern society and orientated along the Four legs good, two legs bad line so successfully that it got buy-in from moderates and Righties like you and Mitt Romney.
Why should they stop going further now? You can be demonised and tossed aside as easily as Parler is.
I ditched Facebook for Parler last year. I was only on Facebook to keep up with my kids in initially but when they started censoring my posts which were links to epidemiological articles about corona virus I called it quits.
Scientific discourse is not “conspiracy theory™” and serious statistical analysis is the furtherest thing from “hate speech™ “ you can imagine. Never the less such things violate Facebooks community guidelines apparently.
But Parler is not much use to me without the “friends” network and anyway it will be gone in a few hours.
It was clear to me about March last year we had hit an historical inflection point where the world we knew was going to be rapidly altered.
The American Election Night 2020 was seriously wacky – I was watching the coverage on MSNNBC and the hostility toward Donald Trump from the talking heads was filling the room – the sheer hatred on display was oppressive .
Donald Trump had handy leads in all the disputed States but counting had “ceased for the night™” in them when Joe Biden addressed the Nation and here things got really wacky – he was at Home and he was addressing his supporters who were in cars in a parking lot (unseen) via a big TV screen. They honked their horns to show their approval, in place of the usual applause and cheers. I don’t know exactly why but Max Headroom came to mind.
About an hour later Donald Trump addressed the Nation from his election night gathering. He was in the Whitehouse with invited flesh and blood people in the audience, which the talking heads told us all was highly irresposible during a “pandemic™”. As he raised the topic of the suspiciousness of the counting “ceasing for the night” MSNNBC cut him off. The image of him addressing his audience remained on one side of the screen, muted; while on the other a talking head said he was lying and the talking head could not allow him to lie to the American people like that.
I could not believe what I was seeing, a talking head on TV censoring the actual President of the United States in real time and being the arbiter what was true.
The USA is in the hands of geriatric politicians who have been on the political stage forever and we are in the matrix, a place where there are three groups of people, essential workers, non essential workers and the ruling class who don’t have to live under the restrictions they have imposed on the other two groups.
Just as an aside, WordPress, the platform used by this blog, has booted a number of conservative blog sites. So even though we’re a tiny NZ blog, don’t bet against us getting some message like the one sent here.
Arguably it is more of an example of cancel culture as such rather than censorship which is really the use of state power.
Although Apple etc are private, they are pervasive. If the SCOTUS says they are private and can include or exclude who they want, the only counter is alternative platforms.
That will mean even more people will only ever be exposed to the viewpoints they want. The other side will be even more demonised. Not a good outcome.
The Court may decide all pervasive sites don’t have quite the freedom to cancel/censor as much as they think. In part to preserve h th e idea of debate and discourse.
When private companies act as enforcers for one political party against another party that’s a textbook component of facism.
https://twitter.com/alexsalvinews/status/1348387727440453632?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1348387727440453632%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fredstate.com%2Fstreiff%2F2021%2F01%2F10%2Fit-looks-like-the-big-tech-conspiracy-just-killed-parler-n307714
I forgot about this…
Based on their recent history and their long opposition to corporate power I’ve no doubt Lefties Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi will do so.
But I’ve yet to see others of any prominence. I quick glance at Kiwiblog, Bowalley Road, as well as US leftist sites reveals a sense of glee rather than concern, let alone “disturbed”. OrangeManBad trumps everything else.
Andrei sure reminds one of Pavlov’s dog with his 8.06 post and his inability to respond to the message in the post. Trump isn’t the focus of the post. It’s the actions of ‘Big Tech’ and the threat they pose to freedom of speech and we should be concerned.
There is a certain synergy between what’s happening here and Labour’s proposed Hate Speech laws. We should be very concerned.
For Andrei … one does not have to be within the NZL political tent to have a visceral loathing of Trump. His narcissism, his lies, his flip flops, his lack of leadership over the COVID crisis, his inability to accept criticism has outshone any good that he might have otherwise achieved and is the reason for his pariah like status among thinking people. The problem for America is that the alternative ain’t much better but at least they will govern without the rancour. But I fear you’re right in arguing the no good will ensue from all of this.
You think I am not a thinking person and you are? Really?
I first encountered censorship with Google a couple of years back Veteran.
I had a Youtube video channel where I posted videos I used in blogposts. Years ago, maybe as long as a decade ago I put up a video quoting Gunter Grass, a Nobel Laureate in literature
One day out of the blue I got an E-Mail telling me this video had been deleted from Youtube for violating community standards – I had actually forgotten this video even existed it was so long ago. They said I could challenge this decision by following a link in the E-Mail. So as a matter of princple I did.
I came to a Web page where there was s tiny little input text box where you could type in your case, Maybe 20 characters would be visible at any time.
They made it very hard and frustrating to create a coherent case but not to be beaten I composed my response in a Text Editor and pasted it in.
I explained that this video was a warning to people about submitting to Fascism, using Gunter Grasse’s words from a work of literature “Die Blechtrommel,” and that Gunter Grasse actually was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature.
All to no avail – when I get a chance I will retreive all this correspondance if I can and post it here.
Last year I posted on Facebook the official Italian Government Report on Covid-19 and epidemiological analysis of it written by an Italian epidemologist which challenges the official narrative as per the BBC and CNN and that just got blown away with very brief explanation about community standards yadda yadda
I think a lot Veteran!!! These things are all connected,
The Rise of Antifa and BLM,
The pulling down of statues and the rewriting of History, sometimes as we watch and readily apparent to anyone paying close attention.
The pulling of classic films that do not meet todays woke standards, “Gone with the Wind” being perhaps the most infamous example
The Covid panic which has provided justification for Governments to curtail the freedom of movement of their citizens and to confine us to arbitary house arrest for months at a time and on a whim
The total shambles of the 2020 American election
This shutdown of free speech
Today as we speak there are still ongoing riots in American West Coast Cities
Also Antifa dressed all in black marched in NYC in masks except for one wearing a pigs head for some reason unknown to me, armed with clubs and riot sheilds in a very intimidatory fashion
Things are looking very ominous to me, very ominous indeed
Thanks @ Andrei. I’ve nothing to add except I’m finding the censorship and deplatforming deeply ominous also. (It would be great if this blog had upticks)
Vet, to consider the Dems will run the political machine without without “Rancour” has a distinctly humorous, (black of course) ring to it with the second in line for the white house, when they section por old Joe, (3% in primaries) if My memory is slightly better than Forbiden and next up to bat the batshit crazy Nancy Pelosi, you must be joking.
Congressman Shifty Schiff D California, Senator Schumer D NY Jerry Nadler Congressman NY who with Pelosi ran a campaign that began before Trump was even Inaugurated, with serious support from The DoJ and its anti Trump cabal, and you suggest the ForBiden Presidency will unite the US, such is not remotely funny.
The unforeseen consequences of such censorship…
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
GD … I refer you to the whole sentence or which you quoted just the second half. Perhaps on reflection rancor wasn’t the best choice of word … inconsistencies might have been better. With the Washington establishment back in control of the leavers of power at lest you can at least fairly guess their way forward in a way you never could with Trump … problem is they don’t have the answers to a deeply divided US society that is getting more deeply divided every day.
The Democrats (and Labour here) embrace Woke politics and from where I sit woke politics doesn’t work.