This column is Part 1 of a 3-part series. Read Part 2, “Justice Thomas’ Solution to Big Tech’s Social And Financial Excommunication” and Part 3, “Centralize Liberty: The Solution To Wicked, Woke Tech”

Republican solutions to Big Tech tyranny do not begin to address financial de-platforming, the cancellation of citizen dissidents en masse, including the infringement of the right to partake in the public square and make a living.

In their weak case against Deep Tech (“Deep” to denote enmeshment with The State), Republicans are still defending only some speech on the “merits,” rather than all speech, no matter how meritless.

In a sense, the statist anti-trust bills—targeting especially Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google—being pushed by lawmakers are worse than useless.

The anti-trust impetus is misguided as it conflates corporate size with anti-competitive practices: the larger, the more monopolistic. However, reducing the size of an entity–a corporation–doesn’t necessarily alter its nature.

When a malignant cell divides, it doesn’t grow less potent. To the contrary, it innervates and enervates more spheres. Likewise breaking up Big Tech. Smaller malignancies metastasize and kill just as well.

The habitual failure of the representatives sent by Deplorables to D.C. to prevent cancellation en masse–the Orwellian nightmare from unravelling–cannot be overstated. On the line is dissidents’ ability to speak, publish, partake in society; sell our cultural products, and transact financially over the country’s major online economic and social arteries.

No wonder the Tech crooks appear periodically on The Hill to make fun of the country’s comical representatives and their gullible, pliable voters. The richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, has no qualms about letting his delivery drivers, who, “operate under severe [app monitored] time constraints,” urinate in bottles for fear of losing their low-wage jobs.

Do you think the dim bulbs in Congress, posturing for the cameras, scare his ilk?

Do not forget that anti-trust busting or the repealing of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act are solutions the GOP had failed to implement when in control of both chambers and the presidency.

It was under Republican control that de-platforming of a president, no less, and the banning of legions of powerless dissident citizens, including detrimental financial de platforming, “occurred.”

Given this incontrovertible reality, The People have an obligation to quit the “my party, right or wrong” unconditional love, and demand the GOP work to unban ordinary, innocent folks, the crooked politicians be damned.

Section 230 Hype

Certainly, Section 230 solutions are insufficient to the task. “Under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act,” explains the Guardian, tech companies currently enjoy broad immunity from civil lawsuits, stemming from what users post, because they are treated as ‘platforms’ rather than ‘publishers.’”

Section 230 “protects social media companies from being legally liable for content on their networks published by users.”

What Republican reformers who never reform are advocating is that social-media censors be deprived of their state-grants of privilege and protections against liability. Thus depriving these social engineers and censors is more than reasonable.

However, ordinary folks–small, independent entities who’re excommunicated by social media–cannot afford to mount a legal challenge against conglomerates whose revenues are greater than the GDP of multiple G20 nations.

Yes, Section 230 is a cynical slap in the face of citizens. Repeal it. But, do not count such political tokenism as a solution to financial and social excommunication by the Big Tech superhighway.

DeSantis’ Big Tech Bill

To get an idea of erroneous Republican “thinking,” take Gov. Ron DeSantis’ “Big Tech” Bill. It most certainly doesn’t give private citizens deserving, unfettered access to the social media public square. His “Big Tech” bill is neither useful nor fair to the Little Guy or Gal—not unless he or she is prepared to and can afford to launch law suits. I can’t. Can you?

DeSantis has simply made “it illegal for large technology companies to remove candidates for office from their platforms in the run-up to an election.”

And I thought that The People’s representatives were supposed to further our interests, and not grease the skids for themselves and their oleaginous amigos!

This is near-useless tokenism in solving Deep Tech tyranny. DeSantis’ “Big Tech” bill’s beneficiaries are the politicians. They receive protections The People don’t.

By-the-by, has anyone heard a politician or a pundit speak of the cancelling and silencing of the speech of regular dissidents, who aren’t invited to bloviate on Fox News? I haven’t.

Recently, a typical Fox News segment dealt with Facebook’s decision to ban Donald Trump for another two years. Not a word did the unbanned, urbane elites anchoring the segment say about MAGA America.

My own hardly lowbrow websites have been banned by the slum dogs of Facebook for life, presumably, with no discernible way to appeal.

Conversely, former President Trump seems able to appeal.

All you and I really deserve, as innocent, law-abiding individuals, is to have unfettered access to social-media’s irreplaceable public square–to Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, PayPal and other banking facilities–without being singled out for excommunication absent a crime. What are we, social lepers?

No question, the Section 230 grant-of-government privilege must be done away with, but this conventional solution is insufficient for the self-serving reasons DeSantis’ Bill is inadequate.

NEXT WEEK: The Solutions.
WATCH: “DEEP TECH’S Economic Terrorism”

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, August 5
Townhall.com, August 5
Unz Review, August 5
CNSNews.com  August 6
Quarterly Review, August 7
The New American, August 9

The post Big Tech’s Financial Terrorism And Social Excommunication (Part 1: The Problem) appeared first on ILANA MERCER.

AS A COINAGE, DEEP TECH is superior to Big Tech. It better captures the deforming power and tentacular reach into state and civil society of the high-tech monopolists.

That reach notwithstanding, many libertarian-minded and “small-government conservatives” (a contradiction in terms, considering the national debt is $28 trillion) have been stalwart defenders of the rights of Deep Tech to deploy unprovoked financial force to kneecap those users who don’t conform to the tech oligarchy’s monolithic notion of the new Ideal Citizen.

David French, writer at the Dispatch—and one of the many political dwarfs tossed periodically at Donald Trump, by Never Trumpsters (hey, dwarf tossing is a cruel sport)—emphasized the immutable right of private platforms to de-platform (limit and throttle) “millions of Americans who engage in wrongthink,” the president included.

LET DISSIDENTS EAT CAKE

Let the disenfranchised—those of us who’re routinely blocked from being able to grow our appeal and peddle our intellectual products, now fearful that our books will be digitally burned—create platforms of their own, exhorts French, from the comfort of his conformingly banal, pixelated perches.

“Find other off-ramps,” advised podcaster David Rubin affectatiously.

Coming from the conformist mediocracy that runs Conservatism Inc., this cynical suggestion is the equivalent of, “Let them eat cake,” which, in practice, means let political dissidents go dark or resort to a barter economy.

You might not know it, but financial de-platforming has been a staple of many a long-suffering American dissident’s working life. Financial de-platforming is when you are barred from banking or transacting via PayPal. It is an “existential threat to free speech in America,” inveighed Revolver News.

This observation both trivializes what’s afoot and misses the point, for financial de-platforming teeters on violating another’s natural right to make a living.

How do you make a living if you can’t bank? Do you revert to a barter economy? A book for some bread? Go underground? Hunker in home-based industries? Keep afloat by word of mouth? Go door-to-door? Oh, I know: Beat the tom-tom drum, if your email service is severed, given that our email accounts and other server-supported facilities are currently under threat, too, with nary a remedy from fat-cat representatives (screw Josh Hawley’s book).

FLOUTING THE SPIRIT OF CIVIL RIGHTS

As a social-media platform, Parler has been found lacking by the Deep Tech overlords, simply because it sports a different business model.

Deep Tech restricts speech to comport with its censorious, progressive and politically correct, do-or-die guiding lodestars. Parler’s business model, however, is based on more free speech, not less of it.

Quislings such as Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Twitter quickly colluded in flagrant violation of the American pro-competition sensibility, and flouting the spirit, if not the letter, of civil rights law, to financially segregate, banish and cripple irksome people and enterprises, Parler, in our example. Quick to ape them were other fearful vendors, lawyers, for example.

“Whatever Trump did, there is no excuse for what happened to Parler,” protested David Sacks, a liberal.

“Barring businesses from using online payment systems,” seconded Never Trumper Bari Weiss, “removing companies from the App Store; banning people from social media—these are the equivalent of telling people they can’t open a bank account or start a business or drive down a street.”

Nice, but Weiss failed to analytically distill the meaning of that prohibition:

“[T]elling people they can’t open a bank account or start a business or drive down a street” is the equivalent of informing them they might not be able to make a living, despite the fact that they are innocent; their only offense is to type or waft words into the ether.

“This is the fate of Parler, courtesy of the Amazon webserver. No such thing as monopoly power? No such thing as deformed, economic gigantism? My a-s!”

I had tweeted out the above in disgust, appended to a screen picture of the following ubiquitous nullity: “We’re having trouble finding Parler; check your network connection.”

“Stop with the monopoly talk,” admonished a diehard ideologue, in reply. “You sound like the government interventionists of the Progressive Era.”

Yes, let the unfettered market-place, peaceful and slow, remedy the speedy and deadly aggression of our tech enemies, who come at us in war, not peace.

This, as the conformists persist in puling, “build your own platforms.” Right. Parler was ever so confident The Competition would be happy for its business. As was I.

For its confidence, Parler was subjected to a coordinated financial attack; dealt an unwarrantedly aggressive, financial death knell. The social-media platform was forthwith robbed of its value, even though it was not the aggressor in a dispute it did not pick—Parler had not defaulted on its financial obligations, and it didn’t defraud its users or vendors.

So, how do conservatives create an “alternative” to Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter, when these are conglomerates whose revenues are greater than “the GDP of four of the G20 nations”; and when “they are, collectively, more powerful than most, if not all, nation states”?

And when, more importantly, the men and women of Deep Tech no longer have products on their megalomaniacal, petty minds, but politics.

STRUCTURED LIKE A PETROSTATE

When Facebook, Google, Twitter, Apple, and Amazon were growing up, they wanted to be government. Now they are!

Think about this: These are “businesses” whose political plank dwarfs their economic and technological raison dêtre: Work for them and you’ll quickly learn that it’s about minorities before merit, foreign over native born, women above everybody and everything, and white men who’re made to go to the back of the org—although, given their legendary facility with engineering, honky is made to do double duty for all the deadwood hired.

And, everything in deeply ignorant Deep Tech is done by the book—the White Fragility book, a favorite “teaching” tool of the barely-literate tools in the Human Resources department.

The profit-structure, moreover, within many a Deep Tech company is reminiscent of that of an Arab Petrostate. Billions flow top down, from these sheik-dominated organization—Bill Gates, Satya Nadella, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos—to their pet political fiefdoms, within each of their respective companies. There, navigating politics is more valuable than making products.

Dissident Americans take comfort in the fact that our leper-like ouster—de-platforming, financial and other—is executed by private companies. Discrimination, aver the libertarian-minded among us, is the prerogative of private property. Or, so we console ourselves. We’re safe, for aggression for the sake of aggression, as we libertarians have long maintained, is the modus operandi of the state, not of free enterprise.

Yet, here we are! In more effectively banishing people and their products from market, private multinationals are posing a serious competition to the State.

And therein lies the rub. Fresh theoretical thinking about the meaning of Deep Tech begins with an understanding that we live and labor under tyrannical corporate statism, or tech-dominated statism. Free-market capitalism remains the “unknown ideal.”

Parler’s sudden (temporary, we hope), financial demise was no natural death; it came not by dint of economic failure, but due to untoward, unwarranted financial force—economic aggression of the most cowardly kind, wielded by economic enemies, and rooted in political enmity.

In defending Deep Tech’s prerogative to visit economic and social violence on innocent individuals and businesses by tossing them off their enormous, irreplaceable platforms, for speech not to their liking—not to mention throttling our speech, and confining us to a leper-like, tenuous status while on the platform—you are not defending the rights of private property to merely conduct itself as it wishes.

Rather, you are marching down the pirate’s plank, on a pirated ship of state in competition with the state.

©2021 ILANA MERCER
WND, January 14
Townhall.com, January 14
American Greatness, January 16
Unz Review, January 14
Quarterly Review, January 15
American Renaissance January 20

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