The ‘War On Terror’ Comes Home
Last
week’s massive social media purges – starting with President Trump’s
permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets – was shocking and
chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the
free exchange of ideas. The justifications given for the silencing of
wide swaths of public opinion made no sense and the process was anything
but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two “offending” Tweets,
for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly.
It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.
Many
Americans viewed this assault on social media accounts as a liberal or
Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans, but they are missing
the point. The narrowing of allowable opinion in the virtual public
square is no conspiracy against conservatives. As progressives like
Glenn Greenwald have pointed out, this is a wider assault on any opinion
that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite,
which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.
Yes, this is
partly an attempt to erase the Trump movement from the pages of history,
but it is also an attempt to silence any criticism of the emerging
political consensus in the coming Biden era that may come from
progressive or antiwar circles.
After all, a look at Biden’s
incoming “experts” shows that they will be the same failed
neoconservative interventionists who gave us weekly kill lists, endless
drone attacks and coups overseas, and even US government killing of
American citizens abroad. Progressives who complain about this “back to
the future” foreign policy are also sure to find their voices silenced.
Those
who continue to argue that the social media companies are purely
private ventures acting independent of US government interests are
ignoring reality. The corporatist merger of “private” US social media
companies with US government foreign policy goals has a long history and
is deeply steeped in the hyper-interventionism of the Obama/Biden era.
“Big
Tech” long ago partnered with the Obama/Biden/Clinton State Department
to lend their tools to US “soft power” goals overseas. Whether it was
ongoing regime change attempts against Iran, the 2009 coup in Honduras,
the disastrous US-led coup in Ukraine, “Arab Spring,” the destruction of
Syria and Libya, and so many more, the big US tech firms were happy to
partner up with the State Department and US intelligence to provide the
tools to empower those the US wanted to seize power and to silence those
out of favor.
In short, US government elites have been
partnering with “Big Tech” overseas for years to decide who has the
right to speak and who must be silenced. What has changed now is that
this deployment of “soft power” in the service of Washington’s hard
power has come home to roost.
So what is to be done? Even
pro-free speech alternative social media outlets are under attack from
the Big Tech/government Leviathan. There are no easy solutions. But we
must think back to the dissidents in the era of Soviet tyranny. They had
no Internet. They had no social media. They had no ability to
communicate with thousands and millions of like-minded, freedom lovers.
Yet they used incredible creativity in the face of incredible adversity
to continue pushing their ideas. Because no army – not even Big Tech
partnered with Big Government - can stop an idea whose time has come.
And Liberty is that idea. We must move forward with creativity and
confidence!
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