When Twitter suppressed a news story that was potentially damaging to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the closing weeks of the campaign, one Republican senator could say, “I told you so.”
Since arriving in Washington, Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri has led the charge against big tech companies he says discriminate against conservatives. His Ending Support for Internet Censorship Act is aimed at ensuring moderation by the major social media platforms is politically neutral.
During the 2020 presidential race, Hawley asked the CEOs of Facebook and Twitter to testify before the Senate over their treatment of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story, which the senator described as potentially an illegal in-kind contribution to the elder Biden’s campaign. He also challenged Facebook’s suspension of advertising for Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. “Facebook’s censors have apparently been busy this week,” Hawley wrote.
But Hawley’s critique of Silicon Valley extends beyond its alleged anti-conservative bias. He’s pushed these companies to protect their customers’ privacy. He has warned against their “exploitative and addictive practices,” as well as what he says are their suspect allegiances in light of a rising China. “You have been more than happy to partner with the most repressive authoritarian regime on the planet,” Hawley said to a top Google executive. “All for profits. Whatever it is that’s good for Google. Why would anybody believe you now?”
For Hawley, it is part of a broader anti-globalist pushback on the Right that has been on the upswing since President Trump has been in office. “The fate of our republican government is at issue,” he warned the first National Conservatism Conference. “This class lives in the United States, but they identify as ‘citizens of the world.’ They run businesses or oversee universities here, but their primary loyalty is to the global community.”
The 40-year-old has tried to attach additional substantive policy detail to Trump’s populist and nationalist rhetoric. This has occasionally led to fights with other conservatives, who regard some of the freshman senator’s proposals as inimical to free markets and limited government. While many other Republican lawmakers balked at increasingly high price tags for coronavirus economic rescue packages, Hawley pushed for federal support of business payrolls for the duration of the pandemic.
When Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, disappointed social conservatives with a ruling interpreting the 1964 Civil Rights Act as banning discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, Hawley urged them to rethink their bargain with the GOP.
“It represents the end of the conservative legal movement, or the conservative legal project, as we know it,” Hawley said from the Senate floor. He urged “evangelicals, conservative Catholics, conservative Jews” to demand something better.
“We were told that we’re supposed to shut up while the party establishment focuses more on cutting taxes and handing out favors for corporations, multinational corporations who don’t share our values, who will not stand up for American principles, who were only too happy to ship American jobs overseas,” Hawley continued.
Hawley was a Republican success story in a midterm election that otherwise saw the suburbs revolt against the party and Democrats win the House. Then Missouri attorney general, he beat Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill, who had survived other close calls before, 52% to 46% as the GOP expanded its Senate majority.
Whatever the result of this year’s election, Hawley is likely to try to inherit Trump’s populist mantle in the 2024 primaries. His forthcoming book, The Tyranny of Big Tech, is expected to be published by Simon & Schuster in June 2021.
