Corporate takeover

While we don’t know the answers, there are some safe bets. It won’t simply be publishers and platforms that decline to bake a proverbial MAGA cake. It won’t stop at web servers pulling the plug on social media sites rife with violent threats.

And on the why question, we also can have some certainty. The Great Deplatforming isn’t simply about liberal Silicon Valley executives pushing their ideology or caving to their radical young employees. It is a lobbying strategy: Big Business will kick certain voices and ideas overboard in order to win favor with a Democratic Congress and administration, as corporate executives and their lobbyists seek friendly regulations, new subsidies, and bountiful contracts.

Guns, babies, churches

One needn’t believe that Trump’s Twitter, Hawley’s book, or the social media site Parler was wrongly canceled to worry what’s next. Also, a conservative or libertarian can agree that private companies have the right to restrict content on their platforms while still condemning the censoriousness and bias of the platforms, and worrying about the implications. And we know more censorship is coming because leading voices on the Left talk about conservative views as not merely wrong, but positively “dangerous.”

Pro-lifers are obviously a target. When pro-life activist Lila Rose posted on Twitter Jan. 7 that “abortion is violence,” Leah Torres, who runs an abortion business in Alabama, saw an opportunity. It was the day after the Capitol riots, and Trump was taking heat from all sides for his incendiary rhetoric and actions, and deplatforming was gaining steam.

“This is violent rhetoric,” the abortionist wrote on Twitter. “It is objectively false and meant to incite others to commit crimes against clinics, patients, and health care providers. This is what domestic terrorism looks like.”

Dr. Torres was explicitly branding Rose’s tweet as unprotected by the First Amendment, deserving of criminal prosecution — or, at the very least, a ban from Twitter. This is the standard way the abortion lobby treats pro-life positions: as false and dangerous.

This view goes almost all the way to the top. Pro-lifers are nearly criminal, in the eyes of Kamala Harris. If she gets her way, the Biden-Harris Justice Department will keep a leash on states that pass laws to protect the unborn or regulate abortionists, modeling her proposal after civil rights laws. That is, she believes pro-life positions are on par with segregation. Given that view of pro-lifers, is there any doubt Democratic leadership believes pro-life groups should be barred or throttled?

Nowhere is the Left’s appetite for censorship clearer than in the sexual revolution. When someone argues against chemical or surgical interventions to transition a boy experiencing gender dysphoria into a girl (or vice versa), that person is branded as bigoted. But it doesn’t stop with name-calling. Asserting that stigma against transgender people causes suicide and hate crimes, such unwoke opinions are blasted as “unsafe” speech that costs lives.

Activists, for instance, tried to deplatform what became the year’s biggest book on gender, Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, and they had success with many big companies. Shrier’s first publisher dropped her. Amazon refused to allow her second publisher to advertise the book on its website. Transgender activists briefly convinced Target to stop carrying the book.

An ACLU official endorsed “stopping the circulation of this book,” which he called “a dangerous polemic with a goal of making people not trans.” A typical review on Amazon reads, “Statistics show 51% of transgender male teens attempt suicide, and things like this book are the reason why.”

Again, some opinions are not just wrong, but actively dangerous. (Recall how New York Times staffers reacted to Tom Cotton’s op-ed over the summer, bizarrely claiming that the op-ed endangered the lives of fellow employees.)

It goes beyond platforms. These days, simply buying something from a willing seller often requires the approval of some major corporation, and some payment processors are refusing to take part in legal sales they don’t approve of. Square and PayPal, two large payment processors, refuse to process gun purchases. There’s a lobby for banks and bigger credit card processors to follow suit. Visa, argues New York Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin, ought to “change its terms of service to say that it won’t do business with retailers that sell assault weapons.”

“If Mastercard were to do the same,” Sorkin writes, “assault weapons would be eliminated from virtually every firearms store in America because otherwise the sellers would be cut off from the credit card system.” We shouldn’t assume this effort will stop with selling “assault weapons.”

Will credit card donations to pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, long the targets of abortion-defending state governments, be next? Niche conservative or religious publishers will be off-limits for some processors that consider them to be peddlers of “hate speech” or “misinformation.”

So conservatives should in the coming years expect to find it harder to gain the services of publishers, platforms, and payment processors. The question is why is corporate America so eager to delegitimize conservative views?

Access by exclusion

Corporate executives have many reasons to join the Left’s side in the culture war. For starters, that’s where the money is. Wealthy cities packed with young, college-degree-toting folks with disposable income all lean hard to the left.

But that’s not the full story. To understand why Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, Square, Simon & Schuster, Wall Street, and the other corporate giants would happily throw social conservatives overboard, you need to think about K Street — that is, Washington lobbying and the revolving door.

Democrats now control the House, the Senate, and the executive branch. Old regulatory frameworks, such as Section 230, are on the table. New regulations have been proposed. Some regulations could crimp Big Tech’s style, while others could deepen the moat that protects Facebook, Google, and others from competition.

It’s no wonder Big Business wants to appear as an ally to the cultural Left. Wall Street and the banks know that Elizabeth Warren might come after them, but also that Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden would be happy to cut a mutual-protection pact. They want access, and a seat at the table.

Apple and Google dropped the Parler app after powerful Democratic congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called on them to do so. Amazon kicked Parler off of its web-hosting platform after Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, who represents Silicon Valley, instructed them to. Twitter, Facebook, Apple, and Google all deplatformed Trump after Michelle Obama wrote, “Now is the time for Silicon Valley companies to stop enabling this monstrous behavior.”

And now, major companies such as Nike have pledged not to support any congressman who voted against certifying the electors on Jan. 6. Notably, this ban does not apply to Democrats who objected to certifying Trump electors in 2016.

Amid the newness of this deplatforming, the episode has reminded us of an old but oft-ignored truth about the revolving door and K Street: The lobbying-government combine isn’t simply a lever by which industry tries to shift public policy; it’s also a tool by which Washington insiders control industry, extracting power and wealth from corporate America.

It’s crucial to remember this when considering the army of Democratic revolvers who went from government to Big Tech and now back to government under Biden. Treasury pick Janet Yellen, transition director Jeff Zients, and White House staff secretary Jessica Hertz all have tech ties. Former and current officials at Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google are all joining the Biden administration.

We can think of these revolvers as Big Tech’s voices inside the government, but it’s just as true that they were Washington Democrats’ voices inside of these corporations. Rather than two competing power centers, it’s best to see government and Big Business as two overlapping webs of money and power, run by the same revolving set of elites.

That helps explain Big Tech’s inconsistent concern for human rights. Conservatives pointed out that Apple and the NBA, which were so quick to don the mantle of social responsibility in the United States, cater to a genocidal and oppressive regime in China. How could Twitter silence Trump but allow a North Korean propagandist to keep an account?

This may look inconsistent, but that’s only if you look from the perspective of human rights. From another perspective, the corporate giants are being perfectly consistent: They are always lining up with government power.

In China, Big Business tolerates abuses, because that’s how to maintain access. In the U.S., they deplatform conservatives.