July 22, 2021 at 12:07 p.m.
The real insurrection
The real insurrection
First, there's a cadre of Democrats in Congress sitting absolutely silent about the Cuban regime's ongoing oppression of the Cuban people, even as thousands dare to march in the streets. Sure, there's nothing odd about that - Bernie and his political bedfellows have been fellow travelers for many years.
On the other side of the aisle, there's a whole pack of Republicans screaming about Cuban totalitarianism, demanding that the Biden administration do something to help the Cuban people secure their freedom.
No, that's not odd, either. Cuba is a dictatorship and the Cuban people do deserve their freedom. To that end, the U.S. should encourage democratic efforts there, so long as that does not translate into interfering into the internal affairs of another nation. Nation building too often only builds more walls of oppression around the people whose nation we are trying to build.
None of that is odd, though, even the hysterical cries of neoconservatives who seemingly want to invade Cuba and execute its dictators. How's that for nation building?
No, what's odd is, most of those voices that are screaming so loudly about Cuban dictatorship are strangely silent when it comes to speaking out about the nascent totalitarianism in our own country - the totalitarianism being fomented right down the street from them at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
These days, the Biden administration is making no secret that it wants to dismantle the First Amendment, and it is actually boasting about its desire - and its actual work - to censor and silence any American who dissents from its orthodoxies.
Last week White House press secretary Jen Psaki laid out one major project of the administration, and she put it pretty bluntly: "We're flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. We're working with doctors and medical experts...who are popular with their audience with accurate information. So, we're helping get trusted content out there."
Flagging problematic posts? In other words, the government is telling Facebook what kinds of posts the administration approves of and what types of posts it wants taken down. This is well beyond the argument that a private company can do what it wants with its platform; this is the government trying to compel that company to act as an agent of the state's campaign to squelch dissent, a violation of the First Amendment.
When opposing points of view are no longer allowed, that's when the remaining speech officially becomes propaganda, and it's also the classic definition of fascism - the government allowing private companies to exist but only so long as those companies do the government's bidding. See Nazi Germany.
The Biden administration would like to do even more, and that's more chilling yet. It's engaging the Democratic National Committee to work with SMS carriers to flag what it considers to be fraudulent text messages spreading "disinformation" and notifying the carriers.
No, they aren't going to read private text messages, but the government will be making it clear to those carriers what information it considers to be "dangerous" so the carriers can do the dirty work of getting rid of the information for it.
Excuse us for saying so, but this is the type of activity that we believe is the real insurrection against democracy.
Of course the administration backs up its "partnership" with Big Tech by slinging around threats of various legal and regulatory measures, you know, such things as repealing liability protections if the companies don't comply.
All of this is unprecedented for an American administration. After spending four years screaming about how authoritarian Donald Trump was, the Democrats have jumped down the rabbit hole of censorship in a way that Donald Trump could never have imagined. Trump never tried to censor the American people on social media. Never. Trump never bullied Big Tech companies to walk the government line or else. Never.
But Biden and the Democrats are, and it is ongoing daily. Just in the past few days, White House communications director Kate Bedingfield went on MSNBC - that is to say, state-run TV - to proclaim that social media companies "should be held accountable" for misinformation and that "there are conservative news outlets creating irresponsible content sharing misinformation about the virus that's getting shared on these platforms."
In other words, content that does not align with that of the regime is irresponsible and should be removed.
The hypocrisy of it all is astonishing. As the president was busy trying to shut down a free internet in the U.S., he was back at the White House calling for a free internet in Cuba: "They've cut off access to the internet," he said. "We're considering whether we have the technological ability to reinstate that access."
If they gain access, hooray for the Cuban people. They will have gone from no access to access to an internet that increasingly contains only government-approved speech.
All of which brings us back to the Republicans in Congress. Why are they not outraged - as outraged as they are about the oppressive regime in Havana? Where is their opposition to our homegrown totalitarianism?
Over in the Senate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz condemned the Cuban government's "widespread internet shutdowns" "to quash the burgeoning pro-democracy movement."
Well, if the aggressive censorship being pushed by the Biden administration is not an attempt to effect a widespread internet shutdown here, we don't know what is. Allowing access only to government dogma is no better than allowing no access at all. A dictatorship is a dictatorship by any other name.
So what to do?
Fortunately, a handful of Republicans and Democrats are standing up and demanding action, chief among them Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, a conservative who has clashed with former President Trump but who also has a 99 percent Heritage Action conservative lifetime rating, and, in the Senate, Josh Hawley of Missouri.
In the House, Buck has championed a package of six bipartisan bills to rein in Big Tech and has picked up support from such Trump stalwarts as Matt Gaetz of Florida. Among other things, the bills prohibit discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms, prohibit acquisitions of competitive threats by dominant platforms, and eliminate the ability of dominant platforms to leverage their control across multiple business lines to self-preference and disadvantage competitors.
They would also establish interoperability and data portability requirements, promoting competition online by lowering barriers to entry and switching costs for businesses and consumers, and give state attorneys general the ability to stay in their preferred venue.
The bills aren't perfect - they over-focus on market concentration and rather neglect censorship collusion with the government, and they have been criticized by Republicans such as Kevin McCarthy (who, it must be observed, always ends up backing Big Tech) as giving too much power to the executive branch, but they are a starting point.
Over in the Senate, Hawley's bill would ban major companies in the business of offering search engines, marketplaces, and exchanges from competing with third-party vendors by selling, advertising, or promoting their own competing goods and services on their sites, ban those same major companies from expanding their power and creating anticompetitive conflicts of interest by providing the online hosting and internet infrastructure services for third parties, and aggressively enforce existing anti-trust laws.
In the end, breaking up market concentration - breaking up Big Tech in a new wave of trustbusting, as Hawley has put it - is the one true way to end blanket online censorship, while a loud and united left and right against political censorship is demanded in the public square.
At least these bills are a starting point for urgent debate. That debate needs to be now, and it needs to take place on the front rows rather than on the back benches of Congress.
Supporting democracy in Cuba is a noble and good thing; supporting the survival of democracy in America is perhaps a more urgent political imperative.
Contact your federal legislators and let them know.
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