WATCHING THE RIGHT: They've Come Full Circle, Openly Embracing Socialist -- Even Communist -- Rhetoric
Fox News host directly threatens several companies by name
I feel like, in some respects, this piece deserves one of those opening crawls from the Star Wars movies … you know, “Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”
That's how it feels when talking about the Republican Party.
The GOP — it may be hard to believe in today's noxious mix of Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and Madison Cawthorn — but the party once did have pretenses towards grandeur, and it actually adhered to a cohesive set of philosophical and political principles.
For instance, its support for law enforcement was more than performative and at convenience.
And, of course, within its capitalist rubric was a healthy respect both for private property and enterprise.
To say that those conservatives would not recognize those who today only pretend at the designation would be both accurate and an understatement.
This is because, in their zeal for grievance, today's crowds on the political right appear consistently willing and happy to set aside any vestiges of respect for either private property or private enterprise.
Where once conservatives railed against government overreach into business, today's right-wingers actually regularly parrot the rhetoric and philosophy of the most extreme elements of socialism and communism.
This has increasingly been the case for several years now in the realms of social media providers and major technology corporations.
And for so-called “constitutional conservatives,” many of those who claim the appellation are woefully ignorant of the basics of the US Constitution.
Right-wingers have been ever-more-loudly complaining about “censorship” of their views on social media.
Here are but a couple of representative examples.
These right-wingers often are told that private companies don't censor — only governments can do that.
And, again, it's explained to them — repetitively — that they, like all users of a given social media provider agreed to abide by certain terms and conditions. If they post content which runs afoul of those terms and conditions, those companies are merely enforcing the rules, these right-wingers are told.
They no more have a right to host content on the computing and networking gear that belongs to someone else — in this case, a social media provider — than I do to show up at the Fox News studios and demand my own half-hour after Tucker Carlson.
Still, these arguments — based as they are many of the rules of capitalism enshrined into policy and law, often by conservatives who came before — hold no moral suasion with today's right-wingers.
Indeed, today's elements on the right use much of the same conspiracist language representative of the worst that leftists we're accused of employing decades ago.
Beware, these high tech companies will drive us toward WW3. Their greed for world domination through globalization and world trade is so great that they are willing to take it all the way to war. Truly folks, beware of what greed and lust for power can do. These high tech people want to be the rulers of the new tech age, which will last for thousands of years. They want to be the kings and queens for the next 20,000 years.
Often, those on the right seek to simply dismiss the terms of service (TOS) they agreed to adhere to, and increasingly use terminology and philosophy shockingly close to somehow socializing, or even nationalizing, social media and tech companies:
All these, naive people talking about TOS and contracts and making these unrelated and false metaphors don’t understand social media has become just like talking out in public. You should have freedom to express yourself as long as you aren’t hurting someone in real life. Restrictions are not so private and laws need to be made to put big tech in their place, should have been done 20 years ago but republicans thought they could use tech to control us, turns out democrats turned the tides.
Gone is any conservative regard for private property. These right-wingers somehow — somewhere — are fabricating a god-given right to post to Facebook.
(We'll all just have to assume that those constitutional clauses on Facebook and Twitter are hiding in the same place as the airports famously used in the Revolutionary War, according to Donald Trump.)
But these poor, deluded saps on the right aren't stopping there.
Not at all.
They're going so far right as to come out the other side.
Laura Ingraham — the Fox News host who functions a bit like a “shock jock” of politics — recently directly threatened several tech and media companies by name, who are not popular among the MAGA and far right.
“When Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney have to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table, your copyright/trademark protection, your special status in certain states, and even your corporate structure itself,” she said on-air.
If a Democrat had said these things, there would be outrage. They’d undoubtedly be dubbed a socialist — or worse — and maybe the markets might even take a hit over such loose and irresponsible talk.
But what's it called — and more importantly, what are the consequences — when it's the far right trafficking in such rhetoric?
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