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The Free Market Has Failed Us

I’ve said it all on Twitter.

There is a disconnect between free market ideology and the reality of our experience with “no platforming.” Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google/YouTube and other social media monopolies engage in political censorship. In contrast, the Post Office is uncensored.

You can send anyone who has been banned on Twitter a letter through the US Mail in complete confidence that it won’t be censored. You can call anyone with your Verizon or Sprint cellphone and talk for as long as you want. You can text anyone in the United States as much as you want without censorship. You never have to worry about SJWs “no platforming” you with political censorship by denying you electric service, water, sewer, a mailbox or cell phone service.

Why should social media be any different? I like the Post Office because there is no Jack Dorsey telling me who I can send a letter. There is no Jack Dorsey telling me who I can call on any given day. BTW, “no platforming” is a major problem with PayPal and Patreon as well.

Twitter is looking for a buyer. Congress should buy Twitter and transform it into a free speech public utility. It should guarantee access to everyone without political censorship.

Note: The fact that Media Matters is trying to censor social media to repress all conservative and “rightwing propagandists” should push this issue to the top of our agenda.

Hunter Wallace
the authorHunter Wallace
Hunter Wallace is the founder and editor of OccidentalDissent.com

17 Comments

  • I 100% agree that the government should buy it in an open market and make it a public utility. Anyone can copy the platform for private versions.

  • Is this land of voluntary exchange of goods & services the same place people are being fined and imprisoned for not making wedding cakes and hiring too many white people …

    • Private property does not mean you cannot regulate. If you did not regulate industries and companies, everything would be run by monopolies and cartels. It is the role of government to regulate monopolies like Twitter and Google.

  • The “Free Market” ideology which states there is no limit to what you can do with your capital unless it harms someone directly has nothing to do with the foundation of America as a nation. It persists among the “right” as a valid ideology precisely because the psychology of right-leaning people causes them to look to the past for a source of moral clarity and are met with this mythological creation in the 20th century of America’s libertarian past. People view it as an expression of conservatism rather than the parasite which it is. It is just a brand of Anarchism which has been rebranded and falsely contextualized as a part of the American folkway to be adopted by the deliberately maleducated American folk.

    This rebranded value system was sold to America by people who deliberately intended for it to be used as a weapon against us, and you can read the correspondence of a great many on the far left in the first half of the 20th century in the US in their own self-awareness of how ‘civil liberties’ taken to the absolute extreme would unravel society. As an ideology it doesn’t stand up to the simplest dialectical process for anyone who has a conservative worldview. The obvious outcome of the “Free Market” is the ability to gather capital to build a parallel society. Which is exactly what the left did and has since the worked to deconstruct their method of victory.

    James Madison wrote about the issues of factionalization and indeed the issue is of primary concern among the extant political writing of Classical Antiquity upon which much of the foundation of America rested. Obviously we had no Free Speech for Jewish Communists in 1789, nor for Muslims and it was never intended for this to be the case. These people also obviously weren’t here at the time but beyond glibness neither was America protective of the “rights” of blacks and injuns who were here. Nor did the American Revolutionaries care about the “rights” of Loyalists among their own kind. America was founded as a One Party State and a Res Publica for a specific people. The fundaments of any market liberalization was to prevent factionalization within this tightly bound culture. Nor was America for most of its’ existence shy about putting its’ collective boot down on any corporate body that put forth parallel institutions as rivals to the People’s Thing.

    Only now that the Left is totally dominant does this sentiment of non-intervention coalesce into taboo and political victories for maintaining the taboo are preciously selective. As we become more socialized and restricted in our rights the hysteria of the Free Marketeer hardens and seeks to make the Right increasingly sclerotic in combating its’ enemies. I do not believe this is entirely conspiracy but I can’t imagine a more perfect system of subversion that could be created.

    The “Free Market” in the more formalized Smithite sense was encoded in the Constitution of the CSA precisely because the Southern establishment viewed the nature of their present conflict as one in which a political faction had used the Federal State to favor their own economically and what was unfolding was the inevitable outcome of not having a Constitutional bar to this kind of market chicanery. From my eagle’s eye view looking in hindsight the problems had a much deeper root in allowing this kind of factionalism to grow in a single political unity in the first place. I disagree with the political philosophy of Adam Smith intensely for believing that entanglements of mutual greed and an inculcation of mutual passivity and erosion of moral values are actually a bulwark against conflict. However the impetus for their inclusion while logically unsound at least was inspired by the opposite impulse among the advocates of these ideas today. The goal was political unity and not the unfettering of the desire of all individuals to pursue their greed wherever it may take them and whatever that may mean for the nation as an absolute moral good.

    The philosophy of Smith relied upon a fundamental reordering of mankind’s nature into Homo Economicus wherein one’s only value system is if it is good for business it is good. The Shopkeeper’s Morality he called it. The reality of America’s earliest stock is that they were bad shopkeepers who came to this continent based on their instincts and inclinations which were mutually exclusive with just keeping the shop in order and not upsetting any customers. Unfortunately for us in modernity I do believe we have been fundamentally altered on an individual level by the project of Capitalism into Plato’s prophesied lowest order society ruled by concupiscence.

    Smith’s vision of the future was wrong and entanglements engendered by greed do not prevent conflict and unleashing man’s appetitive desires upon society actually makes that conflict inevitable. The reach of mankind’s imagination will forever exceed its’ grasp and there is no shop which will ever be able to create a market for every desire. We live in a world wherein almost every material desire can be catered to, and are in the process of fomenting an arrangement wherein the remainder will be ‘liberated’ for consumption in the near future.

    It’s not enough now and we already have a market which tells people it will sell them new bodies with opposite genders, or probably even stranger vistas which I don’t care to personally catalog. We even have ‘religious pluralism’ wherein one can literally shop for transcendental and objective Truths despite being an inherently contradictory premise. We’ve been sold on imagining ourselves as Captain Kirk having sex with green women and perhaps soon the market will satisfy this experience as well having already marketed the desire. Then what? Will lusts finally be slaked having indulged in the final perversion imaginable? It never ends and each satisfaction breeds a new desire for some novel thing to consume. There is already emerging a market for war as the commodification of taboo is now moving into the realm of desire to directly harm.

    We could feel pious and say that the basis of the conflict is us righteously declaring “These things are not for sale!” However our opponents would view themselves in the same light. The reality is I find pleasure in the anguish of my enemies and often in my darkest moments I even desire their blood. I do not want to return to a state of less matured perversity wherein plumbing the depths of our desires could take place in a marketplace without tumult. Our society is ruled by its people’s groins and stomachs and it will create a market for our lust for blood because it cannot stop itself from doing so. We all go on endlessly about why we are right and they are wrong, and indeed our declarations are righteous, but that is probably irrelevant. All that will matter is which side is going to corner the market for suffering, draw the preponderance of new barbarians onside, and hence win.

    Many will balk at this, holding themselves up as being the epitome of the civilized man, but we live in the past again. The destruction of Western Civilization is an event that has already transpired. The time for Solon has already come and gone. Herculean figures need to reemerge and set the stage for a new founding. While we should take full advantage of the weak will of our present social order, let’s not lionize it as a value and seek to base our new civilization on the principles that have failed us in the past and created the current scenario. Liberalism is descriptive of the expressed behaviors of a tightly-bound and properly cultured ingroup (while ignoring many other realities of the group’s cohesiveness). Applying liberalism to enemies and hostile factions will not transform them into friends and allies. Believing so is the same kind of cart-before-horse logic as Magic Dirt Theory.

    A “Free Market” and other vestiges of liberalism may be good for us at present, but they by no means are the Good to be applied universally, nor should their reification be our stated goal otherwise we will never graduate beyond being the market segment which caters to the demand for leftist tears.

  • We don’t need to nationalize so much as apply the public utility doctrine to have the Government regulate social media and other major platforms as public utilities that have to uphold the 1st amendment.

  • The vast proliferation of means of getting our message out, which has come from the private markets and could not have been done by central planning, has been very beneficial to our movement. In spite of the heavy censorship that occurs on Facebook and Twitter, the truth about Trayvon Martin got out to people much more broadly than about Emmett Till.

    • I know Till’s dad was a convicted rapist, and I don’t really doubt the stories of the people involved in Emmett’s case, but the case is not comparable to Trayboon. There wasn’t even the pretense of lawful homicide. The killers were acquitted due to jury nullification. No one actually believed that the killers’ actions weren’t illegal. Zimmerman was acquitted because the prosecution failed to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

      • True. Till’s murder wasn’t even arguably justifiable, legally or morally. But the narrative that was pushed regarding it was even worse, claiming that he was killed for “flirting” with a White woman, when in fact he was killed for sexually assaulting her. The ((media)) was free to push their exaggerated narrative, whereas today social media, as hostile as it is towards heretics, has still improved our position from a few decades ago.

  • You can send something via Fed-Ex or UPS with just as much confidence that it will not be censored. But if you try to start a heretical group on campus it is likely to get shut down regardless of whether or are at a private or public university. How visible your activities are to SJWs is a far bigger factor than whether or not it’s a government entity involved, in spite of the fact that the First Amendment is supposed to protect you on a government platform.

    • Campuses are run by Marxists. The bottom line is who runs the institution is far more important than visibility. Antifa did what they did in Berkeley because they run Berkeley. I go to gun ranges with right wing apparel and I am not messed with. Why? Because gun ranges are run by right wingers.

  • Literally the only argument I’ve heard for this is from racists who think it will stop us from being censored. If we were in a political position to have the government buy Twitter then we’d already be in a position for it not to be a problem for us.

    • He already brought up examples of government owned and regulated institutions where it is a illegal to discriminate based on political opinion and affiliation. The “racists” are right. We are in a position to push this, Trump understand social media more than any other politician in my opinion.

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