George Rebane
[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 10 October 2018.]
Things have become very strange and different since Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump. Of the many outrages the Left has proclaimed since November 2016, the most recent one comes on the heels of the Kavanaugh confirmation from none other than the current titular head of the Democratic Party. The nightly videos of leftwing mobs in the streets stopping traffic, assaulting pedestrians, harassing customers in places of business, and screaming epithets at people they think do not share their interpretation of recent events has now become the norm. Hillary herself calmly explained the situation to an interviewer yesterday, telling us that today it is impossible to be civil with people who oppose her desired direction for America. Therefore, the incivility we witness on the streets and in the media from the Left is totally justified. Moreover, according to her, civility can only return when the Democrats retake control of Congress.
To support this objective and control the national conversation, progressive corporatists are now planning ways of censoring speech on the internet – to bring about what they call “good censorship”. The dilemma that companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube see is a tension between the American tradition of our being “an unmediated marketplace for ideas” which “prioritizes free speech for democracy, not civility”, and the European tradition wherein government ensures “well-ordered spaces for safety and civility” that “favor dignity over liberty and civility over freedom.” The corporatists favor our migration toward the European model and claim that “all tech (aka social media) platforms are now moving toward the European tradition.”
In this chilling grand scheme of things for elitist planning and control, Google sees its new role as “the guarantor of civility” describing its new functions as the editor and publisher of allowed content. All this has come to light in a leaked document from Google that structured a recent conversation between major corporation executives. In response, Google still claims to be a “neutral platform”, and that the document does not describe new directions and policies, but is merely a product of some “internal research”. (more here and here)
To complement such content censorship comes California’s latest attempt to control commerce on the internet through a new set of regulations signed by Governor Jerry Brown. Under the confusing label of ‘net neutrality’, the intent is to make the internet into a utility under government political control to determine who can transmit how much data, for what purposes, and at what price. The intent is to take market demand out of the equation for data-intensive services provided to the consumer. To be sure, this progressive initiative violates not only constitutional norms but also all kinds of established interstate commerce laws, which is why the Department of Justice has now brought suit to have California continue to comply with federal law and regulations. (more here)
Working hand-in-glove with the corporatists is the movement of Millennials – those partially and under-educated 20- and 30- somethings – who are shifting markedly leftward into the Bernie Sanders and hard-socialist wings of the Democratic Party and the new Progressive Party USA that has recently calved from the Democrats. Many of these Millennials, even those who work on Wall Street, no longer understand the necessary foundations of capitalism and what makes a market economy work. According to polls, one of their prime concerns is the general notion of economic inequality that such free-wheeling markets produce as they also raise the living standards of our poorest, and cause the opposite, with even more inequality, where such markets are proscribed by governments and corruption. (more here)
These Millennials somehow miss the socialists’ policy prescriptions that have always promised to create a new world, based on government induced altruistic behavior, where risk and reward no longer go hand-in-hand. A world without inequalities where people will still labor to provide today’s goods and services, with little regard to how much they earn or what profits they will be allowed to keep. Today more and more of our Millennials are striving to bring about a new socially just America that will be planned and controlled from on high by well-meaning elites. And in this happy world no one will be heard to complain, because such communications will be automatically censored for the good of us all.
My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on Rebane’s Ruminations where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively. However, my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR. Thank you for listening.
rebanesruminations.com 
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