1) “When MLB pulls its all-star game to protest Georgia’s voting law, that’s corporate free speech.”
This is a good @DavidAFrench piece about the dark illiberal turn in attacks on MLB, Big Tech and woke corporations.
https://time.com/5953715/clarence-thomas-tech-free-speech/ …
A few additional points.
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2) As
@DavidAFrench notes, each of these are being attacked for different things. MLB and companies like Delta are faulted for criticizing the Georgia voting law, Big Tech for supposed suppression of conservative viewpoints. https://time.com/5953715/clarence-thomas-tech-free-speech/ …pic.twitter.com/0VDfXGJlfb
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3) But in all these cases,
@DavidAFrench argues, these are forms of speech. That’s what MLB is doing by pulling the game, and what private platforms moderating content are doing. And conservative voices *aren’t actually* being suppressed:pic.twitter.com/dWRDqBvWnq
5 replies 67 retweets 267 likesShow this thread -
4) There are additional layers of illiberalism here that I’d like to flag. Republicans are proposing to use legislative power expressly as *retaliation* against these opinions. A Georgia Republican openly declared this in targeting Delta's tax break: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/01/gop-war-on-voting-georgia-delta/ …pic.twitter.com/9TllXXI74Y
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5) Just as Georgia Republicans targeted Delta, Josh Hawley, the king of bad faith posturing, will offer a new proposal busting up “giant woke corporations,” after blasting MLB for opposing “election integrity,” a.k.a. voter suppression: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/09/josh-hawley-fox-news-rant-woke-corporations/ …pic.twitter.com/CajOl0Htr7
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6) Hawley was the front man trying to subvert Biden’s electors, sustaining the 2020 lies that inspired Jan 6. Criticism of Hawley for this is tossed into the Right Wing Media Victimization Machine, magically converting it into an effort to “cancel” him: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/09/josh-hawley-fox-news-rant-woke-corporations/ …pic.twitter.com/qt1kbjNfFi
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7) The hyped sense of victimization is absolutely central. In the right wing imagination, the big story weaving together all these threads is that our corporate overlords are part of an elite cabal scheming to subjugate virtuous conservatives everywhere: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/09/josh-hawley-fox-news-rant-woke-corporations/ …pic.twitter.com/nTqguWHtGB
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8) In fact, movements are pushing corporations *from below,* amid Trump-stoked anti-democratic tactics + years of relentless stoking of racial conflict. These movements are driven by an ideal of *empowerment.* It’s ugly to cast this as elite suppression of conservative agency:pic.twitter.com/4WlTsaY004
3 replies 62 retweets 250 likesShow this thread -
9) Bottom line: In addition to this increasing reliance on illiberal tactics that
@DavidAFrench discusses, Republicans are manufacturing all kinds of wildly hallucinatory narratives to justify them. In so doing, they are dragging their voters to an ever darker place. FIN14 replies 91 retweets 421 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @ThePlumLineGS @DavidAFrench
A critical component to fascism is their belief that they are actually the victims and are just defending themselves. For 40 years they told us not to look to the government to change anything for us. So we found another way. Now that’s wrong too. Only 1 common thread there.
1 reply 4 retweets 37 likes
Yup. One historical example: The "stab in the back" narrative common among far right circles in Germany and enthusiastically embraced by Hitler that Germany would have won WWI if not for being betrayed by Jews and Bolshevists (which were conflated).
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Replying to @gorskon @waspuppet and
I was going to write a response until I saw yours, exactly what I was going to say...
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