WINGNUTS REALLY THINK THEY'RE ALL GOING TO BE THROWN IN GULAGS ANY MINUTE NOW

Roy Edroso tweets:

Fascinated by all these free-market conservatives telling us why a private company can't choose who to keep or kick off their own website -- on behalf of ALEX JONES.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 7, 2018

I mean they weren't even this excited about forcing businesses to accommodate wingnuts back when James Damore was their free-speech cover boy. It's like the worse the wingnut, the more passionate their defense of him.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 7, 2018

I begin to suspect the reason the worst wingnuts excite their defenses the most is because they secretly believe the loathsome things those guys say -- and know they could never say such things themselves. So they *must* have an Alex Jones out there to say it *for* them.

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 7, 2018

I suspect that many "respectable" conservatives sincerely believe liberals are as evil as Jones says we are, and wish they could say the things Jones says about us without losing what credibility they have in the world outside their bubble. But I don't think that's the real reason they're so excited about the Jones situation.

I think they're worked up because they sincerely believe liberal fascism has come to America -- yes, even though they control all three branches of government and the majority of state governments. They think all of them will be silenced soon, if not jailed.

Glenn Reynolds, who a decade ago was exulting in the downfall of the Dixie Chicks ("Learning the difference between capitalism and censorship," he snarked) and the end of Dan Rather's career at CBS, now laments "the unpersoning of Alex Jones" and warns,

This is absolutely the first stage in a coordinated plan to deplatform everyone on the right. It’s not really about Alex Jones at all.

Elsewhere he writes, "REMEMBER, THE LEFT’S GAME PLAN IS ALWAYS TO SILENCE ITS OPPONENTS, NOT TO OUT-ARGUE THEM," and links to this Twitter thread from John Hayward:

Blogs shattered the Old Media monopoly during the 2004 election. Social media became an instrument to restore the power of the guild. As websites grew dependent on a few big social platforms for clicks, a leash that could tame the seemingly uncontrollable blogs was forged.

Some on the Left wanted to do this with crude government censorship, but that always runs into 1st Amendment problems, and it's a power they could lose in elections. Guild power is immune to elections. It is above the will of the people. It tells the people what they think....

Unelected guilds and mob actions give the Left control over speech without fear of losing elections or running into the 1st Amendment. They also confer the power to define terms, which is how government power can be bent to the Left even when it loses elections....

Left-wing activists are not afraid of establishing non-governmental guild controls that would effectively ban "fake news," "hate speech," "dangerous ideas," etc. because they are confident they will define those terms. The sword of New Censorship is not double edged....

How do you squash the blog revolution of 2004? By making it very difficult for anyone outside the guild and its approved politics to attract a huge audience, and very easy for insiders to do so. You make the little outsider afraid to even TRY. And here we are.

Reynolds's PJMedia colleague Roger Simon tells us we're literally in Hitler territory:

Fascist is a big word not to be bandied about (though it too often is these days)....

Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones ... is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.

What we seem to be on the brink of, if not over the brink, is a kind of techno fascism replete with the deepest kind of enforced conformity through the fusion of social media and the hardware produced by these companies. It's already beyond what Orwell and Huxley conceived.

I can still go to Facebook and see Gateway Pundit and Breitbart and Mike Cernovich and World Net Daily and the Federalist. They're all on YouTube and Twitter. They still have their own sites. In other words, they continue to have platforms. They're not even in a virtual gulag, much less a real one.

Their president is still the president. The Supreme Court of their dreams will outlive me and many of them. Alas for them, they don't own Silicon Valley -- neither does liberalism -- and it's making them crazy. They're supposed to control all the levers of power.

We got angry a decade ago when Rather and the Dixie Chicks and Phil Donahue and Eason Jordan were forced to the sidelines by star-spangled pro-Bush triumphalists. But most of us didn't think what we were living through was worse than 1984. Get a grip, righties.