Whom the Gods Would Destroy...

 

Not Icarus, but the same old story.

The current general pogrom against conservative voices is nothing I would have predicted. On the face of it, people on the left seem to be acting not just irrationally, but against their own self-interest.

Take Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats launching articles of impeachment against Trump. There are only eleven days left in his term, at this writing. It is improbable that the process could be completed before his last day of office. If it were, what is the urgency of having him step down a day or two earlier? And in the meantime, tying up the US Government to do so? At a time of general crisis?

If the measure passed the House, moreover, it would take a two-thirds majority in the Senate to have him removed. Since the Senate is 50% Republican, there seems no chance of that. So Pelosi is tying up the machinery of government for nothing.

If he were impeached and removed, this would apparently bar Trump from running again. But if this is Pelosi’s hope, it makes no sense on another level. When Trump was nominated in 2016, I thought the Republicans were making a mistake: Trump was a loose cannon, and many of their other possible candidates looked stronger electorally. The fact that Trump could not cleanly beat Biden bears me out: Biden was hardly a strong candidate. Again, the Democrats seemed suicidal in picking him, against the will of their own supporters and despite his obvious cognitive decline. If Pelosi were to prevent Trump from running again, this looks as likely as not to be a gift to the Republicans: they can now nominate a candidate with wider appeal, without alienating the Trumpists.

In the meantime, Pelosi is doing a thorough job of alienating Trump supporters from the Democratic Party. As is Joe Biden. Instead of calling for reconciliation, as any sane politician would do, they are demonizing anyone who supported Trump. This is significant, and an obvious case of self-harm, because many of them were Democrats before Trump came along.

It looks like a shotgun blast to the face. It looks like attempted suicide.

It looks the same to me with regard to the censorship by Silicon Valley. Especially Jack Dorsey, who seems to have been the most aggressive. Twitter is a limited platform that, before Trump came along, looked as though it were dying. Trump’s love of tweeting has made it the place to be; one third of all their subscribers are following Trump. Throwing Trump off is like refusing to serve at least one third of their customers. It is alienating at least half of their potential customers, the half who voted for Trump. It is forcing the action to a rival platform, which is then almost certain to eclipse Twitter. 

The same case can be made for all the other social media platforms censoring conservative voices: they are shutting out and alienating half their potential audience, and opening up a huge advantage for any competitor. Why would they be doing this?

Are they forced to it by the demands of advertisers, who do not want their ads run next to controversial content? No: there is no parallel drive to censor the left; it would be trivial to set algorithms to let advertisers steer clear of political speech case-by-case; and advertisers are not involved in the case of Patreon, or Amazon’s cloud services, and others who have been joining in the censorship.

Major advertisers themselves seem to have gone “woke” in self-destructive ways: like Gillette paying huge sums to deliberately insult men.

The “mainstream media” are also on an apparent path to self-destruction. Fox News, with their right-wing slant, was consistently beating CNN, MSNBC, and the old networks in the ratings. CNN’s response? To go further left. Then Fox News, too, seemed to veer left, and Drudge Report. And their audience was handed over, as if deliberately, to upstarts like OAN, Newsmax, Citizen Free Press, and so forth.

The large established tech firms are obviously aware that they are threatening their own businesses with their political stance. They are actively colluding to prevent this from happening: targeting upstarts like Parler, or SubscribeStar in restraint of trade. In doing so, however, they are in violation of anti-trust laws, and obviously risk bringing down legal action against themselves. 

And any such attempts are, in the new world of the Internet age, like whack-a-mole. There are too many people out there with access to cameras, microphones, and, in effect, printing presses now. 

My guess is that “they” are showing the terminal stages of what the Greeks called hubris, and we call narcissism. “They” meaning, in general, the educated and economic elite of our culture. The gang we used to call the yuppies. Having gotten away with a lot, and knowing they have gotten away with it, their conscience, in part, drives them to it. There is in every serial killer an unconscious craving for justice. The tension of a guilty conscience becomes over time unbearable; they will keep acting more erratically and uncompromisingly until at last someone catches them, or calls them out. If necessary, they will leave notes with clues for the police.

When it happens, when at last they are caught, they will sleep like a baby.