re: Robert Reich claims Elon Musk 'out of control,' says regulators should arrest him

quote:

---

Robert Reich

---

quote:

---

Liberalism Removes its Mask

Upper-class America pretended to care about rights, until the rabble moved too close to home

In the Washington Post today, under the headline, “Musk and Durov are facing the revenge of the regulators”:

While freewheeling internet companies have long clashed with authoritarian regimes — Google in China, Facebook in Russia or pre-Musk Twitter in Turkey — Western governments until recently generally did not regard social media and the vision of free speech they promoted as being fundamentally at odds with democracy… Banning entire social networks or arresting their executives simply wasn’t something liberal democracies did… Now, for better or worse, it is.

Columnist Will Oremus noted that although the Durov and Musk cases differ, both “involve democratic governments losing patience with cyberlibertarian tech moguls” who “thumbed their noses at authorities.” He highlighted a “vibe shift,” noting that “high-flying tech leaders will have to think a bit more carefully” about “whose soil they’re on when they step off a plane.”

American liberalism railed against Bush conservatives who said those who didn’t break the law had nothing to hide. Now, once-liberal voices are tripping over each other to make more extreme versions of the same argument. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich published a guide to how to “rein in” Elon Musk in The Guardian that includes a recommendation that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest,” adding cheerfully that “global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov.” Following up its July article about how “The First Amendment is Out of Control,” the New York Times also has a piece titled, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is it Also Dangerous?”

My old employers at Rolling Stone described defenders of Durov as “far-right extremists” and Musk as a “grandstanding” charlatan seeking to evade “consequences.” All this is in line with views of Kamala Harris, who’s argued that “there has to be a responsibility that is placed” on social media sites to prevent misuse of speech “privileges.” The Harris take previewed the complaint this year by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson that the First Amendment was “hamstringing the government,” despite this being its purpose.

---

quote:

---

This is all freeing for white liberals. In the age of Trump, there’s no longer need to pretend to care about people on the business end of unconstitutional crackdowns, who can and must be painted as deserving all of upscale America’s most aggressive enforcement plans.

In fact, as columns like Reich’s show, they can barely restrain their glee at using institutional power to go after unwelcome visitors to what they consider their political neighborhood, i.e. earth. They’ll keep painting shutdowns and arrests as blows against “unaccountable” billionaires, but make no mistake, the real targets of their anger are the millions of ordinary slobs refusing their advice and calling them names online. In cities they arranged it so the riff-raff were neither seen nor heard (and those who disobeyed went upstate, fast). Until they get the same service everywhere else, well, aristocrats gonna aristocrat. They just don’t feel like hiding it anymore.

---