1/ While I was in the hospital for the birth of my daughter, Techdirt posted my thoughts on the right's reaction to the post-Capitol Siege deplatformings.

And what a reaction it has been . . . https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210125/21281246117/how-can-conservatives-fight-back-against-big-tech-start-just-be-sane-again.shtml

2/ . . . Big Tech platforms are Orwellian! It's the death of freedom! It's practically a new Jim Crow! Welcome to North Korea!

3/ Given all the alarmism, it's no surprise that the right is itching to do something, anything, to "fight back."

There's a lot of noise, but . . .

4/ . . . not a lot of realism.

The Dems control the White House, Senate, and House.

State-level reforms, meanwhile, are likely to snag on federal preemption and the dormant Commerce Clause.

5/ Might Dems and the GOP reach some kind of Baptists and Bootleggers arrangement?

Seems unlikely. Dems are mad at the platforms for being *too slow* to police conspiracies, hate speech, and other forms of extremism.

6/ And most of the proposed reforms simply ignore that platforms have a 1st A right to free association.

Repeal Sec 230? Go nuts with antitrust? Sure, you could, in a fit of rage, do all kinds of damage. Yet you can't *force* association. This is, as they say, a free country.

7/ One of the reasons (I suspect) that right-wing thinkers are not taking free association seriously here is that they're not coming to grips with how extreme right-wing speech has gotten.

We're not talking about "conservative" speech in any reasonable sense of that word . . .

8/ . . . We're talking about hateful, unhinged stuff.

Here's a little sample from the "top posts" at Gab.

The more mainstream folks complaining about "censorship" are, whether they mean to or not, talking mostly about this

/9 These wingnuts DO have a 1st A right to their opinions. And for what it's worth, I don't think booting them from the big platforms will silence them. I doubt that the far-right info ecosystem can be suppressed.

But can respectable firms be forced to host this junk? No.

/10 In fact, if you broke apart Twitter and FB, it's likely that nothing would change.

It's not that the new firms would "collude" to "censor" "conservatives."

It's that they'd all be normal companies that flinch at amplifying cranks.

/11 Ah, but don't the platforms discriminate by cracking down harder on *right-wing* cranks?

Well, no, they don't.

But even if they do, so what?

Less overall crankery is better than more -- unless you've decided to be the party of cranks.

/12 Which, by the way, seems like a really bad long-term strategy.

It's become heretical, in the new GOP, to point this out, but populism has its limits.

"Elites" wield cultural power. The best way to beat them is to join (or at least be represented among) them.

/13 Being the party of "Stop the Steal" and QAnon undercuts the (few) conservatives in elite institutions, and likely accelerates those institutions' leftward shift.

And so, harsh as it sounds, my plea to the right is: return to sanity!

/14 Full piece here. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210125/21281246117/how-can-conservatives-fight-back-against-big-tech-start-just-be-sane-again.shtml

'Don't say we're acting crazy!' I'm hearing from people who apparently read just the headline of my piece.

Fine. Don't take my word for it. Here's Ben Sasse:

"We're going to have to choose between conservatism and madness."