Aug 18, 2020
On this episode Dan and Sam discuss deplatforming and corporate gun
control.
Anyone familiar with the
Bible
is familiar with the Mark of the Beast: Without this mark, no man
may buy or sell.
Regardless of one’s religious faith or lack thereof, there is an
illustrative case in this biblical story: When one cannot buy or
sell, one is metaphorically up the creek. Short of producing
everything one needs oneself, buying and selling are necessary
parts of virtually every modern person’s life.
In our modern world, we can begin to see a sort of Mark of the
Beast: While ideas and even objects aren’t banned, they are
increasingly difficult to come by, not due to government fiat, but
due to the machinations of corporations hostile to the American
values of freedom.
One can be in favor of the free market while recognizing a simple
truth: There is no way that America’s Founding Fathers would have
sat on their hands while five corporations dominated American
discourse and commerce. It is hard to imagine, for example, the
Founders suffering a single private bank processing most of the
payments in the United States and refusing to do business with gun
merchants. Alternately, one can scarcely imagine that the Founders
would have sat still for three companies – all of them hostile
toward American values and the Constitution – dominating political
discourse and deplatforming anyone who opposed them.
This is the situation in which we find ourselves as a nation today:
Guns are not illegal, but private companies will make it
increasingly difficult to buy, sell or own them – up to and
including pulling your bank account. You have all the freedom of
speech you like, but prepare to be deplatformed or have your voice
buried by large tech corporations with their thumb on the scale of
American discourse.
As the American economy has become more corporatist – such that the
market is controlled by the interrelation between monolithic
mega-corporations, Wall Street and the state – and less
capitalistic and dynamic, the American press and economy are now
being dominated by forces hostile toward the American public and
American values.
No less an authority than James Madison warned Americans that the
First Amendment alone was not enough to protect free speech.
In
Federalist No. 47
and
Federalist No. 51,
he argued that the separation of powers was necessary to protect
free speech by preventing one branch of government from
accumulating too much power at the expense of the others and,
indeed, the rest of society at large.
This is an important point to remember when considering the First
Amendment implications of Big Tech and its war on free speech and
gun freedom. The Founding Fathers did not live in a world where a
few large corporations had more power than the
(incredibly
limited and power impoverished) government had, either at the
federal or the state level. It’s doubtful that they could have
conceived of such a thing.
But they did carefully consider the problem of centralized power as
it pertained to the rights enshrined in the Constitution. At the
end of the day, the Constitution is just a piece of paper with no
ability to enforce itself. What’s more, if the Founders did not
address the notion that the private sector could
meaningfully and substantially circumvent rights for all
Americans,
it was simply because they could not conceive of such a thing, not
because they were writing the private sector a blank
check.
You can read the full article “Deplatformed:
How Big Tech Companies & Corporate America Subvert the Second
Amendment” at Ammo.com.
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