While in Austin last month, I sat down for a discussion with Dwarkesh Patel. Video is below, or you can listen on his podcast, The Lunar Society. Dwarkesh is a recent UT grad, and he asked a lot of smart questions about wokeness and other things I’ve written about.
I just published an article for Newsweek on the strange conservative plan to deal with big tech censorship by…voting in Congress for policies long favored by Democrats pushing for big tech censorship. The upshot:
Populists often argue that the right needs to be more willing to embrace state power in order to achieve its goals. Wherever one comes down on this debate, by supporting current antitrust legislation as written, the GOP is indeed increasing state power, but it will likely be wielded by left-wing bureaucrats and trial lawyers in the service of silencing conservative voices.
Being willing to recognize a problem is not the same thing as knowing how to solve it. Whatever conservatives decide to do about internet censorship, they should not fool themselves into believing that the answer is antitrust legislation supported by the same politicians who are most eager to suppress their speech.
This goes back to my theme of liberals read, conservatives watch TV. Liberals had fully worked out ideas about what they wanted to do with state power, with a close match between the means they would use and the ends they desire. Conservatives, in contrast, got mad at Silicon Valley, had no real plan to deal with the problem they faced, and decided to stick it to their enemies by just voting for what liberals have always wanted. That can’t end well.
But they may be getting smarter, as it was nice to see my article tweeted out by the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
Have I helped kill antitrust legislation? We’ll see.
My ideas were also discussed this week in a very goofy piece by Jeet Heer on supposed “right-wing Russophilia.” It somehow works me, Darren Beattie, Paul Weyrich, Francis Parker Yockey, and many other very different people with little in common into some kind of intellectual tradition. Jeet analysis always makes me smile, I don’t know why.
The big news of course remains the war in Ukraine. I was quoted on the subject for the Bari Weiss Newsletter and will write more on the topic hopefully next week. Have a good weekend, everyone.
Dwarkesh Patel is a smart young man. He has some impressive other interviews as well.
The case for antitrust is not that it will prevent censorship directly but that it will punish the companies responsible. Corporate America needs to be on notice that if they throw their lot in with the left there will be consequences.