Josh Hawley: We Must Break Up Companies Whose Politics I Disagree With For Discriminating Against People Whose Politics I Agree With
from the that's-not-how-it-works dept
Josh Hawley is gonna Josh Hawley. The Senator from Missouri, who still has not apologized or admitted to supporting the invasion of the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the election, has a long history of nonsense bills that are performative for his riled up base. His latest is more of the same. On Monday he introduced the "Bust Up Big Tech Act" and even if you're a supporter of antitrust and think that big tech should be "busted up," it should give you pause before supporting Hawley's nonsense. The bill itself is... weird. It seems to pick seemingly random activities and insist that no company can do two of them. Basically, he looked at different businesses that Amazon and Google are in, and the bill says "you're no longer allowed to do those different things." As some have pointed out, under this bill it appears that Walmart can no longer sell under a house brand, because the bill bars any company that qualifies from selling, advertising or otherwise promoting your own products.
But the thing that amazes me is just how upfront and blatant Hawley is that this bill is not about any principled stance regarding antitrust. It is entirely about "owning the libs," which is the performance Hawley thinks he needs to perform for his base. The fact that Hawley knows he needs to do stupid shit for his voters shows that he truly believes his supporters are a bunch of ignorant fools, and he's catering to that audience. He did it last week with his bill to attack MLB for its speech, and now he's doing it this week with this bill to go after "big tech." You can see it from the quote in his press release, in which he flat out admits he's doing it to attack "woke" companies.
“Woke Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon have been coddled by Washington politicians for years. This treatment has allowed them to amass colossal amounts of power that they use to censor political opinions they don’t agree with and shut out competitors who offer consumers an alternative to the status quo. It’s past time to bust up Big Tech companies, restore competition, and give the power back to the American consumers.”
Hawley has really embraced the phrase "woke capitalists" in the last few months as he realized that everything he used to pretend to stand for (he used to argue he was about "keeping government out of business") resulted in a bunch of companies recognizing that Josh Hawley is a power-hungry fascist in waiting. So now he has to attack the very companies he used to say he wanted the government's hands off of, so he's invented the laughable idea that these companies are "woke" (by which he means they're skeptical of his style of fascism, and therefore they need to be taken down).
But, really, that quote is quite incredible on multiple levels. He starts out by attacking the companies for their supposed (though, not actual) political beliefs ("woke"), and then says he has to do this to stop them from "censoring political opinions they don't agree with." So... that one quote alone shows Josh Hawley's true principles: punish those whose politics I dislike, and protect those whose politics I like.
Even if you dislike big tech and think the companies should be smashed to bits, that's no reason to support Josh Hawley's cynical brand of authoritarian retribution.
Filed Under: antitrust, big tech, josh hawley, woke capitalists
Companies: amazon, google
