There is a road that seems right to a man…
Whatever the result of the massive Twitter purge, it made one thing clear to the world. Carl Schmitt’s most important and controversial aphorism, “sovereign is he who decides the exception” is still timeless.
In the American republic, the sovereign is not the state, which has hollowed out. The sovereign now is the group of neo-feudal oligarchs, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook, who now decide and control who can speak, see, learn, and buy, and what and when. Give them an army of their own like the East India Company, and the American state is over.
This is an accelerationist’s dream, and a centrist and moderate’s nightmare. The question at the heart of the debate within conservatism, of “who holds the real power,” was settled for good as the tech purge rolled.
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No wonder China, Russia, the European Union, and India are trying to control their internet. Their sovereignty is in question if tech oligarchs decide who can speak and who cannot. And the Chinese are happy to rub it in that at least in China, the state remains supreme to a bunch of feudal lords arbitrarily deciding rules.
“This Schmittian political landscape has urgent lessons for us in Europe: we need to disentangle ourselves from America’s political chaos as urgently as we do from China’s industrial and economic stranglehold,” British war reporter Aris Roussinos wrote recently. “The result of the free-market ideology trading under the name ‘conservatism’ is that we have handed control of information to California’s tech oligarchs just as we have handed control of industry to the Chinese Communist Party.”
The Global Consequences Of The Tech-Lash Will Be Severe by Sumantra Maitra
Christians would be wise to avoid going down this road.
For the Tech Tyrants, for all their progressive bias and bigotry, don’t have the power of badges and guns and the courts to delete (“temporarily or permanently”) opinions they don’t like.
The State does.
And the harm of the unpredictable Tech Tyrants can do with their money is, frankly, trivial than the government can do with armed men and censorship laws and prison terms (…and executions, in certain jurisdictions).
So the corporate winners of today’s fascist economy (“Now with Progressive seasoning!”) can shut you up on their platforms. That’s bad, but there are ways free men can get around that, with time and work.
(North has his own suggestions to deal with the de-platforming gangs. You might want to take a look at them.)
America’s Calling
Finally, I would note that the article author….
Sumantra Maitra is a doctoral researcher at the University of Nottingham, UK, and a senior contributor to The Federalist. His research is in great power-politics and neorealism. You can find him on Twitter @MrMaitra.
English intellectuals have no love of free speech. Christian Britain died a long time ago.
Christian Americans would be wise to avoid placing British chains on their wrists, and tying British gags on their mouths.
Don’t kneel to Caesar, looking up to some Mighty Man, begging him to save you.
Think like a Man of God… and not a dependent slave of Leaders Who Will Protect You.
Listen to God’s Holy Spirit, understand where you are, and count the costs.
When you can afford it, and when it is just and right to do so… get to work, justly, wisely, without fear or dependence on Powerful Men With Guns.
Obedience to Christ and the Fear of the Lord brings victory in the here and now.
Acrosss the Stars 