Senator Hawley and Fairness online AND The Brainwashing of my Dad

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I recommend today’s NPR new interview with Missouri Senator Hawley.

My summary:

Josh Hawley has criticized big tech for leaning way out on the left and this distorting politics. He wants to rein them in and he has put pressure on them to make sure liberal points of view overwhelm conservative.

I don’t like Hawley and it would be easy to dis him now but something more useful would be to take him at his word and extend his concerns to those which have troubled me.

Keep in mind the European Union has been holding American tech companies to higher standards where their control of data is concerned. This is also part of Hawley’s message. Ironically when the NPR reporter asked him about Elon Musk, soon to be Europe’s new villain misusing the access he is prying out of our Trump leg governments on Americans Hawley shrugged off the concerns saying that its just a matter of making government more efficient. Count me a skeptic squared and squared again.

In my view its Musk who has bent the Internet towards “conservativism” or rather Trumpism. He spent a quarter of a billion dollars, a fraction of his half trillion wealth in flooding low interest votes to get them to the polls. BTW this is the opposite of the strategy Republicans since my college years followed. Back in 1972 they were paranoid that college kids were swamping the polls and news with anti Richard Nixon claptrap. Suddenly, ignorance helps get Republicans elected.

I’m more interested in honesty not political views on line.

To that end I’ve been imagining laws that require, the best of modern tech’s ability, accountability for liars online. I want claims to have the names of their creators on them like footnotes in a history book. I want the names of big donors who are flooding politics with billions of dollars. I want bullets stamped with the name of people who use them so when a coroner digs one out of a corpse police have some idea in whose possession the deadly bullets were once held. Anonymity is license to lie and overthrow the government of the United States.

And what have we gotten with our and now the Supreme Court’s insistence that money is speech so that billionaires have tons more of it than those of us who can’t advertise or lie our way through the internet and political debate and broadcast? Well January sixth with its Hitlerian Big Lie that the 2016 election was stollen and everything that has followed are part of that anarchistic persuasion.

I’d join John Hawley in cleaning up online commentary if it included accountability for everyone. I’d go farther. Before Ronald Reagan was president both parties supported the “Fairness” Doctrine in the age of three major news distributing networks and national newspaper chains owned by the few and the rich.
Republicans killed that requirement as new channels were created and people who crowded AM radio talk shows took over. Rush Limbaugh was not only allowed to tell lies with impunity (other than the loss of some advertisers) but tell one sided unfair propaganda. The Fairness Doctrine would have made the last thirty years a lot less contentious.

I want the Fairness Doctrine back and I have a movie for you to watch. Made back in 2010 it gives an accounting of how abandoning the Fairness Doctrine made us crazy. Its called The Brainwashing of my Dad. You can see it on that link or here:

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty