Josh Hawley Quotes

We must free ordinary Americans from the constant surveillance and manipulation of the tech giants.

Facebook mouthed platitudes about user privacy and choice; company executives disclaimed any political manipulation or unequal treatment; but the truth was clearly otherwise. Facebook had a political agenda, or more precisely, a social agenda, and it was determined to use its power to achieve it.

This first generation of corporate barons left a lasting, if dubious, legacy: they made America more hierarchical, with new divisions between management and labor, between a professional class and everyday workers. They made the economy more centralized, consolidating power into a few mega-companies and their owners; they made it more globalized, keyed to international capital and trade. They diminished the voice of the ordinary citizen in society and politics in favor of educated, professionalized elites. In short, they gave America an entirely new political economy, what some historians have called corporate liberalism.

As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated. So we find Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeting a rant about “unelected progressive elites in our govt.”16 The senator went to Stanford, taught at St. Paul’s School in London (founded in 1509), and graduated from Yale Law School. Senator Ted Cruz denounces “coastal elites who attack the NRA.”17 Cruz was born in Calgary, Canada, graduated from Princeton and Harvard Law School, was a Supreme Court clerk, worked in the Bush administration, and is a former assistant attorney general. His wife was born in the coastal town of San Luis Obispo, California, and holds a BA from Claremont McKenna College, an MA from Université Libre de Bruxelles, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. She works as a managing director at Goldman Sachs.

A Senate of Josh Hawleys certainly won’t stop Trump. Neither will House Republicans led by a Speaker who has made himself a willing hostage to Trump and his most unhinged supporters in Congress. I am very sad to say that America can no longer count on a body of elected Republicans to protect our republic.

It’s why Roosevelt would say the struggle for liberty was “the struggle of freemen to gain and hold the right of self-government as against the special interests.”10 It’s why he would say the success of the republic depended on “the average man and woman”: “just in proportion as the average man and woman are honest,

One of the hallmarks of the Trump era is the alacrity with which intelligent people embrace stupidity. As it was in Mao’s China with the Red Guard, it is a political crime in today’s Republican Party to appear well educated. So we find Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri tweeting a rant about “unelected progressive elites in our govt.”16 The senator went to Stanford, taught at St. Paul’s School in London (founded in 1509), and graduated from Yale Law School. Senator Ted Cruz denounces “coastal elites who attack the NRA.”17

This is a book the corporate monopolies did not want you to read.

My sin was to raise an objection to one state during the electoral college certification process, thereby triggering a congressional debate, precisely as permitted by the law and precisely as Democratic members of Congress have done in the electoral counts of 2001, 2005, and 2017. I was, in fact, waiting to participate in that debate on the Senate floor when the riot halted our work and forced the Senate (temporarily) to disband. For this I was branded a “seditionist” and worse. But like many others attacked by the corporations and the Left, my real crime was to have challenged the reign of the woke capitalists.

Our republic has never been more hierarchical, more riven by class, more managed by an elite than it is today.

I proposed limits to tech’s addictive design features and reforms to confront tech’s political censorship. This followed from my efforts as Missouri attorney general to investigate Facebook (and Google) for antitrust and consumer protection violations. I was the first state attorney general in the nation to launch such a probe. Facebook, Inc. was not amused.

Roosevelt believed that liberty had more to it than the right to be let alone. It was the right to have a say in one’s nation, to help shape the future of the community one called home, to exercise the power and mastery of a citizen.

Big Tech’s business model is based principally on data collection and advertising, which means devising ways to manipulate individuals to change their behavior—and then selling that opportunity at manipulation to big corporations. The result? An addiction economy designed to keep us online as much as possible, as long as possible, to sell us more and more stuff and collect more and more information.

That sturdy American yeoman, the common man, was to be swept aside as the dominant force in American life and replaced by the enlightened, sophisticated, corporate aristocracy. America would become a corporate republic.

The new monopolies brought bulging profits without all that desperate competitive struggle. The capitalists were certain they had unlocked the secret of the industrial age. This was what the new economy, the new country, required, they decided: enlightened management and control, by persons such as themselves.

Every society had its elites, of course: its wealthy, well-educated, upwardly mobile types. Machiavelli, a republican himself, called them the grandi. The trick to preserving a republic was not to allow them to predominate as a class, to amass power at the expense of their fellows. Or more precisely: the key was not to allow them to amass power at the expense of the common man.

We all have to live in the world Big Tech has created around us.

As the power of the common person declined, the power of the Big Tech overclass multiplied: power over attention, over time, over users’ judgment, and soon power over their speech.

In the great Age of Tech, journalism was clickbait, and Big Tech controlled the clicks.

Big Tech was the culmination of the corporate liberal ideology and the globalized economy it envisioned. This was an economy that by the early twenty-first century depended less and less on producing anything tangible, or on producers themselves, for that matter, but lavished ever greater rewards on the rarified, highly educated, largely urban technologist class.

That’s the thing about plutocrats: once they seize the power, they tend to keep it.

Big Tech had bought enormous influence in the hallowed precincts of Washington, D.C. Second, Big Tech was (and is) desperate to protect its special relationship, its sweetheart deals, with Big Government.

Big Tech is desperately afraid of public criticism, of someone taking a public stand.

When the tech behemoths claim, as they routinely do, that they couldn’t exist without Section 230, they are only slightly exaggerating. They couldn’t exist without the new and improved Section 230 that they rewrote with the help of the courts.

Big Tech’s handouts from Big Government made the tech class what it is.

It is possible to imagine a world where tech serves us, and not the other way around, where the Big Tech monopolies are monopolies no longer, where our property in our personal data is protected, where our children are safe online, where our speech is free.

Today’s Big Tech barons have benefited from lax antitrust enforcement and outdated antitrust laws, from cozy relationships with supposed regulators, and from special protections in the law. All this must end.

Antitrust has become a legal backwater in recent decades. But the curse of bigness is back, and antitrust enforcement must come back with it, updated to perform its original, republican function: protecting the independence of the American people from oligarchic control.

Manipulative advertising based on personal characteristics is far from the passive distribution of third-party content Congress envisaged when it adopted Section 230 a quarter century ago. And behavioral ads drive many of tech platforms’ worst pathologies—the surveillance, the addiction race, the data pilfering. But Section 230’s shield from liability is worth far more to Big Tech than even behavioral advertising. Section 230 is the giant government subsidy on which Big Tech feeds and has built its empire.

Give every American the right to stop data collection altogether with the click of a button. That’s what I call the Do Not Track proposal, legislation I introduced in the Senate.

The tyranny of Big Tech can be challenged.

Theodore Roosevelt understood that our republic was a republic of the common person. This is what made it a republic of liberty. Now we must recall his example and make it so again.