The US government’s bi-partisan war on your right to publish embarrassing videos of yourself proceeds apace. As of March 6, Reuters reports, the White House is “working with Congress” on legislation that would give US president Joe Biden authority to pretend that he can ban TikTok.

As I’ve written before, I’m all in favor of banning government use of TikTok. And all other apps. And smart phones. And the Internet.

And as I’ve pointed out before, the idea of a general ban on TikTok for the American public is unconstitutional, stupid, insane, and evil.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t silver linings in this cloud of political idiocy.

The first and most easily foreseeable consequence of Congress passing such legislation, and Biden invoking its awesome alleged power, would be the reinvigoration of the “cypherpunk” phenomenon.

Within minutes of a general TikTok ban, every American Gen Zer — or at least every American Gen Zer who hadn’t already figured this stuff out for purposes of bypassing copyright to download obscure Japanese anime videos — would become a budding expert in “side-loading” apps onto smart phones, using Virtual Private Networks to go boldly where everyone went before the politicians said they couldn’t anymore, and just generally waving his, her, their or xir middle finger in Biden and Company’s faces.

A secondary consequence would be app developers increasingly catering to a growing user base interested in avoiding “walled gardens” like Google Play and the Apple App Store,  both because they’re vulnerable to stupid government censorship tricks like a TikTok ban, and because they’re inclined toward limiting developer/user relationships for their own reasons, even when not forced to do so by politicians.

And those two trends would, in turn, resuscitate the insanely great idea of the “Wild West” Internet, a golden age when users did what they darn well pleased — because they could, and because clueless politicians were powerless to stop them.

Which might conceivably even bring us to the Promised Land: The Internet as its own global super-jurisdiction, completely immune to political control by any regime for any reason. Politicians would be left with the choice of cutting “their” serfs off from the Internet entirely (and likely getting overthrown for it), or conceding that cyberspace isn’t, and isn’t ever going to be, their turf.

To steal an abbreviated Eastwoodism:  Do you feel lucky, politicians?

If so, as the not-very-old saying goes,  ____ around and find out.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Readers of the Wall Street Journal opinion page on March 1 may have had to double-check that April didn’t arrive early.  Or at least that the byline for an editorial lambasting Republicans who “have campaigned on free-market principles but governed as corporatists — supporting subsidies, tax breaks and legislative carve-outs,” all “policies that benefit corporate America [but] don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy” wasn’t Ralph Nader’s.

A closer look at “Why I Stood Up to Disney” shows that it’s business as usual for governor Ron DeSantis, who may style his Florida “the state where woke goes to die” but whose crusade against the Magic Kingdom remains haunted by the grim, grinning ghosts of what Nader alternately calls “corporate socialism” and “government guaranteed capitalism.”

Three decades before DeSantis’s threats to micromanage Mickey, a different Republican governor was eager to “kick down any hurdles” in the Mouse’s way. George Felix Allen’s red carpet wasn’t enough to bring Disney’s America to Virginia, yet the unrealized project faced uncannily similar criticisms.

Murray Rothbard called it an examplar of “subsidized, state-directed growth: the opposite of free markets” (not unjustifiably, given nine-figure handouts) and the “vulgarized, shlockized” output of a conglomerate more devoted to pandering for profits than safeguarding “the old Disney tradition.” Rothbard also anticipated DeSantis’s charges of “cultural Marxism” by tracing the pedigree of Disney’s historical research to “the notorious Foner family of Marxist scholars and activists.”

DeSantis could have read in the pages of The Wall Street Journal about how, despite Walt Disney’s admission that “my father was a Socialist,” his ideological inheritance amounted to little more than honing draftsmanship skills by copying imagery of “the big, fat capitalist with the money” placing “his foot on the neck of the laboring man.” The Walt Disney’s Uncle $crooge comic book might have been just as cartoonish, but when developing the character of a post-Ebenezer Scrooge McDuck, Carl Barks took pains to distinguish the fanciful treasure hunter from “the millionaires we have around who have made their money by exploiting other people to a certain extent.”

Even the website of Rothbard’s own Ludwig von Mises Institute includes his “Eisnerizing Manassas” alongside Philip S. Foner’s edition of The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine.  And Disney didn’t need help from “the Communist-dominated Fur Workers Union” or “the Communist-dominated Drug and Hospital Workers Union” to get audiences to line up for The Lion King while Rothbard wrote his warning.

DeSantis professes to be merely putting Walt Disney World Resort on a level playing field with the Sunshine State’s other theme parks like Universal Studios and SeaWorld.  Yet his insistence on cutting off “a way for the left to achieve through corporate power what it can’t get at the ballot box” when “it is unthinkable that large companies would side with conservative Americans” reveals a willingness to use his electoral votes as carte blanche to override those voting with their untaxed dollars — or their feet.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Free mice in free markets” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, March 6, 2023
2. “Free mice in free markets” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Wilson, North Carolina], March 6, 2023
3. “Free mice in free markets” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], March 6, 2023
4. “Free mice in free markets” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], March 6, 2023
5. “Free mice in free markets” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], March 6, 2023
6. “Free mice in free markets” by Thomas L. Knapp [sic], The Madill, Oklahoma Record, March 9, 2023
7. “DeSantis’ Disney stance anti-free market” by Joel Schlosberg, The Daily Advance [Elizabeth City, North Carolina], March 14, 2023
8. “DeSantis’ Disney stance anti-free market” by Joel Schlosberg, Rocky Mount, North Carolina Telegram, March 14, 2023
9. “DeSantis’ Disney stance anti-free market” by Joel Schlosberg, Reflector.com [Greenville, North Carolina], March 14, 2023

US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, no stranger to finding himself under political fire, has been hunkering down beneath a new barrage after turning over 40,000 hours of US Capitol security camera footage (from the January 6, 2021 riot) to Fox News’s Tucker Carlson.

“The speaker is needlessly exposing the Capitol complex to one of the worst security risks since 9/11,” Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) whined. “The footage Speaker McCarthy is making available to Fox News is a treasure trove of closely held information about how the Capitol complex is protected.”

But NBC News reports that, per a source with direct knowledge of the process, “the Jan. 6 committee worked with a Capitol Police representative to make sure the video would not pose a security risk if it were released to the public.”

The only thing wrong about this is that only Carlson has received the footage. But that’s a temporary problem.  “[H]e’ll have an exclusive,” McCarthy says, “then I’ll give it out to the entire country.”

On March 1, Tracy Walder — a former CIA and FBI employee —  clutched her (taxpayer-provided) pearls on MSNBC’s The ReidOut. “[A]s someone who served in Afghanistan, served my country and was in harm’s way,” she said, “I did not risk my life for something like this to happen.”

And then Walder got really weird: “But also, the way I look at this, strangely, is actually no different than what Edward Snowden did.”

That’s an interesting comparison.

Edward Snowden is probably the 21st century’s greatest American hero, driven into exile under threat of life imprisonment for exposing the crimes of agencies like those Walder worked for.

While McCarthy should find the comparison flattering, he isn’t putting his life or freedom, or even his job, at risk by doing the right thing here.

Nor is what he’s exposing the equivalent of what a cat does in the litter box and then tries to cover up, as were Snowden’s revelations.

He’s just releasing footage of  events that occurred in a public building and are of obvious public interest.

The US House of Representatives likes to refer to itself as “the People’s House.” There’s no particular reason why the Capitol building it works in should be treated as “only the Very Special Important People’s House.”

In fact, all areas of the Capitol building should be covered, 24/7, by cameras/microphones that anyone can access via Internet stream. Except the bathrooms. Let’s keep those audio-only, please.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY