Not liking a comparison does not mean that the comparison is incorrect

A quick post on the recent stunt by Florida’s legislature and deadly governor Ron DeSantis.

Last June, I wrote a post about how today’s Republican party proves its resemblance to the apartheid government every day. In it, I noted, “What is also very much like South Africa, is the attempt by Trump and his lackeys to put in place an infrastructure to enable this minority government to impose its will upon those it judges not to be “real Americans.” 

Trump has been exiled to the outer darkness of Mar A Lago, hopefully, to await a legal indictment. However, his minions are still hard at work putting his dream of an American Apartheid state into place. It’s now become a contest among southern states to see which state can be the biggest and best at fascism. Ron “Death” Santis has jumped out to an early lead.

I’ve done a lot of research in the past few months on South African history. I’ve done it specifically because I fear the United States is being dragged unwittingly down the same path. The GOP has now made it clear they will not share power willingly; their unstated but clear-cut goal is to disenfranchise anyone who disagrees with their vision for the USA. To do so, they are going after the machinery that enables a democratic system to survive and prosper.

A big part of that machinery is free speech and rights of free expression. In Apartheid South Africa, the National Party used a variety of laws to ban free speech by people opposed to the white minority government.

Flordia has now joined the ranks of the National Party. Steve M., writing on his own blog, shows us how:

As you probably know, Florida governor Ron DeSantis used the First Amendment as toilet paper yesterday:

Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online, by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates in the state.

… In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories.

… Companies would be fined $250,000 per day for cases where they barred a candidate for statewide office. The fine is lower for candidates seeking other offices.

The law says the platforms cannot take down or otherwise prioritize content from a “journalistic enterprise” that reaches a certain size. Conservatives were outraged last year when Facebook and Twitter limited the reach of a New York Post article about the contents of a laptop it said belonged to Hunter Biden, the younger son of President Biden.

We’re told that this bill is flagrantly unconstitutional, although at least one Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas, thinks treating tech platforms as “common carriers” and compelling them to transmit speech seems like a pretty good idea.

And perhaps the courts will rule that the law violates the Constitution. I’m not so sure that they will, given the current composition of the court and the presence of bomb-throwers like Brett Kavanaugh and Thomas. And as Steve reminds us, the Florida law is full of landmines just waiting to explode:

There’s more to this bill than just the provisions that have made the headlines. There’s also this:

S.B. 7072 … contains a concerning provision that would establish an “antitrust violator vendor list.” Companies convicted of antitrust violations will reportedly be placed on a list, and may not get contracts or do business with any public agency in the state. But further down in the bill there’s a nasty twist: The state’s attorney general can temporarily add a company to the list on the basis of merely being accused of or charged with antitrust violations, based on simply determining the state has “probable cause” that the violation occurred—an extremely low evidentiary threshold.

“The point is that when Republican state AGs file bullshit antitrust suits that are never going to go anywhere or [may] get tied up in court for years, it will still allow the Florida attorney general to use that as a predicate for some legal action,” [Berin] Szóka [of the technology think tank TechFreedom] says. “The point isn’t to get that judgment. It’s to drag the company through the process so you have another circle for your political theater. It’s a weapon. That’s the whole point.”

Basically, that is a “get out jail free card” for Florida to go after anyone opposing Death Santis in 2022 or, for that matter, anyone not being on the preferred list for national office like, say, an opponent of “Lil” Marco Rubio.

It’s especially ironic that DeSantis would be concerned about “media promotion’ when he practically has an apartment inside the Fox News studio.

And yes, in a world where Fox News exists, the fact that Republican government officials might treat upbeat coverage of Democrats as the equivalent of a cash donation seems absurd. But I think that’s why this sentence is in the bill.

Too many people are just content to mock these efforts without backing away and looking at the bigger picture. That’s dangerous and will be a big regret for a lot of people when those of us who have not fled the country are shipped off to the bantustans in 2028. Steve M explains for us:

This is the world we’re entering: a world in which free speech as guaranteed by the First Amendment is like abortion rights as guaranteed by Roe v. Wade. In Republican states, governors and legislators will chip away at the speech rights of their political opponents the way they’ve been chipping away at reproductive rights; the courts will endorse some of these constraints and reject others, but the rights will be increasingly limited, until, for the opponents of Republicans, the right to speech that truly challenges the (one-party) government essentially isn’t there at all. If it can happen in the Eastern Bloc, it can happen here.

The danger is real.