Thread by @GregTSargent

1) “When MLB pulls its all-star game to protest Georgia’s voting law, that’s corporate free speech.”

This is a good @DavidAFrench piece about the dark illiberal turn in attacks on MLB, Big Tech and woke corporations.

time.com/5953715/claren…

A few additional points.

*THREAD*

@DavidAFrench 2) As @DavidAFrench notes, each of these are being attacked for different things. MLB and companies like Delta are faulted for criticizing the Georgia voting law, Big Tech for supposed suppression of conservative viewpoints.

time.com/5953715/claren…

@DavidAFrench 3) But in all these cases, @DavidAFrench argues, these are forms of speech. That’s what MLB is doing by pulling the game, and what private platforms moderating content are doing.

And conservative voices *aren’t actually* being suppressed:

@DavidAFrench 4) There are additional layers of illiberalism here that I’d like to flag.

Republicans are proposing to use legislative power expressly as *retaliation* against these opinions.

A Georgia Republican openly declared this in targeting Delta's tax break:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

@DavidAFrench 5) Just as Georgia Republicans targeted Delta, Josh Hawley, the king of bad faith posturing, will offer a new proposal busting up “giant woke corporations,” after blasting MLB for opposing “election integrity,” a.k.a. voter suppression:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

@DavidAFrench 6) Hawley was the front man trying to subvert Biden’s electors, sustaining the 2020 lies that inspired Jan 6.

Criticism of Hawley for this is tossed into the Right Wing Media Victimization Machine, magically converting it into an effort to “cancel” him:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

@DavidAFrench 7) The hyped sense of victimization is absolutely central. In the right wing imagination, the big story weaving together all these threads is that our corporate overlords are part of an elite cabal scheming to subjugate virtuous conservatives everywhere:

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

@DavidAFrench 8) In fact, movements are pushing corporations *from below,* amid Trump-stoked anti-democratic tactics + years of relentless stoking of racial conflict.

These movements are driven by an ideal of *empowerment.* It’s ugly to cast this as elite suppression of conservative agency:

@DavidAFrench 9) Bottom line: In addition to this increasing reliance on illiberal tactics that @DavidAFrench discusses, Republicans are manufacturing all kinds of wildly hallucinatory narratives to justify them.

In so doing, they are dragging their voters to an ever darker place.

FIN