@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.
@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:
@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:
@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:
@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.
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Phony populist Josh Hawley is now claiming "woke" corporations are victimizing people like him for merely defending "election integrity" in Georgia. Yes, the leader of the effort to subvert Biden's electors really said that. I unloaded a rant in response: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Here's Josh Hawley's full quote. It's just steaming wretched nonsense.
No sympathizer with the new "conservative populism" should accept this. It's truly deranged:
What's galling is Hawley is using the rhetoric of empowerment (protecting conservative voters' agency from woke elites) to defend actual efforts to disempower people via voter suppression.
Amazing: Gov Brian Kemp has done 14 Fox News interviews on Georgia's voter suppression law, in a frantic bid to atone for his heretical refusal to help Trump steal the election. And it's still not enough! I tried to unpack the deeper pathologies here: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Republicans keep telling their voters to fear "woke" corporations and "cancel culture."
But what Republicans really fear is *more Democrats voting.*
And what they really object to is corporations defending a future shaped by Dem voters' participation:
Republicans can whine all they want about "woke corporate virtue signaling." But here's the truth: This situation is their fault. It's in no small part the result of the continuing GOP refusal to fully renounce Trump's lie about the election. New piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Another Republican threatening companies who criticize voter suppression: Texas' Dan Patrick.
He says they might “have a bill they want us to pass for them. Good luck!”
And he says voting limits are needed to boost voter confidence, which he undermined.
McConnell is threatening "consequences" against corporations that defend voting rights. So surely he'll back the new Dem push to bring back revenues multinationals are sheltering abroad, right? Stop calling the GOP "populist." You're getting scammed: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
GOP threats against woke corporations are toothless. This is deliberate! Rs are targeting tax privileges to create the aura of acting in the public interest. But they won't target real tax privileges in a way that has serious distributional consequences:
“If Republicans are interested in ensuring megacorporations pay their fair share — not just punishing perceived enemies that support voting rights — I’m all ears."
@RonWyden to me. Dems have a new plan to tax multinationals. It exposes sham GOP populism:
Today's GOP, in a nutshell: Republicans are telling their voters to rage at "woke" corporations for defending African American voting rights while also telling them raising corporate taxes to fund infrastructure is socialism.
It's dumb to analyze the Georgia law only in terms of impact on turnout. Even if burdened voters do turn out, limiting voting to skew elections is wrong. And it erases the larger context, in which the GOP is ramping up anti-democratic tactics everywhere:
The ridiculous GOP claim that Biden's infrastructure plan is "socialism" actually reveals Republicans, not Democrats, as the real ideological outliers. Which helpfully confirms exactly why Democrats will all but certainly have to pass it alone. New piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
The GOP claim that investing in green technologies isn't "real" infrastructure spending is just another way of saying Republicans will never accept the need to fund the transition to decarbonization.
It makes the GOP an outlier relative to its own past: