You can add Gab to the list of dissident outfits that have been shut down by concerted efforts by Leftist tech monopolies. This time the oligarchs’ flimsy cover story involved hyperventilating over the recent mass shooting in Philadelphia. The shooter happened to have a Gab account, so our betters sunsetted Gab for giving him a platform. How they were expected to foresee that this particular user would turn out to be a mass shooter is left unsaid.
Gab isn’t really the point–at least not the whole point. They’re just the latest alternate information channel to be banished from the web for the capital crime of not being Facebook or Twitter. Big tech firms teaming up to take down competitors is monopolistic behavior, and everyone knows it. The Left is celebrating it.
The refusal of Republican lawmakers to act against the systematic censoring of their constituents in the name of the free market has become a tired meme. Likewise facile boilerplate from Libertarians admonishing us to build our own multinational trillion-dollar tech companies. Elsewhere, political actors less paralyzed by Liberalism are responding quite differently to Leftist shenanigans.
More than 200 schools had planned to take part in “Rainbow Friday,” an anti-discrimination event that a civic rights group, the Campaign Against Homophobia, had promoted in hopes of building greater acceptance for LGBT students.
Private broadcaster TVN reported that some schools pulled out of the event following an outcry. The education minister of Poland’s conservative government, Anna Zalewska, had warned ahead of time that any principals who allowed such events to take place could face negative consequences. She also asked parents to report any such activities to authorities, reported Associated Press.
The Polish government didn’t tell parents to build their own schools if they didn’t want their children brainwashed by perverts. A government official used the power of her office to quash this abomination. Unlike the free market approach, the state’s threat of consequences made school principals rethink their decision to help corrupt kids. Probably because such threats are ultimately backed up by thousands of guys with guns.
Speaking of which, here’s a recent case of government stepping in to correct a free market misstep.
ROME (Reuters) – Italy’s far-right League party intervened on Sunday to block efforts by a Muslim association to turn a former hospital chapel into a mosque.
The Muslim group last week made the highest offer for the chapel in the northern city of Bergamo at an auction organized by a local hospital, outbidding the Romanian Orthodox Church which had been using the building for its religious services.
But the project proved short-lived, with League leaders in the wealthy Lombardy region, which includes Bergamo, announcing they would halt the sale by using a 2004 law that enables them to intervene and safeguard cultural sites.
“I would never put a Church on sale and I am amazed that the hospital management did not realize what a sensitive issue this is,” Lombardy President Attilio Fontana, a League politician, wrote on Twitter.
“However, we will exercise our right of first refusal (for the sale) and there will be no space for any appeal,” he added.