'Back when he was a member of the House Freedom Caucus, Ron DeSantis embraced a classic conservative argument about the threats to American freedom posed by government regulation of the internet.
“If you want government to exercise a power that you like right now, someone else can come in and exercise that power in a way you don’t like,” he said to applause at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2017. “Why don’t we just deny government the power to do it to begin with, and let the American people have a free internet and make their own choices?”
Just a few years later, DeSantis reversed himself as Florida’s governor, claiming that technology companies and their political views had become the real threat to liberty. Far from government being the problem, as former president Ronald Reagan had famously argued, DeSantis offered a new law as the solution. He signed a bill that imposed fines of up to $250,000 a day on social media companies that deplatformed candidates for office in his state for any reason.
The move was just one part of his broad embrace of the often coercive power of the government to push back on the private decisions of corporations, banks, academies of higher learning and the national media. He has argued that these institutions now make up an “anointed” regime of elite thought that threatens the country, and that Silicon Valley companies are operating in a way “probably unforeseen by the founding fathers.”'
Of course, DeSantis is not alone among the right pursuing coercive, authoritarian conservative government; indeed, conservatism itself is coercive and authoritarian.
“If you want government to exercise a power that you like right now, someone else can come in and exercise that power in a way you don’t like,” he said to applause at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in 2017. “Why don’t we just deny government the power to do it to begin with, and let the American people have a free internet and make their own choices?”
Just a few years later, DeSantis reversed himself as Florida’s governor, claiming that technology companies and their political views had become the real threat to liberty. Far from government being the problem, as former president Ronald Reagan had famously argued, DeSantis offered a new law as the solution. He signed a bill that imposed fines of up to $250,000 a day on social media companies that deplatformed candidates for office in his state for any reason.
The move was just one part of his broad embrace of the often coercive power of the government to push back on the private decisions of corporations, banks, academies of higher learning and the national media. He has argued that these institutions now make up an “anointed” regime of elite thought that threatens the country, and that Silicon Valley companies are operating in a way “probably unforeseen by the founding fathers.”'
Of course, DeSantis is not alone among the right pursuing coercive, authoritarian conservative government; indeed, conservatism itself is coercive and authoritarian.
