Trumpism 2.0: Sen. Josh Hawley Unveils Populist Platform to Fight Big Tech 'Aristocrats,' (trunc)

InformationLiberation ^ | 14MAY19 | Chris Menahan

[vannrox]

Newly-elected Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has unveiled an excellent Tucker Carlson-esque populist-nationalist platform to move the GOP beyond boomer conservatism.

This is the best vision I've seen since Steve Bannon's 2016 platform for Trump (which Trump abandoned for boomer conservatism).THE BIG IDEA: Josh Hawley, the youngest member of the Senate, was born on Dec. 31, 1979 -- the final day of a sclerotic decade. The freshman Republican from Missouri argues that the GOP must now move away from the shibboleths of his childhood to become the party that stands in unflinching opposition to elites.

"It's not 1980 anymore. We've got to wake up to the problems of today," Hawley said in an interview. "For my own party, there is a tendency to want to live in the past and to live in a time when Republican orthodoxy was fixed by the 1980 Reagan campaign. Listen, the Reagan presidency was extraordinarily successful and extraordinarily significant historically. But that's a long time ago now. And I think that it is past time for Republicans to stop living in the 1980s and start living in 2019 and facing the problems of this day."

Ronald Reagan famously declared during his first inaugural address that "government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem."

"Government has a role to play," Hawley explained. "We need a shift in policy. This is why I say it is time to move beyond the old and tired policy debates of the last 30 and 40 years, which we just rehash and rehearse over and over again. ... In a weird way, our politics has kind of been captured by nostalgia in the last 10 or 15 years. As the glaring problems of the great middle of our society have become worse, in some ways politics has become more and more blinkered. It's just more trapped in the past. There's this aversion to facing things as they are. If anything, our politics has become more nostalgic and more backward-looking. We need to stop that."Highlights:

-- Hawley is trying to forge a future for Trumpism that is bigger than President Trump, who won by breaking with GOP orthodoxy on a host of issues like trade and decrying what he railed against as a system rigged by elites. Much of the party, including Hawley, has moved with Trump. But it remains to be seen what the post-Trump GOP looks like.

-- Four months after his swearing-in, Hawley plans to address some of these questions on Wednesday with his maiden speech on the Senate floor. He shared a copy of the latest draft of his speech, which he's still tinkering with, and we discussed it last night. He sees a political realignment underway, accelerated by Trump, and he's trying to sketch out a populist vision that he believes matches the moment. The conservative mood has changed, and the appetite for using government to achieve desired ends has grown. So has the hostility toward big business.

"Most people don't want to live a life centered around high-priced wine and cheese and theater tickets and so on. They don't want to start a tech company. They don't want to be a tech billionaire ... and there's nothing wrong with that," Hawley said. "They want to have a life centered around their school and their church, and we need a politics that recognizes that, respects that and makes that way of life possible. And my biggest concern is that that way of life is withering away and, as it withers away, our democracy is in danger because it is that way of life and the great American middle, the middle of our society, that has defined our common citizenship."

-- For Hawley, "the great middle" is more than geography. It's a state of mind. The 39-year-old, who defeated incumbent Claire McCaskill in November, said his interactions with people on the campaign trail impressed upon him the depth of anger and the need to do things differently.

"They are angry at Big Tech. They are angry at Big Pharma. They are angry at being ignored by Washington and by the elites. This is why President Trump won the state of Missouri by 20 points," Hawley said. "It's because they are angry and they don't feel that they have a voice in our politics, in our government or in our society anymore. That is a major, major problem for us as a democracy. ... We've got to get a politics that honors that and is focused towards rebuilding and renewing those folks and their way of life. If we do not, then I think we'll probably look back on the rancor and the division of these years and say, 'That was pleasant,' in comparison to what might come."

-- Hawley believes politics is downstream of culture, and that the culture has become corrupted. "We must put aside the tired orthodoxies of years past and forge instead a new politics of national renewal," he plans to say, according to his prepared remarks. "We must begin by acknowledging that GDP growth alone cannot be the measure of this nation's greatness, and so it cannot be the only aim of this nation's policy. Because our purpose is not to make a few people wealthy, but to sustain a great democracy, and so we need not just a bigger economy, but a better society."

"We must repair the torn fabric of our common life," he will add. "We need a politics that prioritizes strong marriages and encourages strong families, where children can know their parents. ... We need strong schools and churches and co-ops because these are the things that make liberty possible, for liberty is more than selling or buying or the right to be left alone."

[...] -- Hawley has made waves since arriving on Capitol Hill in January. The latest fight he picked is against Candy Crush. Yes, the children's game. He introduced a bill last week to prohibit video games popular among kids from offering "loot boxes," or randomized assortments of digital weapons, clothing and other items that can be purchased for a fee. These video games also would be banned from offering "pay to win" schemes, where players must spend money to access additional content or gain digital advantages over rival players. Hawley said such games exploit children, and that government should step in to stop them.

-- The conservative senator is open to breaking up Facebook. "All options should be on the table," he told me. "We may need to break them up. That might be the right move from an antitrust perspective and from a policy perspective. I'm not sure about that. What I do know is that the Facebook business model of extracting information from consumers without telling them, monetizing it without their permission and then getting them addicted to your products so that you can make billions of dollars is not something that we should have going forward. We need to have a conversation as a society about whether this is really the best that we can do. ... Silicon Valley needs to do better, and this had better not be the future of the American economy. Because, if it is, we're going to be in big trouble."

-- He wants to change the debate about the role of technology in society. "My great worry is that Silicon Valley might truly come to define our future economy, which is an economy that works for a small group of people who are billionaires and then everybody else gets their information taken from them and monetized," he said. "Are these social media platforms and the business model that animates them really good for our economy and our society? We need to ask those questions. We shouldn't just say, 'Oh, well they exist. So therefore they must be fine.' They're not fine! Their social effects are deleterious. Their economic effects are highly questionable. We need to have that conversation."

Hawley was the first Attorney General to go after Google for violating antitrust laws all the way back in 2017.

-- Hawley also argues that society's drift toward "the Uber economy" is a nightmare for the people he represents in the Show Me state. "Uber is paying its drivers 60 cents a mile ... but the cost of wear and tear on the vehicle is 58 cents a mile. That means that the Uber economy is an economy where the driver makes two cents a mile," he said. "Really? This is the future? We've got to get technology and innovation that actually produce something of value to our economy and our society and doesn't drain away value from the great middle of our society."

These are the best lines of the whole piece:

-- Hawley said that "big banks, big tech, big multinational corporations -- along with their allies in the academy and media -- are the aristocrats of our age": "The new aristocrats seek to remake society in their own image: to engineer an economy that works for the elite and few else, to fashion a culture dominated by their own preferences. These modern aristocrats often claim to be a meritocracy. Many of them truly believe they are. What they don't see, or won't acknowledge, is that the society they have built works primarily for themselves. They've effectively run this country for decades, and their legacy is national division and national decline. They live in the United States, but they consider themselves citizens of the world. They operate businesses or run universities here, but their primary loyalty is elsewhere, to their own agenda for a more unified, progressive and profitable global order."

-- In his view, Republicans have focused too much on promoting the selfish ideal of rugged individualism at the expense of the selfless virtue of communitarianism. "Individuals find control over their own lives and opportunities for their own lives in healthy communities," the senator explained. "I don't see the two as being an opposition. In fact, I think it's one of the great mistakes of the last 30 to 40 years to preach a politics of unfettered individualism, that individuals can create and re-create themselves and should be able to choose their own destinies without family or tradition or community impinging in any way. This leads to the breakdown of community, the breakdown of the family and the breakdown of the neighborhood. And those are the very institutions that actually give individuals control over their lives and give them a sense of agency and empowerment to change their world."

-- Hawley said many problems come down to a question of who respects who. "The crisis reaches well beyond economics," he said. "Being a free person, being an American, isn't just about what you can buy. It's about the pride that comes in supporting a family. It's about contributing something of worth to your community. It's about being able to look a neighbor in the eye and know you're his equal. It's about respect, and too many Americans aren't getting it anymore. They're certainly not getting it from our elite-driven culture: The media, Hollywood and academia relentlessly press their values and priorities on the rest of us. ... They idealize fame and preach self-realization through consuming more stuff. ... That has produced, predictably, a good deal of dislocation and alienation and rightly so. People feel that they are not respected, that they are not heard, and it's produced what I do believe is the great crisis of our time."

Though immigration was missing from this piece, Hawley was strong on immigration during his campaign and said in a column last year that "we need an immigration policy that works for the citizens of this country, not the global elite."

At this point, the only other visionaries talking like Hawley are Democrat 2020 presidential candidate Andrew Yang and Tucker Carlson.

Most Americans agree on the majority of these issues, though our ruling class views them as heresy.

Hawley also gave a solid speech at the Hoover Institution earlier this month on the negatives of social media:

[RoosterRedux]

Great speech, but it incorrectly identifies the enemy.

The enemy is not the cultural elite. That is a fuzzy term.

To fight and win, we must CLEARLY identify the enemy and clearly identify the strategy to be used to defeat it.

Academia, the media, entertainment are not the enemy per se, but they are the footsoldiers of the enemy. Also among the footsoldiers are the cultural liberals who scream for abortion, gay cultural dominance, and fluid morality and reality that is what they say it is.

But then, if these are the footsoldiers, who is the enemy? Who is it that calls the tune for these footsoldiers?

I suggest that enemy remains hidden, unnamed...and, as yet, unnameable.

To understand who the enemy is we have to ask, who is it that indoctrinated the professors at our colleges and universities? That was the starting point.

These professors, over many years extending into the last century, indoctrinated and, indeed, brainwashed the students marching out of their colleges and universities. These students carried their new ideology into the media and entertainment. And into the practice of the law.

When we can identify who is at the root of this problem, we can name the enemy.

[thoughtomator]

> To fight and win, we must CLEARLY identify the enemy

Communism.

> and clearly identify the strategy to be used to defeat it.

Free helicopter rides.

[metesky]

Dec. 31, 1979 -- the final day of a sclerotic decade.

Nobody knows how to count these days...

[yoe]

"It's not 1980 anymore. We've got to wake up to the problems of today,"

No and it is not 1600 America either with pioneers building their one room homes with trees they cut themselves; food they grew or hunted themselves, clothes they made themselves; no electricity, running water or lavish indoor plumbing.

Those early Americans had something called strength of character; they had integrity; there was a decency and fairness about them, a handshake was their bond.

Honesty and decency are rare today; our justice system is broken so badly the two tier system of law and order has been wrecked by something called Social Justice...which is no justice at all and worse yet, there is little or no consequence for crimes committed by our elected who use their offices to enrich themselves.

Senator Hawley understands this new age as does President Trump...the radical left want power and wealth so badly, some of them just tried to overthrow a successful President and his administration...unthinkable for Americans who abide by The united States Constitution and the laws of the land.

[Pollard]

A few guys from the Frankfurt School but it’s been labeled a conspiracy theory by the left.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Theorists

The ones that came to Columbia Univ, USA sewed the seeds.

[RoosterRedux]

THX MUCH to both of you.

Yes. It is communism. And it reaches through the Frankfort School and Columbia U. was certainly one of its first and major U.S. centers of operation.

But (I suggest), its success implies a solid but as yet unseen command and control structure.

The wholesale indoctrination of almost every college and university in America is not the result of some rag-tag effort by scattered collectivists who think alike. It appears to be the result of something carefully planned and implemented...something that would require organization and centralized leadership/command.

I am thinking out loud here but my gut tells me that there is something more at work that just folks around the world who have old dogeared COMINTERN cards in their wallets and "Workers of the World Unite" posters on their basement walls.

If we are to root out these termites, we have to find their nest...their queen.

[Bratch]

[Captain7seas]

“But (I suggest), its success implies a solid but as yet unseen command and control structure.”

---

“The Deliberate dumbing down of American Education” Author: Charlotte Iserbyte.

“American Betrayal” and “Red Thread” By Diana West.

[thoughtomator]

> If we are to root out these termites, we have to find their nest...their queen.

Which begs the question of how Soros is still alive after giving dozens of nations more than ample reason to terminate him.

[ronnie raygun]

Cut the head of the snake off and the rest dies, we need to find out who is funding inside and out and do just that. Now we can work toward rebuilding the fabric that has been torn

[RoosterRedux]

Thx for those recommendations. Will check them out today.

[RoosterRedux]

I can't imagine why Soros hasn't been eliminated. Unless, that is, he is not the one actually pulling the strings.

It has always been rumored that Soros joined the Commies when he was young and they gave him a leg up in his accumulation of wealth.

[9YearLurker]

I think the bigger problem is that he sees Big Tech as wrong only for their unequal commercialism. It is the surveillance and control, the censorship, the role of our intelligence community behind it all that is most important.

Otherwise, pretty good.

He is right about the Uberization of the economy for the masses.

[9YearLurker]

A big miss that Trump doesn’t get is his pushing of any weapons sales by the US worldwide as good for our economy. That is only fueling our overlords and necessitating that they find wars to expend them on.

[Artemis Webb]

Bookmark

[RoosterRedux]

It is the surveillance and control, the censorship, the role of our intelligence community behind it all that is most important.

That is a big problem.

Another problem of significance is that Big Tech is filled to the brim with college students who have been thoroughly brainwashed in commie-think.

There have been rumblings in the investment community that even those in senior management and their venture capital overlords feel a certain lack of control over those in the middle and at the bottom. The fear is that the little commie robots of Big Tech are taking it upon themselves to spread their ideology via algorithms and destroy (by algorithm) anyone who threatens it.

[9YearLurker]

Yes, that too.

[RoosterRedux]

Along the lines of my prior comment, I heard the other day on some business show that youtube was worried about the revenue/profit loss due to eliminating all the "conspiracy theory" videos. As we all know, such videos attract a huge following.

Someone interjected into the conversation the notion that management may not have control over all the "conspiracy theory" video removal...that junior people were taking it upon themselves to clean house.

It is like we have millions upon millions of little Manchurian Candidates working in Big Tech.

[9YearLurker]

Still, the biggest problem is the command and control, authoritarian-government end game.

Those pipsqueaks are just tiny nails in the massive Trojan horse that is Big Tech.