Open, free and unregulated platforms, or regulated to protect our rights?

Kurt Schlichter writes in Town Hall,

When the social media companies start deplatforming conservatives, and engines like Google start up with antics like listing the GOP’s ideology as “Nazism,” we need to respond to their exercise of their power with the exercise of our own power – via our elected representatives. A GOP bill requiring social media platforms to explicitly and clearly explain their content policies, to disclose to banned people their exact violation, to provide a rapid, meaningful appeal process, and to provide for lawsuits (with fee awards to prevailing plaintiffs) to remedy violations is just the first step toward a regulatory solution.

The Fredocons will whine that this is not a conservative solution. Oh. Well, we tried submission and that doesn’t work for us. My conservative principles include fighting fire with a firestorm. Don’t want none, don’t start none – if you exercise your power, we’ll exercise ours. I don’t want to do it, but the two choices are 1) open, free, and unregulated platforms, or 2) platforms regulated to protect our rights. Maintaining platforms that exclude Normals is not an option. So, choose wisely Silicon Valley.

But for most institutions, we have alternative options that don’t necessarily involve leveraging our government power. When companies start deciding they want to modify our behavior by refusing to do business with people the libs hate, like NRA members, we can boycott them. We can also choose to support businesses that don’t disrespect us. There are lots of banks that don’t discriminate against those exercising the Second Amendment. By supporting companies that respect us – and not patronizing ones that diss us (like Dick’s Sporting Goods) – we are effectively building parallel institutions. But we can also create our own businesses from the ground up.

...The truth is that the walls really are coming down – what good is a gatekeeper if you can just walk around the gate? Technology makes production accessible at a fraction of what it used to cost, and the ravenous Internet is starving for content. There’s nothing to stop us conservative from stepping in and doing it ourselves.

...But as we keep seeing, money is not the only motivation to those temporarily holding sway over our cultural institutions. They will take a hit in the pocket book to score their cheap little points against us. We need to confront that nonsense, hard, and raise the cost of liberal virtue signaling high enough that they will think twice before trying it. But we also need to build our own institutions, institutions that meet Normal Americans’ needs, not the needs of some Silicon Valley socialist or Hollywood pinko. And if we don’t, we may well find ourselves exiled from our own society.

Read more here.