More Cops and Big Tech-Led Deplatforming Won’t Help Us Defeat the Far Right – Truthout

So, this is what a latter-day insurrection looks like: the crowd waving their mobile phones. Mirror are smashed, boots are stamped on Nancy Pelosis desk. Among the protests stalk those with the darkest of fantasies, zip ties ready to kidnap their despised liberal enemies. Five people lost their lives and although this is bad enough already, the casualties would have been even higher if the protesters had broken in before the had a chance to politicians flee.

From the point of view of the institutions, the far right were an embarrassment and inconvenience. Trump has lost the election; Biden will replace him. Yet politics is about more than who occupies the White House: it is also about the rise and fall of social movements and the values which underpin then. Before Wednesdays event, the popularity of the Proud Boys and other right-wing extremist groups was already growing, which was confirmed by the broad approval of their actions at the Capitol. They returned home with the applause of tens of millions of right-wing voters ringing in their ears. One in five voters supported their action, including 45 percent of Republicans.

The fallout of Wednesdays events will continue to echo for months, perhaps years to come. For all their seeming partisan difference, the center-left and center-right of US politics have a shared response for dealing with the crisis: it is to demand a greater number of cops and the removal of the social media accounts of the worst perpetrators. But neither strategy is in the interests of the majority of Americans or in particular of the US left.

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The extraordinary thing about the protest is that they did so much with so few people. Barely 15,000 people answered Trumps call to join him in Washington DC to protest the outcome of the elections. The crowd was so small that in order to make the march on the Capitol seem the mass event its believers needed to be, they had to post recycled images of older, better-attended, anti-Trump protests.

Those who had taken to the streets against Trump and against the racism of the US state responded with images of their own, showing militarized lines of police that confronted Black Lives Matter crowds last summer. We remembered the sadism of the state when Black people marched, the way that even water bottles were broken. We saw how few bodies were placed in the way of Trumps march.

Some, but only some, of this will be remembered on the center-right and center-left. There, the message will be a special kind of Never again. Never let a crowd form. Never authorize a demonstration. Never let a march take place without the National Guard being primed to stop it. The revenge for Wednesdays demonstration will be felt in calls to increase police budgets and in demands for the violent suppression of protest. And its victims will not be the new fascists.

Friends tell me that there must have been some secret command from well-placed Trump allies, to make sure that his protest went on without being stopped. But life is rarely that convenient. The reason the police take sides with the fascists is ideology. The belief-system of American liberalism in both its Democrat and its non-Trump Republican form, accepts Trumps claim that the far left are violent, secretive and likely to destroy property.

The police take a cue from that politics. They recognize that the fascists share with them certain core politics a belief in the nation and in private property rights they see anti-fascists as instigators and as challengers to their monopoly use of force, and never see far-right street movements in the same negative light

Between the start of 1994 and summer last year, white supremacists and other right-wing extremists in the US carried out attacks that left 329 people dead. In the same period, a single attack staged by an anti-fascist resulted in one killing (the anti-fascist perpetrator). You would have thought with a death toll so one-sided, the state would have to take sides against hate. But in the mindset of US centrism, the Proud Boys and like-minded extremist groups are almost invisible, their right-wing politics inexplicable. Both the far left and far right require suppression in their view. And if the clubs are going to fall hardest on left-wing backs, then is that not a price worth paying?

For two years, the social media companies have been slowly deplatforming the worst of the far-right offenders both in Britain and the US. In 2019 and 2020, the Daily Shoah podcast, was taken down from iTunes, Twitter and Facebook. Much the same happened to the Daily Stormer website. Former Breitbart journalist Milo Yiannopoulos was relegated from Twitter to Gab, complaining that I cant post without being called a pedo [sic] kike infiltrator half a dozen times I cant make a career out of a handful of people like that. I cant put food on the table this way. In the UK, Britain First (once the second most popular political page on UK Facebook) was relegated to the much smaller world of Telegram.

Last summer, when tens of millions of people took to the streets in support of Black Lives Matter, YouTube banned former Klan leader David Duke, alt-right leader Richard Spencer and so-called race realist Stefan Molyneux. Reddit deleted more than 2,000 subreddits including r/The_Donald. Two months ago, Steve Bannon was banned from Twitter.

This week, after Donald Trump repeated his praise of the people who had marched for him, Twitter finally took down his account, leading to howls of protest from right-wingers and claims that the most sacred value in US society, the First Amendment, was being contravened.

This is a tougher political question for the left than whether we want there to be more policing. For, after all, the removal of right-wing websites makes life harder for our opponents. In the short-term, it carries seemingly no risks for us.

But if Trump is now a hate-monger, he was no less of one in October last year when he used Twitter to demand what became the extra-judicial killing of Michael Reinoehl. He was no better last spring when he first began calling the people onto the streets who became this Wednesdays crowd. He was no different when he separated immigrant children from their parents, or when he promised to lock up Hillary Clinton. He has been the same for years, and for most of this time his presence has been of immense value to Twitter.

Between joining Twitter in 2009 and summer 2017, Trump posted more than 30,000 times acquiring 36 million followers. Every time he posted, and newspapers or television companies reported his latest outrage, he drove people onto the site to read him. From the perspective of the owners of the platform, he was devoting an incredible amount of time to boosting its profile. In 2017, one financial analyst, James Cakmak, estimated that if Donald Trump had to leave Twitter the companys value would fall by $2 billion. Between then and Friday, when his account was taken down, the number of his followers on that site had nearly tripled.

The strategy of deplatforming carries all sorts of concealed risks for the far left. On occasion, we have seen marginal individuals with modest public platforms use the fact that they were banned from social media as a way to invoke the morality of self-defense and build up a huge new audience, greater than anything they had had before.

The left and the right are never simply fascist or anti-fascist but combine multiple other causes. When they ban right-wing figures from social media, the companies look to the left next, search for sites they could punish in order to prove that they are above politics. Last year, that meant taking down such anti-fascist sites as Its Going Down, CrimethInc and Enough is Enough.

Five or ten years ago, you would often find leftist critiques of the tech giants for their social policies and, above all, for the way in which they had opted themselves out of the tax system. That criticism is still made, however it has become more muted just when it needed to become more urgent. Last year, the wealth of Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg passed $100 billion, making him the worlds fourth richest person.

The amount of time which the average American online has increased from less than two to more than seven hours a day in the last decade. The top five wealthiest companies in the US by market capitalization are all part of the digital-industrial complex: Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. At the same time, American schools and hospitals and libraries have been steadily defunded and spending on the sorts of infrastructure you need to keep an economy functional (roads, water, electricity) has been cut substantially over the past decades.

The wealth of the major companies has been achieved, in other words, at public expense. People are poorer, their lives diminished and they are in greater debt because of a series of behaviors at the heart of which is the diminishing willingness of the rich to pay tax, with the owners of the social media platforms being the ideal poster boys for this type of behavior.

We cannot be at ease with an anti-fascist strategy of deplatforming which give Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey the power to decide what kinds of opinions are worthy of being heard and which deserve to be silenced.

In the face of a growing far-right, these are going to be the issues which dominate the next four years: whether to depend on the state and social media platforms to take on Trumps supporters, or whether anti-fascists need to build our own strength.

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More Cops and Big Tech-Led Deplatforming Won't Help Us Defeat the Far Right - Truthout