I thought only the Human Rights Commission people were dumb enough to make their lifestyle issue out to be the biggest thing since Selma. But now, Free Press is doing the same thing with Net Neutrality. And I know it says it’s the “blogger” section, but this blogger is Free Press Outreach Coordinator Jordan Berg, not some troublemaker off the virtual street. But he seriously wrote last week:
As we commemorate Dr. King’s legacy – which was created and pushed by youth to inspire future generations to work toward equality – we must remember their message: It is not enough to work for change; we need the means to inspire that change. A generation ago, young people across the country organized to give us a day dedicated to that message. Today our fight for justice and racial equality is also about control of the Internet: Will it belong to us or to the corporations?
It marks Berg and Free Press as unserious even to make the mere juxtaposition of Net Neutrality with the fight against the former Confederacy’s Jim Crow adminstered by 80 years of one-party Democrat rule (which for today’s generations too young to remember, was comparable with South Africa’s Apartheid administered by 50 years of one-party National Party rule). And yet, sadly, right wing groups such as the Gun Owners of America and the Christian Coalition, as well as libertarians like Glenn Reynolds, continue to allow their names to be associated with Save the Internet, a front group of Free Press’s. I hope readers who know or are affliated with Save the Internet coalition members will speak up.
Just as the Jim Crow invocations only hurt the campaign against Proposition 8 in California, I expect minority groups to step up their opposition to the Free Press-Google Net Neutrality as such silly comparisons get out.
This isn’t the only communications embarrassment Free Press is dealing with, even. Apparently the neo-Marxists in that organization don’t like it when they get called out as such. Neo-Marxist is an appropriate term I think because Free Press is Marxist for the American service economy. Traditional Marxism was designed for an industrial economy, so those socialists wanted to control factories. Neo-Marxists just want the media, including the Internet, under their power.
Josh Silver and Craig Aaron of Free press flipped out in response, though. First off the attempt the usual Weimar tactic of the ad hominem, implying that the critic is a dishonest shill who only opposes Free Press for pay, and would otherwise agree. Then they have the audacity to make the extended argument that AT&T setting network policy is just like systematic oppression of people in Red China. Even if that comparison itself weren’t as insulting to the victims of PRC tyranny, does anyone else find it odd that Free Press claims that big government is the only way to save us from enduring something like the huge government in China?
Free Press is just so outside of the mainstream that they’re incapable of making metaphors that don’t make normal people want to laugh in their faces. So let’s laugh in their faces in true Alinsky style, shall we? And make sure to defeat Net Neutrality so we have plenty to laugh about.