Platform Access Is A Civil Right

When Lyndon Johnson was in Congress in the 1950s he had three of his employees drive his car back from Washington to Austin at the end of every legislative session. That trip took his employees through the deep south. 

In Johnson’s telling, this went on for years without incident and he was unaware of any issues with this trip. All three employees were black.

One year, he asked the three employees to take his dog, Beagle, back to Austin with him. According to Robert A. Caro in Master of the Senate, one employee hesitated, explaining:   

“It’s tough enough to get all the way from Washington to Texas. We drive for hours and hours. We get hungry. But there’s no place on the road we can stop and go in and eat. We drive some more. It gets pretty hot. We want to wash up. But the only bathroom we’re allowed in is usually miles off the main highway. We keep goin’ ‘til night comes – ‘til we get so tired we can’t stay awake anymore. We’re ready to pull in. But it takes another hour or so to find a place to sleep. 

“You see, what I’m saying is that a colored man’s got enough trouble getting across the South on his own, without having a dog along.” 

In Johnson’s telling, hearing this story was jarring enough to permanently convince him of the necessity of protecting his employees – and every other African-American – from discrimination. 

And it should change the view of any holdout radical libertarian who still thinks that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was unjust. Because you know what? Private property rights are great. But that does not mean that we, as a society, had to let private restaurant owners and private hotel managers turn away customers because they were black. 

We didn’t have to accept a world in which black people had to defecate on the side of the road because they weren’t allowed to use a privately-owned restroom. We, as a society, do not have to allow private companies to violate Americans’ civil rights. 

SILENCED Yesterday, Paul Joseph Watson, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, and Milo Yiannopoulos were permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram. InfoWars content itself was banned even more broadly – accounts that share InfoWars content will see it deleted, and accounts that repeatedly share it will be banned themselves. 

Now, a critic might argue that Loomer’s First Amendment rights haven’t been violated, because she could always go to a public park and scream into the ether. 

That’s true. 

Lyndon Johnson’s black employees could always sleep in their cars, too. 

For Watson, this is a nontrivial loss – while he still has massive platforms on YouTube and Twitter, he spent plenty of time building up his Facebook and Instagram accounts too. All that time and effort is now dissipated because of the decision of some petty leftist apparatchiks in Silicon Valley. 

But for Loomer and Yiannopoulos, this was the death blow. 

Instagram was their only remaining platform, both having already been banned from Twitter. They no longer have any ability to meaningfully contribute to public discourse. 

They have been silenced. Not by the government, but by the private companies which – together – constitute the modern public square in 2019. 

Reading Laura Loomer’s reaction should trouble anyone:

Now, a critic might argue that Loomer’s First Amendment rights haven’t been violated, because she could always go to a public park and scream into the ether.

That’s true.

Lyndon Johnson’s black employees could always sleep in their cars, too.

GRTWT.