For someone so awkward with technology, Elizabeth Warren is seemingly on the right side of the debate concerning the world’s tech giants. Take a swig, Liz.
“Today’s big tech companies have too much power — too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Warren said, sounding more like a conservative scorned (like me) than someone whose progressive philosophy is a beneficiary of tech bias.
Kudos to her for being so gracious about it.
“They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else,” she added. Also true.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m not quite where Tucker is yet. Especially not when you consider Warren’s appeal to the populist centre — where a lot of Trump voters came from — will have socialist strings attached.
In the long-term, people will have to decide whether they’re happy to take the rough with the smooth in terms of Warren’s manifesto. I doubt they will. But it should be concerning that Democrats are ahead of conservatives on a matter that predominantly skews the U.S. to the left.
This is why — at least so I am told — there is a new “Yang Gang” phenomenon emerging, too, where former MAGA-types are looking to liberal populists like Andrew Yang and his plans to tax the hell out of Jeff Bezos and company in order to fund a universal basic income.
Perhaps as Bill Murray said at the end of Groundhog Day, “Anything different is good.”
But all this means President Trump has to urgently address some of this stuff. The lack of swamp draining. The lack of a border wall. And the lack of standing up for conservatives who are being bashed around by big tech.
Donald Trump Jr. has made fantastic inroads into this area, but he’s not on the ticket for 2020, and when MAGA voters, many of whom are still sick of the Republican Party, go to cast their ballots next year, they’ll be wondering whether or not the President has really had their backs all along.
In the meantime, Warren’s plan will seem attractive. Because it is.
It is far more focused and serious than what some of her competitors like Bernie Sanders (or one day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) are offering, which is just socialism on steroids.
And she is far more aggressive than even many the most hard-headed, anti-corporatist conservatives are.
Her plans, as ABC reported, “would prohibit companies that make more than $25 billion a year through an online marketplace from also owning participants on the platform. It would prohibit, for example, Amazon from selling its own line of everyday items called Amazon Basics — things like bath towels and HDMI cables — on Amazon’s own marketplace.”
That is incredibly heavy-handed, and would probably never happen. But her willingness to say such things is a sign of her recognition of how seriously Americans are beginning to think about corporate takeovers of their lives, their data, and even their homes.
If Republicans don’t follow Don Jr.’s lead and get to this issue faster, they stand to lose an inordinate amount of support in 2020. After all, the next great meme war is coming, and the MAGA crowd cannot be allowed to stray to Warren, the Yang Gang, or team Tulsi.
Raheem Kassam is the global editor in chief of Human Events and a fellow at the Claremont Institute and the Middle East Forum. He is the author of two bestselling books: “No Go Zones” and “Enoch Was Right.”
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of The Daily Caller.