Conservatives’ taking on Silicon Valley

Conservatives have found the latest mark in their long-running assault on cultural elites: Silicon Valley.

From Steve Bannon railing against the "lords of technology" to Donald Trump Jr. using Twitter's "blue check mark" as an insult, anti-tech tropes are ricocheting around the right, painting the internet industry as an unaccountable monolith that looks down on so-called mainstream Americans.

For tech companies, flush with cash and facing little risk of regulation from Republicans, the intensifying rhetoric poses minimal short-term danger in Washington. But a sustained assault could, over time, turn the tech industry into a conservative punching bag, like Hollywood or the news media. And that threatens to alienate parts of tech's vast user base that spans the ideological spectrum.

Conservatives say their disdain stems from suspicions that tech companies are biased against their views — as well as from the industry's usefulness as a symbol of the establishment amid the populist backlash unleashed by President Donald Trump.

“They’re looking out for themselves, and building technologies for themselves, while giving the short end of the stick to the rest of the country,” said Garrett Johnson, co-founder of the right-of-center tech group Lincoln Network, adding that many fellow conservatives are eager to "pick a fight" with Silicon Valley.

Fueling the dynamic is the fact that many executives in the tech industry espouse socially liberal views and rallied around Hillary Clinton's White House bid. While the industry does have a libertarian streak, few in the tech sector self-identify, at least in public, as Republican.

Bannon, the former Trump White House adviser and current Breitbart executive chairman, is one of the leading voices on the right to have latched onto tech as an adversary.

At an October state GOP convention in Anaheim, California, he told the assembled Republicans they should start worrying about the danger swelling within the borders of their own state, a force Bannon branded “the lords of technology in Silicon Valley.”

Pacing back and forth across the stage, Bannon called the industry a challenge to the country itself, run by so-called globalists with no particular affinity for the U.S. From there, he made the leap to California’s “sanctuary cities” and to those who he says feel free to pick and choose which U.S. laws they’re willing to follow.

“Trust me, if you do not roll this back, 10 or 15 years from now, the folks in Silicon Valley and the progressive left in this state are going to try to secede from the union,” warned Bannon.

The tech industry says such attacks are misplaced. "The internet is not a partisan issue, and American voters of both parties value the high-quality products and services internet companies provide at little or no cost to consumers," said Noah Theran, spokesman for the Internet Association, a trade group whose members include Google, Facebook and Twitter.

Theran said that Internet companies help people to connect, small businesses to compete and nonprofits to raise funds, adding, "the sound bites coming from inside-the-Beltway do not ring true to voters who care deeply about their access to internet platforms."

Perhaps because conservatives have so actively adopted Twitter as a forum to push their ideas and debates, the site’s perceived missteps have also been a particular target of their scorn — especially about the ways the company goes about verifying selected users of the platform.

Twitter has said that verification, signified by a blue check-mark badge appended to a user’s screen name, is just mechanics. It’s a visual cue that lets users know when accounts of public interest belong to who they say they belong to. But some on the right see it as a signal of social status the company hands out willy-nilly — and rarely to conservatives.

After then-Breitbart technology editor Milo Yiannopoulos was stripped of his check mark under Twitter’s policy against abusiveness in January 2016, he brought up the issue at a White House press briefing.

“My verification check was taken away for making jokes about the wrong group of people,” Yiannopoulos complained to Obama press secretary Josh Earnest. Earnest replied: “I’m not sure exactly what sort of government policy decision could have any influence on that.”

From there, the concept has developed such currency in conservative circles that it serves as a broad-brush putdown dropped into conversation without any other context.

“If only blue check mark SJWs [social justice warriors] cared as much about terrorists attacking us as they do about me attacking socialism,” tweeted Donald Trump Jr. in November after taking heat for a joke about giving away half of his daughter’s Halloween candy.

Other constructions include “blue check-mark mafia” and “blue-check MSM,” a reference to the mainstream media.

Twitter’s verification program is currently “paused,” the company announced last month. That move came after the company was criticized for verifying the account of the chief organizer of a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, at which a counter-protester was killed.

That organizer had celebrated by tweeting, "Looks like I FINALLY got verified by Twitter. I must be the only working class white advocate with that distinction."

More recently, Twitter moved this month to remove what it called “hateful conduct and abusive behavior” from its platform, beginning with booting the leaders of far-right and white nationalist groups. Some on the right warned that conservatives are widely at risk of being silenced by what was quickly branded the "#twitterpurge."

Conservatives are still in the early stages of figuring out how to use the cultural complaint against tech to their political advantage. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) is on the cutting edge of that effort.

In October, Twitter rejected as "inflammatory" a Blackburn video ad, meant to kick off her Senate run, in which she says, “I fought Planned Parenthood and we stopped the sale of baby body parts, thank God.” Rather than asking the company to reconsider or reworking the spot, Blackburn’s camp immediately spun it into an fundraising opportunity. Her campaign sent out an email to her list saying, “Silicon Valley elites are trying to impose their values on us.”

Twitter’s refusal to run Blackburn’s ad reverberated on the right. And when Twitter reversed its decision a day later, Fox News ran it with a “breaking” banner.

Twitter’s yanking of Blackburn’s ad was such a gift from the company to the candidate, joked one conservative commentator, that it should count as an “in-kind donation.”

The idea that Silicon Valley is biased against conservatives goes at least as far back as May 2016, when Facebook was condemned on the right for filtering conservative news sources from its "trending news" scroller. That led to a sit-down meeting between Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and more than a dozen conservatives — among them Glenn Beck, Jim DeMint and S.E. Cupp — in the company’s sprawling Menlo Park, California, complex.

What's newer is the right's effort to craft cultural framing around the tension.

Some attribute the push to Trump himself. The president has proved himself willing to take the gloves off against Silicon Valley. “Facebook was on her side, not mine!” he tweeted in October, in what appeared to be an attempt to counter reports that Russia used the social network to boost Trump’s candidacy against Hillary Clinton.

Of course, critiques of the tech industry’s biggest players are not limited to conservatives. In recent months, there's been considerable talk on the left that Silicon Valley’s power is disturbingly unchecked.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), for example, has criticized Twitter, Facebook and Google for what he says is their generally ineffectual response to Russian manipulation of their platforms around the 2016 election. And other Democrats — like Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts — have argued that the country needs to confront big tech companies’ overwhelming power to shape what people see, say and shop for online.

But conservatives are ahead of the game when it comes to turning it into a cultural argument. And some of them are looking to see whether it can carry weight at the ballot box.

Paul Nehlen, who is challenging House Speaker Paul Ryan in the Republican primary in his Wisconsin district, announced in mid-December that if elected he’d push for a bill that would ban the big online companies from blocking speech.

Nehlen said he’d battle against “shadowbanning,” the practice of websites hiding what some users post without letting them know. Facebook-owned Instagram in particular has been criticized for the practice, which conservatives say is disproportionately used to silence them.

For some slices of the right, their leaders’ willingness to confront Silicon Valley has become a litmus test.

“The GOP’s voters are being systematically censored off of the primary channels of public communication by left-wing tech giants,” wrote Nehlen, “and Ryan — indeed, the entire GOP Congress — has sat utterly mute for years and allowed it to happen.”

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Trump reverses another Obama policy

President Donald Trump derailed a $13 billion dollar project to build an Amtrak tunnel between New Jersey and New York’s Penn Station Friday, Crain’s New York Business reports.

Trump is scrapping a proposal by former-President Barack Obama for the federal government to cover half the cost of the new line. New Jersey and New York would cover the other half of the cost under the Obama-era proposal.

Department of Transportation Deputy Administrator K. Jane Williams notified State officials in response to an updated proposal to fund the states’ half of the price tag through federal loans. The states’ proposal referenced the Obama administration’s plan for the federal government to underwrite the project as an “agreement.”

“Your letter also references a non-existent ’50/50′ agreement between USDOT, New York, and New Jersey. There is no such agreement,” Williams’ letter said, according to Crain’s New York Business. “We consider it unhelpful to reference a non-existent ‘agreement’ rather than directly address the responsibility for funding a local project where nine out of 10 passengers are local transit riders.”

The proposed line would shuttle tens of thousands of commuters daily in one of the United States’ most important economic areas.

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