A diamond is buried in the “cromnibus” recently passed by Congress — potentially giving Republicans a decisive advantage with millennials. The Obama administration, in the name of “net neutrality”, was proposing to regulate the internet as a public utility. This legislation will prevent it.
Republican presidential candidates should make this an issue for 2016. Millennials love the freedom of the internet, and know, after Obamacare, that the government would cock the whole thing up if they regulated it. If Rand Paul or John Kasich don’t pick this ball up and run with it they’re not as smart as I thought they were.
In this, as in so many things, Obama and the Democrats are on the wrong side of history. They’re the contemporary equivalent of the Catholic Church 500 years ago. Back then Gutenberg and his printing press enabled the destruction of the religious monopoly of the Church, in the process moving from a medieval to a modern world. Today the internet is an assault on the state itself, along with other ossified institutions such as the media and academia. It is revolutionary.
Politically, nothing is more important than breaking the communication stranglehold of the media. For a hundred years they have been in the vanguard of the progressive project, agitating and propagandizing. Stories that don’t advance the narrative are killed. Think Walter Duranty and the cover up of the Ukrainian famine. Twenty years ago, when Matt Drudge used the internet to break the Lewinsky scandal, he was like Martin Luther posting his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church door.
The diffusion of knowledge is the death of tyrants, and the internet is the most radical change in the transmission of knowledge in human history. In the past, fundamental changes in the means of communication transformed the world. When we learned to speak, we became human. When we learned to write, we became civilized. The printing press created the modern world.
The internet changes everything. It bends the long arc of history toward truth, and freedom.
We’re going to win.
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