Horowitz: The question everyone should be asking about the Big Tech fascist purge of conservatives

That monopolies are odious, contrary to the spirit of a free government and the principles of commerce, and ought not to be suffered. ~Art. 41, Maryland Declaration of Rights

What are they afraid of?

Imagine a 250-pound boxer being so petrified of a 100-pound woman that he had to get his entire motorcycle gang and the local police department to hold her down while she was unarmed so he could beat her.

Well, if you are having trouble conjuring up such an image, you likely don't realize that is what is happening to conservatives today.

One would think that with control of nearly every single government agency (regardless of who is president), media, academia, corporate America, Big Tech, Big Science, Big Pharma, and every platform and venue of information flow across the entire internet, leftists wouldn't feel threatened by the presence of some dissenting views. If the landscape of information flow on politics between the right and the left were two sides of a battlefield, it would be the equivalent of the U.S. military fighting a Rwandan militia. So why does the left feel it must crush every last vestige of conservative news, analysis, and debate even on off-the-beaten-path platforms?

The answer is as troubling as it is obvious. They are fascists. But they are also cowards. Their views are so puerile and fickle that they cannot withstand the scrutiny of a dissenting view that is powered by even one millionth the online presence they already have created. Just as a door opened a crack in a dark room can bring in a disproportionate amount of light, so too the dissemination of self-evident truths against the corrupt ruling elite will completely destroy the lies of the left if it is allowed to coexist with the left, even in such a weak and diminutive presence.

This is why, unlike the totalitarian left, we are not scared of darkness coexisting alongside our light. I've written thousands of columns and posted countless videos and audio podcasts passionately making the case for my beliefs on many issues. Never once have I called for anyone espousing views I regard as repugnant and even dangerous to be silenced — and that includes those who supported last year's rioters.

Thanks to BLM and the anti-policing agenda, thousands of buildings have been burned, thousands of civilians have been attacked in addition to cops, thousands more individuals have fallen victim to homicide, and to this day, rioters are rampaging through residential neighborhoods in the middle of the night. It's estimated that between $1 and $2 billion in damage was incurred just from May 26 to June 8 of last year.

We have fought their ideas and warned about the consequences, but never have we called on their supporters in politics and media to have their lives destroyed. We debate, expose, debunk, and dispel, but we never attempt to silence. Censorship is the weapon of first resort for authoritarians and cowards, but is not even the weapon of last resort for those confident in the truth of their views.

It's not the bias of what they do report that makes the media and Big Tech so insidious. It's what they obfuscate, censor, and remove. If people were to see the extent of the damage BLM has done to this country – and continues to do up to this very day – they would realize that the unprecedented FBI and DHS clampdown on people who attended the rally is not coming from a good place. It's not coming from a sense of ordered liberty, security, and justice. It's coming from a sadistic plan to crush and persecute any opposition, for if they truly cared about safety and justice, they would have done this every day last year, beginning on May 26, which was quite literally our night of broken glass.

None of these measures were taken against BLM. The 2020 equivalent of what the corporate-government complex is doing now to all of Trump's supporters would be censoring anyone who ever supported "police reform" or abolishing the police and criminalizing anyone caught on the ground near where BLM was rioting, even if they were not indicted for a particular crime.

Not only did the most prominent Democrats of our time decline to condemn the rioters, much less the broad movement surrounding them, they offered to help those arrested, who, by definition, weren't peaceful protesters. None other than incoming Vice President Kamala Harris used Twitter to help fund bail for those "protesting" in Minnesota during the week that they burned down a police station and over 1,500 public and private businesses.

Thus, while they want to criminalize even those who protested peacefully on our side, these same leftists deemed criminals of their own ranks to be peaceful protesters — and still do to this day. They have deemed all of our speech as violence and all of their violence as speech.

The fact that BLM was exalted as the most noble cause by these same media, governmental, and corporate figures is not a reason to excuse any violence on the right. Indeed, anyone involved in the murder of Officer Brian Sicknick, in my view, should get punished more severely than any liberal believes in punishing second-degree murder. But what this sickening double standard does show is where this growing crackdown is coming from and where it is headed. This is not about security. This is about crushing constitutional rights. And what better time then nearly 10 months into a new "COVID constitution," where constitutional rights have been suspended at the drop of a hat by executive fiat.

Nobody is excusing what happened at the Capitol the way the left excuses an entire year of violence. However, it cannot be allowed to be used like the Reichstag fires in 1933 to crush all political opposition to very undemocratic policies they keep implementing.

Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution gave the president the power "to suspend any or all individual rights if public safety and order were seriously disturbed or endangered." Well, following the fire, they declared an emergency and suspended freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, and habeus corpus and crushed the opposition. They argued they needed to suspend democracy to save it. Sort of like what we saw this year with the suspension of liberty and property rights for an "emergency" virus, the suspension of election law for that same virus, and now the suspension of all political norms and even the First Amendment because of the "emergency" of unprecedented right-wing violence the likes of which we've never seen before from the left since … three minutes ago.

Anyone who thinks that trajectory charted from the Reichstag fire cannot happen again is clearly not paying attention. Those who seek not just to defeat an opposition but to silence the opposition always have an ulterior motive. And it's never a good one.