Lew Rockwell: US Fascism behind Websites Purge

In a new interview with host Tom Woods at the Tom Woods Show, libertarian communicator Lew Rockwell provided a fascinating critique of private technology companies such as PayPal and the Google subsidiary YouTube recently ending their provision of services to organizations they deem unworthy. Rockwell, chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and publisher of the popular website lewrockwell.com, identifies the companies’ decisions as part of the shift toward fascism in America.

Rockwell, in the interview, dates the beginnings of the United States “fascist regime” to the Woodrow Wilson administration during World War I and further argues that that fascist regime became permanent during the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration with the partnership of businesses and the government under the New Deal.

“It seems to me,” says Rockwell, that fascism, which he calls a “disastrous, evil philosophy,” has “reached new levels in recent years” with “the fascist state erecting a public-private partnership for the police state.”

Concerning the recent websites purge and its relation to fascism, Rockwell, offering an analogue from persecution in China during the Cultural Revolution, states:

So you have companies like Google, like Twitter, like PayPal and GoDaddy, many, many other companies that seem to be working in cahoots with the government to suppress dissent. And, yes, of course, they start with the easy [websites and organizations to suppress].

In the days of the Cultural Revolution in China, which sometimes I think this is beginning to resemble, the Red Guards would demand at, say, a university that all the professors come to a self-criticism session, which was mandatory. And, of course, these were all communists — members of the Communist Party; they were not regular people. And they would pick one guy to wear a dunce cap, a literal dunce cap, and to be especially beaten — and that might be the best that would happen to him because he could go to the gulag too — and be taken around the campus afterwards. What the Red Guards called this was “killing a chicken to scare the monkeys.” Apparently, if you have a band of marauding monkeys, which is a problem in some countries, you can scare them away by killing a chicken that you are going to eat. They run away screaming. So, they knew they only had to do this to one guy, maybe the worst guy from the standpoint of their alleged principles, in order to terrify everybody else.

So that is what’s happening now.

If, in response to the internet crackdown, “everybody else calms down, shuts up, doesn’t say anything politically incorrect, is very careful to abide by” what they are told to do, then Rockwell suggests the crackdown will be a success.

Rockwell also warns that the reach of the websites purge may, with time, expand much further.

Listen to Rockwell’s complete interview here.

Though in an early stage, the websites purge appears to have already reached the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, with YouTube recently routinely refusing to place advertisements on the institute’s Ron Paul Liberty Report daily program. You can read more about that here.