A few years ago I ruminated that growing tribalism coupled with the left's anti-pluralistic stance as reflected by full deplatforming would necessitate the right developing their own commercial industries. Robert Barnes who represented Alex Jones during that time said as much. Jones could not even get bank access. He could not get any online platform to process payments. He basically had to reinvent all levels of operation again. My theorizing came more from Alan Taylor's historical work on the Revolutionary War and how commerce fared then. There were loyalists stores and there were patriot stores. You had to stick to your own.
This is how the worst of the Jim Crow era functioned. If you had the wrong identity you were functionally not free to fully participate in commerce or public society. That's pretty much what we're seeing now, albeit only applied to conservative people with "reach". That's better than things were. But it is obviously still very disturbing. That's because it pushes the marginalization of identity toward some crazy extremes. "If you're not Muslim, here's the limits to which you can participate in society". That seems to be where progressive tolerance is headed. After all, you can always convert. Just a small step is required to renounce your heretical ways...
On this front, Daily Wire's move into film is interesting. It looks like Ben Shapiro has decided to go big and accept the need for media companies to produce their own content. Looking at Netflix this weekend (prior to seeing the Wire's move), I thought, half these films are pretty much straight up hate about me (a freedom oriented centrist). Content is more and more sovietesque, albeit with much better production quality. In terms of moral messaging, it's about as subtle as an Evangelical Christian flick. And, equally as appealing.
Shapiro's movie studio's acquired Gina Caarano (of Mandalorian fame) after she was purged for the sin of saying "violence based upon political identity is bad". Does this reflect an inflection point in the rise of a conservative hollywood? I don't know. I looked at the Wire's school shooting movie trailer, and I have to say, it hit a lot of check marks for me. There aren't a lot of movies that glorify conservative ideals any more. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a score of 14%. One can't help but wonder the extent to which establishment industries will go to to prevent the escape of the captive conservative market. I suspect they will go far.
I don't know how long it will be until internet traffic running through public utilities will get functionally censored. After all, it won't be that the traffic itself is censored, only that the relay of certain sites through AT&T servers is prohibited by private hosting companies. After all, a service provider like Shaw Cable has no duty to serve you everything... And fibre companies surely can discriminate on who gets a "phone" even if they can't discriminate on the content of that "phone call". This seems all but ensured now.
Lawfare provides precious few real solutions. Politicians chose many years ago not to pass legislation protecting political identity. They were still trying to fight against the loss of equality under the law. Caving in to identity carve outs (like sexual orientation, etc.) was not something they wanted to energize. But this failure to acquiesce has spelt political doom. Once the progressive left was sufficiently energized to leverage judicial and law enforcement systems for one sided prosecutions, all balance was lost.
While you can recreate your own systems as per Alex Jones, I suspect you will need to lay your own fibre too.... At that point, what really is the advantage one gets from a single USA? There is none. And that is what spurns some really major polity changes.
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