It is tyranny, built on ubiquitous surveillance, fueled by spite and grievance.

One of Trumpism's most important tenets is that private institutions should have the legal right to discriminate against minorities that he doesn't like. For example, he's trying to end the CFPB's enforcement action against Townstone, a mortgage broker that practiced rampant racial discrimination:

prospect.org/justice/2025-03-2…

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Trump Scrambles to Pardon Corporate Criminals He Once Prosecuted

First the gutted CFPB pronounced ‘Whites Only’ marketing legal again. Now Boeing wants to renege on the sweetheart deal of the century.

^{Maureen Tkacik (The American Prospect)}

By contrast, Trump abhors the idea that private institutions should be allowed to discriminate against people he likes, hence his holy war against "DEI":

cnbc.com/2025/03/29/trump-admi…

This is the crux of Wilhoit's Law, an important and true definition of "conservativism":

> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protectes but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/l…

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Trump administration reportedly warns European companies to comply with anti-DEI order

The Trump administration has reportedly sent letters to European companies asking them to comply with a U.S. executive order banning DEI initiatives.

^{Tanaya Macheel (CNBC)}

Wilhoit's definition is an important way of framing how conservatives view the role of the state. But there's another definition I like, one that's more about how we relate to one-another, which I heard from Steven Brust: "Ask, 'What's more important: human rights or property rights?' Anyone who answers 'property rights *are* human rights' is a conservative."

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Thus the idea that a mortgage broker or an employer or a banker or a landlord should be able to discriminate against you because of the color of your skin, your sexual orientation, your gender, or your beliefs. If "property rights *are* human rights," then the human right not to rent to a same-sex couple is co-equal with the couple's human right to shelter.

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The property rights/human rights distinction isn't just a way to cleave right from left - it's also a way to distinguish the left from liberals. Liberals will tell you that 'it's not censorship if it's done privately' - on the grounds that private property owners have the *absolute* right to decide which speech they will or won't permit.

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Charitably, we can say that some of these people are simply drawing a false equivalence between "violating the First Amendment" and "censorship":

pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes…

But while private censorship is *often* less consequential than state censorship, that isn't always true, and even when it is, that doesn't mean that private censorship poses no danger to free expression.

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Consider a thought experiment in which a restaurant chain called "No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe" buys up every eatery in town, and then maintains its monopoly by sewing up exclusive deals with local food producers, and then expands into babershops, taxis and workplace cafeterias, enforcing a rule in all these spaces that bans discussions of politics:

locusmag.com/2020/01/cory-doct…

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Cory Doctorow: Inaction is a Form of Action

In XKCD comic 1357, “Free Speech”, Randall Munroe offers a characteristically concise and snappy summary of one of the canonical arguments about free expression: “The right to fre…

^{Locus Online}

Here we see how monopoly, combined with property rights, creates a system of censorship that is every bit as consequential as a government rule. And if all of those facilities were to add AI-backed cameras and mics that automatically monitored all our conversations for forbidden political speech, then surveillance would complete the package, yielding private censorship that is effectively indistinguishable from government censorship.

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The main difference being that the First Amendment permits the former and prohibits the latter.

The fear that private wealth could lead to a system of private *rule* has been in America since its founding, when Benjamin Franklin tried (unsuccessfully) to put a ban on monopolies into the US Constitution.

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A century later, Senator John Sherman wrote the Sherman Act, the first antitrust bill, defending it on the Senate floor by saying:

> If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade.

pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-…

40 years ago, neoliberal economists ended America's century-long war on monopolies, declaring monopolies to be "efficient" and convincing Carter, then Reagan, then all their successors (except Biden) to encourage monopolies to form.

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The US government all but totally suspended enforcement of its antitrust laws, permitting anticompetitive mergers, predatory pricing, and illegal price discrimination. In so doing, they transformed America into a monopolist's playground, where versions of the No Politics At the Dinner Table Cafe have conquered every sector of our economy:

openmarketsinstitute.org/learn…

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Monopoly by the Numbers — Open Markets Institute

The Open Markets Institute uses journalism to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization.

^{Open Markets Institute}

This is especially true of our speech forums - the vast online platforms that have become the primary means by which we engage in politics, civics, family life, and more. These platforms are able to decide who may speak, what they may say, and what we may hear:

pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e…

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These platforms are optimized for mass surveillance, and, when coupled with private sector facial recognition databases, it is now possible to realize the nightmare scenario I mooted in London 23 years ago. As you move through both the virtual and physical world, you can be identified, your political speech can be attributed to you, and it can be used as a basis for discrimination against you:

pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/ste…

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This is how things work at the US border, of course, where border guards are turning away academics for having anti-Trump views:

nytimes.com/2025/03/20/world/e…

It's not just borders, though. Large, private enterprises own large swathes of our world. They have the unlimited property right to exclude people from their properties. And they can spy on us as much as they want, because it's not just antitrust law that withered over the past four decades, it's also *privacy* law.

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U.S. Denied Entry to French Scientist Over Views on Trump Policies, France Says

The French authorities said the academic had been traveling to a conference near Houston when border officials blocked his entry because of conversations found on his phone.

^{Aurelien Breeden (The New York Times)}

The last consumer privacy law Congress bestirred itself to pass was 1988's "Video Privacy Protection Act," which bans video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals. The failure to act on privacy - like the failure to act on monopoly - has created a vacuum that has been filled up with private power. Today, it's normal for your every action - every utterance, every movement, every purchase - to be captured, stored, combined, analyzed, and, of course *sold*.

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With vast property holdings, total property rights, and no privacy law, companies have become the autocrats of trade, able to regulate our speech and association in ways that can no longer be readily distinguished state conduct that is at least theoretically prohibited by the First Amendment.

Take Madison Square Garden, a corporate octopus that owns theaters, venues and sport stadiums and teams around the country.

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Their notoriously vindictive, thanks to a spate of incidents where MSG used facial recognition cameras to bar anyone who worked at a law-firm that sued the company from entering any of its premises:

nytimes.com/2022/12/22/nyregio…

This practice was upheld by the courts, on the grounds that the property rights of MSG trumped the human rights of random low-level personnel at giant law firms where one lawyer out of thousands happened to be suing the company:

nbcnewyork.com/news/local/madi…

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Madison Square Garden's Ban on Lawyers Suing Them Can Remain in Place, Court Rules

A Radio City Rockettes show incident involving a Girl Scout mom shed light on the growing controversy around facial recognition technology -- and Madison Square…

^{Sarah Wallace (NBC New York)}

Take your kid's Girl Scout troop on an outing to Radio City Music Hall? Sure, just quit your job and go work for another firm.

But that was just for starters. Now, MSG has started combing social media to identify random individuals who have criticized the company, and has added *their* faces to the database of people who can't enter their premises.

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For example, a New Yorker named Frank Miller has been banned for life from all MSG properties because, 20 years ago, he designed a t-shirt making fun of MSG CEO James Dolan:

theverge.com/news/637228/madis…

This is private-sector Trumpism, and it's just getting started.

Take hotels: the entire hotel industry has collapsed into two gigachains: Marriott and Hilton.

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Madison Square Garden’s surveillance system banned this fan over his T-shirt design

A fan was ejected from a Knicks game in 2021 for wearing a shirt calling out the team’s owner, James Dolan.

^{Mia Sato (The Verge)}

Both companies are notoriously bad employers and at constant war with their unions (and with nonunion employees hoping to unionize in the face of flagrant, illegal union-busting). If you post criticism online of both hotel chains for hiring scabs, say, and *they* add you to a facial recognition blocklist, will you be able to get a hotel room?

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After more than a decade of Uber and Lyft's illegal predatory pricing, many cities have lost their private taxi fleets and massively disinvested in their public transit. If Uber and Lyft start compiling dossiers of online critics, could you lose the ability to get from anywhere to anywhere, in dozens of cities?

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Private equity has rolled up pet groomers, funeral parlors, and dialysis centers. What happens if the PE barons running those massive conglomerates decide to exclude their critics from any business in their portfolio? How would it feel to be shut out of your mother's funeral because you shit-talked the CEO of Foundation Partners Group?

kffhealthnews.org/news/article…

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Death Is Anything but a Dying Business as Private Equity Cashes In - KFF Health News

Investors are banking on increased demand in death care services as 73 million baby boomers near the end of their lives.

^{KFF Health News}

More to the point: once this stuff starts happening, who will dare to criticize corporate criminals online, where their speech can be captured and used against them, by private-sector Trumps armed with facial recognition and the absurd notion that property rights aren't just human rights - they're the *ultimate* human rights?

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The old fears of Benjamin Franklin and John Sherman have come to pass. We live among autocrats of trade, and don't even pretend the Constitution controls what these private sector governments can do to us.

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