This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, July 29th, 2021 on Cabal Brown.

The contradictions in so many self-styled conservatives claims about the tyranny of big tech are ever present.

But they keep doing it.

And the shift to fighting on antitrust grounds is in full force.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown is a senior editor at Reason. We talked about the current state of the fight against Big Tech.

It's a popular thing online to grab two tweets from the same Republican politician on the subject of tech and speech and either cancel

culture or any number of things and point out how diametrically opposed those ideas are. How much awareness is there within the

the GOP or within the conservative movement that there is a pretty big

inconsistency there? I think that they have to know that they're making contradictions. I think that there's just not a lot of care about that. You see both what you

mentioned and a lot of you know people like Josh Holly saying on Twitter you know that Facebook is a monopoly or you know please go buy my book on Amazon about how big tech is a tyranny and it's just it's it's silly there's no way to not realize that there's a hypocrisy there, but also it doesn't matter.

The goal is just, you know, demonizing big tech.

But my concern is that at some point, I mean courts are fairly consistent on the First Amendment

and what it means and what the meat on the bones has come to be over the years and in legal precedence so I wonder

They've transitioned to trust, antitrust, which is not strictly speaking of First Amendment

issue, but certainly would could be implicated.

So where do you suspect is going to be the most productive avenue for Republicans to try to attack big tech on antitrust grounds?

And I should add that the left has its own complaints as well.

It's interesting because Republicans when they're going after things on

antitrust grounds, they're often not actually antitrust grounds. Like there's a lot of saying that things are antitrust issues, but they

actually then are freedom of speech issues that relate to the First Amendment and

sometimes you know specifically to Section 230 and there's a lot of saying like well this is an antitrust issue and it's just not but

and you also have that though on the Democrats side too you know like my favorite

...