Eight Years On, Google Fiber Is a Faint Echo of the Disruption Promised

Perhaps this is true for "mainstream" politics for most of the past 100 years. I'm not so sure it applies to political activism on campus (i.e. Evergreen), the Alt-Right, Antifa, explicitly White Supremacist fringes, Redneck Revolution, &c.

It is bizarre to argue about left and right when it takes a microscope to differentiate the two.

Agreed, but as I point out above, the small difference between the traditional Democrat and Republican parties isn't the issue in 2018.

If you don't like "leftward shifts", when did you decide to vote Democrat?

As a child of immigrants, I was basically raised to vote Democrat. I showed up for the first primaries for Obama, noting the ham-fisted attempt of the local democratic secretary to get us all to incorrectly fill in the forms to disenfranchise us. I remember distinctly when basically no one would ever use the term "White Supremacist" north of the Mason Dixon line without being considered a conspiracy nutcase. I remember when the dismantling of due process and the wholesale labeling of the rural population as "deplorables" would've been considered stupidity from the mouth of a Democratic candidate. I remember when "safe spaces" on campus would've been immediately rejected as infantile nonsense by Democrats.

I remember when the kind of toxicity, fact-free imputation, and leaning on emotional images in we see in today's politics would have been called out by Democrats as an intellectually dishonest mode of operation. Not to say that politics were free of such nonsense and pollution, but back then, it was widely recognized as nonsense and pollution and not thought of as an intellectually and morally worthy activity.

Election shenanigans, not Free Speech per se.

and passing anti-speech laws at the state level exactly?

Those should also be fought, no matter who is doing it.

The GOP does that as well and pretending its only one side is absurd on many levels.

The lion's share of the mainstream media is biased to the left, and even at first many in the mainstream media gave a free pass to even to Antifa. It's well known that the GOP has an advantage in local politics. No one is pretending this isn't the case. However, the widespread conceit that the mainstream news is anywhere near unbiased still needs debunking. Badly. As in, society's survival is at stake levels of badly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qmiPWgCYb4

No, it's not. The lions share of media workers may have left-of-center leanings, but media firms aren't coops, so that doesn't actually matter; old media corporations are not owned and run by leftists, or even left-of-center-ists.

The mainstream media may be getting increasingly distant from the Republican Party by standing still (or, at least, moving to the right more slowly), politically, while the Republican Party continues the sprint to the far right that it's been doing since the moment the Democratic Party, led—dragged, really—by Bill Clinton, itself shifted right to form the center-right neoliberal consensus of the early 1990s.

(I call this response an “Overton Slingshot”, because while the tactical move to the right by Dems may have had short term electoral benefits for those left of center in getting slightly less conservative Democrats elected over Republicans—though whether it had any tactical value is itself highly debatable—it definitely was a long term disaster for them in the way it shifted the Overton Window.)

An analysis of the product indicates a clear bias. The left-leaning biased organizations far outnumber the right-biased ones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qmiPWgCYb4

since the moment the Democratic Party, led—dragged, really—by Bill Clinton, itself shifted right to form the center-right neoliberal consensus of the early 1990s.

In most western democracies, it's the center which needs to be allied with the administration in order to govern.

The shift isn't to the right. The failed embracing of Identity Politics and Intersectionality by Hillary was the final stage of a massive shift of the Democratic party in the center under Bill Clinton far to the left. Much of that was overseen by Obama.

Throwing out due process and freedom of speech -- individual rights -- is about as radical-left as you can get. In years past, such specific shifts would have been widely recognized as basically going as far left as Mao. It's basically throwing out the fundamental ideological basis of the United States. Now people are trying to convince people that this is "normal" and wanting such foundational individual rights is "shifting far right." Sorry, but anyone who remembers 10 years ago with a clear head can recognize this as a retcon of US history.

> “Governor Scott Walker’s refusal to hold special elections is an affront to representative democracy,” Holder said in a statement. “Forcing citizens to go more than a year without representation in the general Assembly is a plain violation of their rights, and we’re hopeful the court will act quickly to order the governor to hold elections.”