http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455216/ajit-pai-chairman-federal-communications-commission-faces-racist-attacks-threats-violence-progressives-remain-silent
Online Activists Launch Racist Attacks against Ajit Pai
January 8, 2018 4:00 AM
Ajit Pai is under attack. The Federal Communications Commission chairman has
been the target of online vitriol since the FCC voted to reverse the
net-neutrality regulations that were instituted under the Obama administration.
The attacks against him have frequently been racist: Pai, an Indian American,
was told on Twitter that he is “THE UNCLE TOM OF THE INDIAN PEOPLE.” The
criticisms have been personal: Outside his house, Pai was greeted with signs
reading “Is this really the world you want [your children] to inherit?” and
“Dad murdered democracy in cold blood.” And they’ve veered toward the credibly
violent: Pai has now has received his second death threat. The first forced him
to briefly postpone the net-neutrality vote, and the latest was disturbing
enough for him to withdraw from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a major
conference in the tech world.
Despite it all, defenses of Pai are few and far between. The media have
lambasted his decision to reverse the net-neutrality regulations but remains
conspicuously silent in the matter of the attacks against him. Maybe there
would be a different level of concern if Pai supported the Obama-era
regulations and was being threatened by net-neutrality foes, but social-justice
ministers pick their spots.
Pai’s net-neutrality speech, though “briefly disrupted by an evacuation of the
meeting room,” was “specious,” Jacob Kastrenakes wrote at the Verge. His
publicity videos, William Hughes complained at the A.V. Club, are a “dumb” part
of a “minor Internet culture war” that Pai is “waging.” When Pai withdrew from
CES, Hughes wrote this week, it was a matter of him “bailing on the chance to
be the most hated person” at the show. If nothing else, give Boing Boing’s Cory
Doctorow his due for writing what Hughes only intimated: that Pai’s withdrawal
from CES was a show of “cowardice.” The photo headlining Doctorow’s article is
of Pai’s face photoshopped onto a fried chicken; the tags include “seriously
f**k that guy” and “the courage of his convictions.”
Such criticism has come from not only writers but also celebrities — Mark
Ruffalo called Pai a “rogue player,” and Chance the Rapper predicted on Twitter
that Pai “will go to prison.” Aside from the scarce outlier (such as April
Glaser’s “Racist, Threatening Attacks on FCC Chair Ajit Pai Won’t Save Net
Neutrality,” at Slate), the media- and culture- industry playbook on Pai is to
shrilly criticize his actions but ignore the bigoted attacks and threats of
violence against him.
Those attacks and threats make for a story worth thinking about, one that in
another context might interest the same people who are studiously ignoring it.
Pai, after all, is the first Indian American to serve as FCC chairman: The son
of immigrants, he has an impressive résumé in business and government, yet he
is being targeted by the mostly white and male digerati class. No writer seems
willing to touch the racial angle, but one can easily conjure visions of a
story about computer-addicted white men in dark basements coming after a
high-achieving Asian American. Pai is a successful, visible member of a
successful and increasingly visible community within the American ethnic
patchwork, one whose rise has come in the face of racial discrimination — and
in some cases provoked even more.
It’s not as though the media are incapable of writing such a story. Back in
2015, Ellen Pao, an Asian-American tech executive who was then the CEO of
Reddit, decided to give that site’s then-feeble harassment policy some teeth.
The immediate result was weeks’ worth of high-testosterone venom from the
Reddit faithful, who posted Pao’s home address online, marshaled 200,000
signatures for her ouster, and mocked her appearance — all for the crime of
banning subreddits such as “Transfags” and “FatPeopleHate.” Yet the backlash
against Pao elicited a reciprocal one from the media, which rushed to Pao’s
defense. Pao became a hero to women, racial minorities, and their self-declared
allies, a fearless battler against a certain strand of toxic Internet culture
that is dominated by white men. Those who police the bounds of acceptable
opinion welcomed Pao into their ranks.
Even if net neutrality is your guiding passion, Pai is not your enemy. Congress
is.
Not so with Pai, and the obvious reason is that he’s on the wrong team. Pai’s
critics say that his FCC has made a decision that is beyond the pale and that
undermines democracy. But there are reasonable arguments on both sides of the
issue; Pai’s acting on one of them is hardly a moral failing. And putting the
merits of his decision aside, the policy reversal was anything but
undemocratic: The Obama-era rules in question were implemented without input
from the democratically elected legislators who are supposed to be our
policymakers, so the FCC’s action to get rid of them was a procedural
corrective to Obama’s executive overreach. Even if net neutrality is your
guiding passion, Pai is not your enemy. Congress is.
The Left and its evangelizers in the media and culture industries profess to be
deeply disturbed by online racism, but they have greeted the vicious attacks
against Pai with a notable silence rather than a spirited defense. Pai is a
Republican implementing policies Republicans favor, so it follows that any
opposition to him is a good thing — no matter how racist, personal, or
threatening it becomes. The unlikely and unspoken alliance between progressives
and Pai’s unhinged attackers is one of partisanship and convenience.
— Theodore Kupfer is a William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at the
National Review Institute.