By James Pethokoukis The Week
During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, so the story goes, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent President John F. Kennedy a letter offering to remove missiles from Cuba if the U.S. pledged not to invade the island nation. But before Kennedy could respond, Khrushchev sent a second, more bellicose letter, demanding the U.S. also withdraw its Jupiter missiles from Turkey. According to the traditional recounting, Attorney General Robert Kennedy suggested accepting the proposal in the first letter and simply ignoring the second.
There’s actually a name for that kind of deliberate misinterpretation as negotiation tactic: the Trollope ploy, inspired by an incident from an Anthony Trollope novel in which a woman interprets a slight hand squeeze as a marriage proposal. The idea of the Trollope ploy came in handy this week as I struggled to understand the strange policy switcheroo happening at the Heritage Foundation, a wellknown conservative think tank.
I had heard Heritage was releasing a big, buzzy report attacking Big Tech as a censorius oligopoly conspiring to suppress conservative speech and deserving of aggressive antitrust scrutiny. Yet after a quick Google search, I unexpectedly arrived at an utterly reasonable and thoughtful bit of Heritage scholarship, “A Conservative Guide to the Antitrust and Big Tech Debate.”
The report correctly concludes that the crux of growing right-wing populist hostility toward Alphabet-Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook (Microsoft, not so much) — including calls to break them up or even nationalize them — concerns the issue of perceived bias. Sure, the issues that anti-Big Tech folks on the left gripe about, like privacy and anti-democratic corporate power, may occasionally get a shout-out on the right. But that’s just to give the right-wing bias argument a bit more intellectual heft and broad appeal.
