Crypto executives used to love speech. What happened?
In 2021, a regulator named Gary Gensler launched a multi-year campaign to ruin the crypto industry. At the behest of his powerful patron in the U.S. Senate, Gensler and his allies brought the full power of the federal government—fines, criminal probes and more—to bear on law-abiding American entrepreneurs. In response, those entrepreneurs organized a political campaign that drove Gensler and his party from office. Their victory marked the crypto lobby’s emergence as a powerful new player in Washington, DC—one that stood for economic freedom and the right to conduct business free from the arbitrary abuse of government power.
So much for that. During the last week, a new regulator unleashed a wave of intimidation that would make even Gensler blush, and we didn’t hear a peep from the crypto industry. It was a different agency this time, but the behavior was all too familiar: After comedian Jimmy Kimmel made a tasteless joke, the chair of the FCC pressured a TV network to take him off the air. The regulator didn’t invoke law or due process, but instead warned like a mob boss “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” President Donald Trump then made clear there’s more where that came from, suggesting TV networks that cover him negatively should have their licenses taken away.
It’s the sort of arbitrary abuse of government power that crypto leaders hated when Gensler did it to them. But their response to this similar abuse directed at broadcasters has been crickets—or worse. For instance, pro-Bitcoin Senator Cynthia Lummis (R-WY), a self-described libertarian and longtime advocate for limited government, piped up to say it might be time to reconsider the scope of the First Amendment.
Austin Campbell, an influential stablecoin advocate, has been one of the few in crypto land to call out this state of affairs. In a tweet, he asked what has become of the advocates of free speech who recently—and correctly—decried Operation Chokepoint 2.0, the industry’s name for the Gensler-led effort to smother crypto. The hypocrisy feels even more blatant given how many crypto executives leapt to the defense of the developers of Tornado Cash on the grounds that the code they wrote is speech. Yet, now they have nothing to say as the government seeks to censor the actual speech of comedians.
You can make the case that, for crypto executives, defending the likes of Jimmy Kimmel is not their job. After all, it’s not like the CEOs of firms in the oil or pharma sector are rushing to wade into an FCC controversy. Still, and maybe this is naive, one would think that the leaders of an industry founded to promote ideals of privacy and freedom would be willing to stick out their necks just a little.
At the very least, they could do so out of self-interest. The founders of Coinbase and Kraken may be fine with Trump siccing the FCC on broadcasters who criticize him, but do they really want to endorse this sort of precedent? Would they be okay if the next Democratic president refuses licenses to crypto firms unless they express support for Woke Inc.?
Crypto execs would do well to recall the values of the industry’s first leader, whose distrust of government did not depend on which political party was in power. That leader instead put his faith in Bitcoin, which he described as a tool to “gain a new territory of freedom.” That leader’s name was Satoshi Nakamoto.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com