Skip to content
Breaking News Alert Georgia House Guts Bill That Would Have Given Election Board Power To Investigate Secretary Of State

If President Trump Makes His Own Platform He’ll Break Social Media’s Stranglehold

Share

Well, President Trump read my mind. Months ago, I discussed on my podcast how he could save free speech on the internet. Trump just announced that he’s building a 2020 campaign infrastructure that will mostly leapfrog the Big Tech industrial complex and take his messaging directly to supporters. Think of it as an online version of farm-to-table.

Politics is sales, and here’s my pitch for how Trump can become the next tech icon. I realize he’s been busy keeping many of the promises he made as a candidate, so perhaps my request is unfair. I’m mindful, however, that he has similarly ambitious and entrepreneurial children, who are also very active on social media.

Americans Are Mostly Powerless

From thinker Dennis Prager to the New York Post to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, we’ve watched the major Silicon Valley tech behemoths purge speech and rhetoric with which they disagree. It’s no small irony that the same tech companies, such as Google, that manipulated search data to help Hillary Clinton (part of the faux socialist resistance to the rich and powerful) comprise an absurdly rich and powerful conglomerate of omnipotent tech demigods.

Think long and hard about this: what, really, can the American people do about shadow banning? Or sudden, abrupt removals of comments or posts? Or popular videos that are placed on page 425 of a search engine? Or, worse, ones that are blocked from public viewings, due to creepily arbitrary “hate speech” standards?

Perhaps most disheartening is the fact that we don’t know what we don’t know, and now that the toothpaste is out of the tube, it’s likely that the tech companies will never be able to restore trust in their impartiality and integrity, much the same way many Americans will never again trust the DMIC (Democrat Media Industrial Complex). People buy and decide based on perception, and the perception that Big Tech is hostile to conservatives is nearly irreversible at this point.

Sure, conservatives could cease use of tech and social media platforms, but this would, in a way, benefit Democrats. What about regulation, First Amendment lawsuits, and antitrust litigation? All sound promising, in theory, but do we really want the federal government anywhere near the internet? How exactly would the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission keep up with the 24/7 flow of data and content created by billions of users?

Answer: they won’t, and Big Tech regulation would just mean more big government––an information superhighway iteration of Cash for Clunkers. Big Tech would be, at any given moment, years ahead of even the most rigorous regulatory requirements (and don’t get me started on Attorney General Jefferson Sessions).

Furthermore, is there really an antitrust or First Amendment case to be made? When the federal government won its landmark antitrust suit against Microsoft in 1998, it won on the legal basis that Microsoft was stifling its competition. Pray tell: how do the current tactics of Big Tech stifle competition? Those who have been exiled from third-party mediums all have their own websites; I’m unaware of any evidence that Big Tech has done anything to directly obstruct their abilities to get noticed and found on any Internet search engine.

As John Stossel recently remarked, tech companies likely have the constitutional right to kick whomever they want off their platforms and app markets. Want to sue them? Go right ahead. Taking down, for example, Apple, the world’s first trillion-dollar-valued company, would be easy-breezy, wouldn’t it? Although I’m not a bettin’ man, I suspect the same justices who sided with baker Jack Phillips would side with Big Tech if push came to shove.

Trump: The Tech Icon?

So, if more government, lawyers, and playing nice won’t work, what would? Answer: self-reliance and less reliance on large tech platforms in general.

Trump and his family have made a vast fortune. Providing a viable alternative to his tens of millions of supporters—in which users post, comment, and upload free of the tyranny of Big Brother-ish uncertainty that no one will see their content due to manipulation of algorithms designed by foreign workers who can’t even vote in our elections—-would make an impact overnight.

The president himself has said that without Twitter, he might not be president. If true, that’s a testament to him and his former digital media director (and current 2020 campaign chairman) Brad Parscale, more than it is a testament to Twitter.

SiliTrump Valley. Trumpbook. TrumpTube. Trumpinterest. Trumpagram. Heck, create a new search engine, free of manipulation: Troogle. Name me one Trump supporter you know who wouldn’t use the full suite of the Trump Valley platform; you can’t. (This is the part where Never Trumpers such as Ben Shapiro and Sen. Ben Sasse lament the echo chamber.)

I have a two-pronged theory as to why we’ve not seen a Trump-branded mode of online communication: first, the president and family don’t know how to make the many moving parts synchronize (I do, but I won’t yet reveal. As the Joker said in “The Dark Knight,” if you’re good at something, never do it for free). Second, the Trumps don’t know how to monetize it.

Like everything else they touch, Democrats have destroyed speech on the internet, irrespective of its asininity. So, Mr. President, please consider what I’m saying. It all sounds impossibly daunting, but so was your electoral win—-a win that was America’s political black swan event. At the 2016 Republican National Convention, Ivanka Trump boldly stated her father’s election could make the impossible possible.

So embolden and unify our side. Send the Tessio Republicans, as well as the Democratic Party and their corporate sycophants, reeling further into their downward spiral. Channel your inner Sonny Corleone and take it personal, as many of your supporters have.

Big Tech and their Democrat sympathizers in Congress are on the ropes, and they know it. This is a time to relentlessly attack, in the spirit of Gen. George Patton, whom the president is fond of quoting at rallies and pressers. With the midterms fast approaching, time is not our friend; a sense of urgency is necessary to defang the Democrats. The opposition seeks to subvert our will and our Constitution by impeaching Trump for the crime of winning more than 270 electoral votes.

The Democrats and Tessios thought our victory was just a fad, and that we’d lose interest once the new car smell waned. Democrats in particular viewed the 2016 defeat of The Original But Now Second Chosen One as a bump in the road en route to owning the presidency, the courts, and the internet forever. Much to their chagrin, what seemed guaranteed to fade away has moved in the opposite direction, steered by a fired-up and excited voting base.

Politicians aren’t saviors or messiahs, and this includes Trump. Devoutly secular worship of government––the belief that the State, capital S, is God––is inherent in the Democratic Party’s ideology and marketing. However, Trump could redefine what it means to be a man of the people.