Imagine that spouses in a marriage increasingly lived separate lives, socializing with different circles of friends, eating dinner apart, watching TV in separate rooms, and avoiding substantive discussion because they found it impossible to talk matters out. Wouldn’t you suspect they were heading for a break-up?
Now imagine that much of the division resulted because one spouse banned the other from his circle of friends, dinner table, and TV room and refused to discuss differences rationally, instead preferring to just hurl names. Whom would you most blame for an impending separation?
It used to be that while Americans were divided by party, they generally interacted together in other arenas such as church, community organizations, and social clubs. The modern versions of social clubs, writ large, are social media. This brings us to some striking recent news stories.
Twitter has permanently banned President Trump’s @realdonaldtrump account, and Facebook and Instagram recently suspended his accounts on their platforms (GoogTwitFace now dwarfs everyone). Michelle Obama then put in her two cents, calling on all of Big Tech to ban Trump permanently.
Similarly, popular conservative social commentator Dan Bongino has been locked out of his Twitter account, and the company has suspended the accounts of lawyer Sidney Powell and former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn, to name a few.
Moreover, conservatives across Twitter are noticing that the site has been deleting many of their followers for the last 36 to 48 hours. This has been happening to me, too, and I initially thought it was something I’d said. (It was, actually. But what I said was Truth — and it wasn’t my followers who were offended.)
This is unsurprising, of course. Big Tech has long been censoring traditionalists (Facebook recently slapped on one of my articles a false “false information” warning). In fact, the censorship is so severe that liberal psychologist Robert Epstein has warned that the tech companies have the capacity to shift up to 15 million votes in a national election (which helps give us senile presidents).
The Left does this for the same reason there are speech codes on college campuses, hate-speech laws overseas, and draconian punishments in North Korea: to stifle dissent. The Truth is powerful and the Left’s mortal enemy.
The issue, however, is that conservatives don’t disappear simply because you ban them from Big Tech platforms; rather, they move to Little Tech platforms — which then become bigger.
President Trump reportedly now has an account at Parler.com, a free-speech-oriented Twitter alternative, and millions of his loyalists will no doubt follow him there. Bongino announced that he’d no longer be using Twitter and would instead focus on Parler, and the latter is seeing a general surge in usage as conservatives, now made political refugees, migrate there.
The result is the intensifying of our national divide. Admittedly, there’s much name-calling and ad hominem hysteria on social media, but there also is some exchange of ideas among people of different political stripes. But this can’t happen, at all, if liberals and conservatives each occupy their own separate Internet nations.
Note here that peace talks are valued because it’s often figured that if people are talking, they’re not fighting. If Joe Biden were serious when he spoke of “unity,” he’d inveigh against the Big Tech effort to separate Americans by expelling conservatives from their platforms.
But, of course, leftists are interested only in a forced, superficial unity won via a dissident-quelling iron fist. They aren’t interested in debate because this can reveal Truth, which refutes their agenda.
The result is that the battle lines are being ever more sharply drawn. Aside from the social-media division, to a far smaller extent liberals and conservatives may even patronize different businesses, as “woke” companies alienate superciliousness- and sanctimony-weary citizens. (For Christmas, I sent someone a gift from the Black Rifle Coffee Company largely because of its patriotic leanings.)
So disgraced ex-presidential candidate John Edwards famously said in a demagogic 2004 speech that there are “two Americas,” and there are (actually more), though not in the way he meant. Yet while the Left is exacerbating this phenomenon, it also has a “solution.”
That is, again, the leftist goal of stifling dissent, of concluding the “pacification effort” I warned of in 2012 and cementing control by ensuring that opposing ideas aren’t even heard. And right on cue, leftists are addressing the conservative migration to Parler — by trying to shut the site down.
Parler’s app “has been banned from the Google Play Store,” reports NewsChannel 12, and “Apple has threatened to remove Parler from the iOS App Store.” Parler’s chief policy officer, Amy Peikoff, addressed this attack last night on Tucker Carlson Tonight (video below) and appeared concerned that the Big Tech targeting could threaten her company’s very survival.
Of course, as Tucker Carlson points out above, wickedness from child porn to the planning of violent insurrections are facilitated by Big Tech. Despite this, it’s Parler that CNN complained in November was a “threat to democracy” and “bad for the country.”
This is true, too, in a “War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength,” 1984 kind of way, where “democracy means domination.”
This targeting of dissent won’t stop with Parler, either, as the walls continue closing in. This is why traditionalists need to focus on what they can possibly effect: nullification in red states. For if they don’t, red and blue won’t matter because it’ll be fade to black for America.
