[Since this went to post I’ve seen that Google Play has already banned the Parler app. Apple is likely to follow shortly. – J.E.]
Those of us who have been warning about how fast the forces arrayed against freedom will act are being proved right on Friday, 8 January 2021.
President Trump was kicked off Twitter permanently today, after being banned from Facebook and Instagram as well. Twitter cited the 6 January riot at the U.S. Capitol, using the theme that Trump incited it.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Apple is now using the same theme to demand that Parler, the micro-blogging site gaining in popularity as Twitter de-platforms and represses the speech of users, submit a “moderation plan” if it wants to remain available in the Apple app store.
BuzzFeed reports that “In an email sent this morning and obtained by BuzzFeed News, Apple wrote to Parler’s executives that there had been complaints that the service had been used to plan and coordinate the storming of the US Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters on Wednesday.”
We needn’t haggle over where the “complaints” came from; they probably came from Apple employees, political activists, or Nancy Pelosi’s office, for all we know.
The point is that this is the rapidity with which the Big Tech media will act to try to consolidate the gains of the radical Left in the days ahead. It’s already starting. A manufactured complaint based on what was demonstrably a small fringe — practically no one, relative to the size of the crowd in Washington on 6 January, participated in the breach of the Capitol — is being used to de-platform a president and cut off social media communications, probably for millions. Parler may be not just ejected from the Apple app store but fully de-platformed by next week, if it doesn’t conform to Big Tech’s demands.
Consider: the assumption ought reasonably to be that virtually 100% of Trump’s supporters will continue to comport themselves as they have for the last five years. Not once has a Trump rally ever devolved before into anything like what occurred on 6 January. It is more than legitimate — it is necessary — to question closely why this one was different. The president didn’t speak beforehand any differently from the way he usually has. (By contrast, it must be noted, black-bloc groups have been rioting for months and have done far more damage, destroying businesses and lives and getting people killed in St. Louis, Portland, and Seattle, just to name a few locations, without any reaction from social media companies.)
But action is being taken before we have answers to legitimate questions about the 6 January riot. Nothing justifies the media companies in taking these steps. (Indeed, if there are actually people planning unrest via social media, as claimed by the media companies, tell the police or the FBI! Intelligence bumper crop. Cut off the individual users, at most. You don’t shut down AT&T cellphone service or Yahoo! email or snail-mail service to a whole demographic because some customers might use the services in question to commit crimes.)
Moreover, it won’t stop with the Big Tech media. Anyone who thinks some form of “calm” or “normal” will be restored on 20 January is fooling himself. The stakes are the highest they have ever been in history, because there is no firewall for the world’s peoples if America goes down. If we go, the world goes with us. Political opposition can be silenced at will; there will be no refuge for liberty.
Delay in securing that outcome is manifestly not what the operational planners of the Left have in mind.
I urge everyone not to engage in demonstrations. They will be hijacked and misrepresented. That appears to be what Trump recognized in his request to supporters to go home. Please do not make this easier for those who want to proclaim a crisis in order to take drastic actions. But please do understand that what we see the media and the rest of the Left doing is an indicator of what they will continue to do, and on an accelerated timetable. They are telling us who they are and what they intend, with every current action (including the wholly unnecessary and incendiary act of preparing to impeach Trump again, when he has only 12 days left in office). Believe them.
I recommend spending time praying; God doesn’t favor the abuse of peoples by those with power, and He knows that millions of Trump supporters are not responsible for what a few criminals did on Wednesday, any more than all Democrats are responsible for what Antifa does repeatedly to downtown Portland and Seattle.
Keep hope alive, but not based on any illusions about what your fellow men in the media and politics are going to do. You may long to “get back to normal,” but they don’t. Clamping down on social media isn’t a consequence; it was the objective. It’s not the only one on the list.
