You Were Warned About Big Tech, Mr. President
Trump's failures on tech made his censorship possible and now destruction imminent
Dear Mr. President,
Allow me to tell you how it’s going to be for you over the next few years but before I do let me just this: I told you so.
You did not listen the first time I talked to you about this matter. You preferred the fantasy that Twitter really wouldn’t suspend you and that you’d be permitted your Twitter account. You did not care that your supporters were systematically purged from the platform which helped you ascend to the presidency. You did not care about anyone but yourself. Narcissism is a lonely life but you knew that, didn’t you? It’s why you were loyal only to your family and your corrupt son-in-law.
So now you’ll suffer and you’ll suffer with your sycophants, whose welfare you did not take into consideration when you goaded them to take the Capitol, but you’ll suffer all the same. How strange it is that you threw your own supporters under the bus faster than the rioters this past summer… Were you that concerned about being called racist as America’s cities burned? To be a leader you have to lead. And what does your base have to show for your fake leadership?
Now that you’re alone and isolated this is how it’ll go for you.
First they’ll deplatform you. They did that tonight. Then they’ll denigrate and defame you. Then they demonetize you. (That’s what the Shopify ban is about. Say, why is a Canadian company allowed to sell in America anyway?)
And when you are defenseless, Mr. President, then they’ll destroy you and everyone around you. Your wife may leave you, or extort you, or write a tell-all but you are done now, sir. It’s over.
And they’ll delete everything you worked on, everything you scarified for, everything you believed in because you couldn’t be troubled to do the work.
This is your future, too, because you did not listen to voices like mine.
That’ll be the path for President Donald J. Trump, whose failures on tech censorship will be his enduring legacy.
In the end nothing else will really matter. If we can’t civilly and peacefully communicate then there’s little point to having self government. Governments are formed by reflections and choice, in the best of circumstances as Publius would have it, and those choices become impossible when they aren’t even presented. Democracy becomes a sort of Hobson’s choice.
I’d like to say you can “take it or leave it” but you can’t really leave it. No, you’re just going to take it. That’s what the tech companies and their handmaidens in government have said to you.
These disgusting — dare I say “deplorable”? — violent incidents like this past week that have become all too common in our society. The common denominator is that the tech companies have all but encouraged our cold, e-civil war, thanks to their enragement is engagement business model.
It’ll fall to other companies like Clearview, ironically built from social media, to keep us safe from the lawlessness that the tech companies have unleashed upon the rest of us by at least guaranteeing that any would be rioters, be they antifa or Q Anon, do as the rest of us must and “wear a mask!” Naturally Clearview is being targeted by the ACLU, funded by, who else? Big Tech!
This lawlessness brought by Big Tech was always in the offing. What began with an Arab Spring has now become an American Winter.
Oh you thought the destabilization of the world through social media wouldn’t come here? Oh how naive. I tried to warn people about the way in which activists like Black Lives Matter’s DeRay Mckesson were weaponizing Twitter to cause massive damage in America’s cities without concern for how such carnage would affect America’s business owners, property holders, or urban renters.
I made this prediction in 2015. How right I was. How sorry I am have to be right.
The social media companies want to blame Trump but the problem isn’t Trump: it’s them. They’ll scapegoat Trump and his supporters, though, because it’s easier than confronting what they’ve done, privatizing and limiting and narrowing our public square to a sort of sanitized mall. Except in a mall you can actually have free speech. (I made this very same argument in the courts—only to lose.)
The one and only conversation I have had with President Trump was over social media censorship.
I had even spoken to Jack Dorsey about the massive censorship of Donald Trump’s supporters and Dorsey assured me that conservatives weren’t going to be censored wantonly. This was a lie and so I went to the Wall Street Journal when they asked.
And yet the censorships continued. As I told a friend close to Trump at the time, Jack Dorsey had slid his cock down Trump’s throat and Trump thanked him for it. Please forgive the graphic visual but nothing else will suffice.
The unseriousness could have been in how Trump’s team invited a bunch of nobodies to the social media censorship forum. He could have listened to those of us who knew this issue intimately but he chose not to.
These failures were why I didn’t back his re-election, preferring to stay out of politics altogether.
If President Trump cares only for himself why should I care for him?
I saw the future because I had lived Donald Trump’s future. I pray that it’s not your future but I suspect it will be.
For everyone else, heed this: Leave social media behind. It’s your only path to freedom and the good life.
Then free from the narcissism engine you’ll be able to think clearly. And this is when you’ll be the most powerful you’ve ever been. When you can learn the friend-enemy distinction.
You will come to believe that your cancelation was the best thing that ever happened to you. That is, if you manage to shut the fuck up and reflect, brood, and regroup.
There’s a lesson here, too, for other would be leaders of the party.
Do you remember when they thought Laura Loomer insane? When Senator Josh Hawley ran from her? Well his book on Big Tech just got canceled by Big Tech. Maybe Senator Hawley should have realized that Laura and I are the author of his future.
The number one issue for the 2024 presidential candidates will be where were you when Donald Trump had the election stolen from him.
The next question will be what did you do when your supporters were swatted like flies on the platform that once advertised itself as the “free speech wing of the free speech party”?
Say, if a company offers you free speech and delivers unfree speech, isn’t that fraud? Good luck finding a court that’ll enforce that tort!
We have Section 230 for me but not for thee and don’t you dare try to build an alternative. If you do, we will deplatform you from the Apple Store and from the Google Play account. And if you somehow survive that, we have friends at Visa and Mastercard who will shut you down.
What did you do about any of this censorship, Mr. President? Not a damn thing.
Trumpism was a slogan and a hashtag but never a movement.
The president tried to do something about big tech and the swamp stopped him.
I stead of repeating “I told you so” over and over, what exactly was he supposed to do to stop big Tech? EO them out of existence? He’s only one man, AG maybe could have done something with anti-trust lawsuits but sat on his ass. The tone of your message is BS. Social media was one way for like minded people to find each other, and they are trying to destroy outlets for people to vent. As that frustration builds, so does anger and violence as people continue to be oppressed. Maybe we need to go back to speakeasys and pamphlets.