Turning Bystander Americans Into an Active Citizenry Against Big Tech Censorship

Written by Robert Knight

Former President Donald Trump will soon launch his new social media platform, Truth Social, and it can’t come any too soon.

The reigning Big Tech powers, so full of hubris that they banned the former president, are a massive part of the leftist cabal that is remaking America in the image of San Francisco, Chicago and New York. These cities are amid moral meltdowns, crime waves and an epidemic of homelessness.

Silicon Valley thinks the rest of America needs to achieve this sort of sophistication.

Leftist politicians who crafted these disastrous outcomes have significantly benefited from Big Tech’s enforcement of the cancel culture, which prevents damning truth from reaching what they see as “the masses.”

They especially hate Mr. Trump. Not only did he reverse many bad leftist policies imposed by the Obama Administration, but he exposed the venality and bias of Big Tech and Big Media. No one is supposed to do that, with or without mean tweets.

The Trump Media & Technology Group is serious about competing. It recently signed an agreement for “wide-ranging technology and cloud services” with Canada-based video and news site Rumble Inc., which claims 44 million monthly users.

This is still embryonic compared with Facebook’s 2.85 billion and YouTube’s 2 billion monthly active users, but you have to start somewhere.

The new platform’s growth, as with fellow upstarts Parler, MeWe, Gab, Telegram and others, will depend on how many people are tired of being messed with by social media royalty.

The more people connect the dots between Big Tech, Big Media and the litany of unfolding disasters wrought by the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party, the faster alternative platforms will grow.

The silver lining to galloping inflation, pandemic fatigue, tyrannical government overreach, cultural insanity, the illegal immigration tsunami and the upsurge in urban violence is a populace waking to the idea that they can no longer afford to be bystanders; they have to become active and take back the country.

History offers a sobering lesson for those willing to listen. Before you tell me that no one is ever supposed to invoke the Nazis for any reason, tough beans.

A film at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., shows how the German people were, through carefully orchestrated propaganda, co-opted into enabling a totalitarian regime.

Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and his National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) media machine did not have to turn their fellow citizens into mass murderers; they only had to turn them into bystanders.

At the same time, they vilified Jews until the average German felt no obligation to defend his Jewish neighbor when the Brownshirts began persecuting them and eventually hauling them away to the death camps.

Since the 1960s, and especially over the last decade, the left has been fighting a culture war designed not to turn Americans into communists but to make them so fearful of violating evolving standards of “tolerance” that they become bystanders. More and more people have become afraid to engage in honest discussions of public issues lest they be accused of being “haters,” “bigots” or “deniers.”

At the same time, Christians are pilloried, ridiculed and lied about, as detailed in David Horowitz’s book, “Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America.”

Since evangelical Christians make up a significant portion of the “unvaxxed,” the ruling elites equate the two. A Los Angeles Times article, citing a survey in August about vaccine hesitancy, reported that “The definitely nots are mostly white (65%) and Republican (nearly 6 in 10). About one-third are evangelical, white Christians.”

The article also notes that “As the COVID-19 pandemic resurges, the roughly 7 in 10 adult Americans who have gotten vaccinated have begun to lose patience with the 3 in 10 who haven’t. In much of the country, especially Democratic-majority cities and states, public policy has begun to reflect that.” This was before more recent studies indicated that fully vaccinated people were contracting the virus and transmitting it.

That hasn’t tempered former conservative and “Never Trumper” David Frum, now a leftist writer at The Atlantic. In a Dec. 12 tweet worthy of Goebbels, he called unvaccinated people “the malignant minority.”

You’ve got to be careful about reporting stuff like this. Dissent on a range of issues can result in cancellation on social media or at least an attached warning that your view is suspect or false. The censors at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube pounce on contrary information about COVID-19 vaccines and alternative treatments, election fraud, climate change, the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and anything that annoys LGBTQ or BLM activists.

They don’t even need to remove a post they don’t like; they just insert an algorithm that makes the post virtually disappear from search engines. They do this routinely to conservative content while boosting liberal content, something that a couple of Facebook “curators” admitted a few years ago.

I’ve had many friends hauled into “Facebook Jail” or suspended from Twitter for sharing accurate, documented information. One friend merely posted a quote from former President Barack Obama. The censors told my friend that it was an “out of context” post.

“But there was no context whatever,” he said. “I just posted a sentence verbatim. For about a week after that, my posts went into oblivion, with no comments from anyone.”

Mr. Trump’s new venture describes itself as “America’s ‘Big Tent’ social media platform that encourages an open, free, and honest global conversation without discriminating against political ideology.”

Sounds like the promises made by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram when they were in their infancy.

If America is going to move beyond “bystander nation’s” doctored information flow, we had better hope that Truth Social and like-minded sites keep their promise and get big enough to compete with the powers that be while they still can.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.