Twitter has caved to the pressure from the left and announced that it will no longer run political advertisements, including any for candidates running for president in 2020. That’s because Democrats view free speech as a threat and want to regain their iron grip over “The Narrative.”
After Donald Trump’s historic victory in the 2016 presidential election, liberals embraced all sorts of conspiracy theories to explain how Hillary Clinton lost an election that virtually everyone expected her to win. Unable to accept the election results as a repudiation of their corrupt candidate and the Democrat Party’s legacy of failed policies, they insisted that the Trump campaign must have cheated.
They ultimately settled on “collusion with Russia” as their hoax of choice, but even after spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars on a two-and-a-half year investigation into that “#resistance” fantasy, the best that former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of Democrat lawyers could come up with was evidence that a handful of Russians had posted some memes on Facebook — which didn’t stop Democrats from going apoplectic over the supposedly grave threat to our democracy posed by the online sharing of photos with humorous captions.
Apart from exonerating President Trump of the scurrilous allegations leveled against him by vindictive Democrats, the main takeaway from Mueller’s investigation was that Democrats are extremely concerned about the power of social media to circumvent the standard media channels they control. Legacy media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times are vital to the Democrats’ political power, using their influence to create an “echo chamber” in support of liberal viewpoints.
Over the course of Donald Trump’s presidency, the left has pursued this strategy more aggressively than ever before, deploying its legions of loyal liberal journalists to craft a Democrat-friendly narrative at every opportunity. The unsuccessful effort by liberal media outlets to defame Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh should have given them pause, but instead they sunk even lower by embarking on a nationwide smear campaign against a high school student, Nicholas Sandmann, demonizing him as a bigot based on nothing more than his decision to show his support for the president by wearing a MAGA hat. As these appalling cases of journalistic malpractice illustrate, today’s mainstream media act more like public relations firms on the payroll of the Democratic Party than independent seekers of truth.
President Trump’s revolutionary use of social media, however, broke the left’s stranglehold on the flow of information and allowed our campaign to fight fake news in real time.
As the president’s campaign manager, one of my most important duties is making sure that we provide potential voters with the real facts in response to the disinformation put forth day in and day out by the Democrat-controlled media. Advertising is an effective way to do that, albeit not nearly as effective as President Trump’s own Twitter account.
It’s no secret that we’ve worked hard to develop the most sophisticated digital operation in the history of American politics, and the Democrats are clearly terrified of our growing ability to communicate President Trump’s positive message of unity, prosperity, and American greatness. By preventing our access to advertising, Twitter is trying to put its thumb on the scales ahead of the 2020 presidential election, even though that means forgoing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue.
They want to take on the role of liberal gatekeeper in the digital age, but at what cost? Their naked political bias is irresponsible to their users and shareholders, and is another sign of their ideological delusion.
Democrats aren’t used to competing against their political opponents on a level playing field, so they want social media companies, especially Twitter and Facebook, to carry water for them just like the legacy press has done for so long. Democrat presidential candidates are even calling on Twitter to ban President Trump from the platform altogether. Democrat lawmakers on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, are threatening to dismantle Facebook if the company doesn’t police “hate speech” on its platforms.
By “hate speech,” of course, they really mean “conservative speech.” If you don’t think liberals will be allowed to get around restrictions against political advertising on Twitter, you’re kidding yourself. If I’ve learned anything during my time working for President Trump, it’s that liberals refuse to play by the rules they set for conservatives.
No wonder Hillary Clinton and her fellow Democrats are cheering Twitter’s decision to ban political advertising. Because social media executives are in bed with the Democrats and most of their employees are far-left ideological zealots, Facebook and Twitter reliably use their power and influence to undermine conservatives and advance a radical liberal agenda. This is especially true when they claim that a given decision is motivated by considerations of “fairness.”
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey effectively acknowledged as much in his statement defending the ban on political ads, in which he argued that “political message reach should be earned, not bought.”
In other words, Dorsey thinks that political candidates should only be able to communicate with voters if their messages are vetted by and filtered through mainstream media gatekeepers. There’s no doubt that he would gladly ban President Trump from the platform completely if he thought he could get away with it.
Unfortunately for the left, Twitter advertisements were only a small part of our strategy for 2020, so Twitter’s ban is going to hurt them a lot more than it hurts us. We have plenty of other advantages, including a data infrastructure the Democrats simply cannot compete with, that will enable us to communicate the president’s message even more effectively than we did in 2016.
The Democrats view free speech as a threat to their political ambitions — and they’re absolutely right. But banning political ads on Twitter won’t be nearly enough to save the Democrats in 2020.
Brad Parscale is the campaign manager for Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.