There are some very exciting developments underway in the realm of social media because the Right is finally getting its act together. This is overdue — I wish it happened yesterday — but it's happening today, and it's going to continue to happen tomorrow and beyond.
The extreme censoriousness of the mainstream platforms is clear. I see just recently that Twitter suspended an account of the Maxwell trial tracker, an account providing factual details of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Evidently, Twitter decided to shut that down because maybe too many awkward names might come up. You can see this happening on Facebook, the censorship continues on YouTube and even on Twitter. Perhaps even more with the new CEO Parag Agrawal, who has said, somewhat infamously, he's "not to be bound by the First Amendment."
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis called these digital platforms the censorship arm of the Democratic Party, I guess in the same way Antifa or BLM is the paramilitary — the thug arm — of the Democratic Party.
For a while, conservatives were, it seems, at the receiving end of all of this. Our platforms — in one case, Parler — didn't really seem to work all that well. Parler was, in a sense, taken down in a coordinated strike, but it's now back up. The big kahuna here is going to be the Trump platform. If Trump can get this platform to work well, it's going to be a juggernaut. Devin Nunes just announced he's going to be stepping down soon as a congressman to become the head of the Trump platform, and Nunes is a fighter. It's going to be proven a very good choice.
But the left is already sensing that something big is happening here, and I see right away that Trump's SPAC, the shell corporation that has taken the Trump platform public, is under investigation by two federal agencies: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA). Both of them have dashed off a bunch of questions to the Trump SPAC and media group to say, in effect, please give us a list of this and a list of that, a list of your meetings, a list of your directors, what progress have you made so far. And this is within the law, but you can see the political targeting here. Just about three weeks before these letters went out to the Trump platform, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) demanded that a federal investigation begin into this platform, saying, "Nobody is above the law and there may have been serious violations of security laws during the proposed merger of Digital World Acquisition Corp. and Trump's media company."
The relentless assault against Trump continues, but I should say that investors don't seem to be freaked out. The Trump media platform launched the SPAC at a value of $10, but it's now at $43, so basically, a 400 percent gain already with probably a lot more to come when the platform actually launches.
To give a little bit of context for all of this, it's important to note that conservatives do a lot complaining about why the left dominates this and why the left dominates that, and it's rare that we do something about it. But we have done something about it in two areas, and we've had fantastic results. The first area is talk radio. When Rush Limbaugh started, talk radio was not dominated by the right. But Limbaugh basically became the towering dominant figure in talk radio along with, of course, a number of others. Salem Media Corporation, which cosponsors this podcast, has become a powerful force in radio. Dan Bongino, Mark Levin, and many others. We dominate talk radio; we don't complain about talk radio — because we sort of own it.
Similarly, in cable news, you had CNN, the pioneer; they went out front. And they appeared to have a kind of Amazon-style dominant, invincible position. Then NBC announced it was launching MSNBC, so you had a huge network getting behind another cable channel, and it looked like conservatives couldn't possibly compete in that kind of space. Fortunately, through the combination of Roger Ailes — the creativity of Roger Ailes — and the entrepreneurship and money of Rupert Murdoch, we got Fox News Channel. And now, you can say our side dominates cable news. We don't dominate media, not by a long shot. But in the cable space, Fox News Channel has as many viewers, I believe, as CNN and MSNBC put together with some to spare.
Conservatives can compete in the marketplace, but we haven't been competing in the digital platform marketplace, at least not at the same level. Think of how huge Facebook is and how huge YouTube is. But now, finally, our platforms are getting out the gate. The most powerful platform currently is Rumble — which I believe has 40+ million followers — is downright awesome. The two biggest figures on Rumble are Dan Bongino and me, at least at last count. Rumble is huge, Gettr is getting bigger and growing fast, Parler is back, there are other platforms coming.
I am delighted to see we are not just complaining about tech supremacy and the evils of Big Tech — which we should complain about — but we're also building alternatives that I think have the potential in the long-term to be even bigger than those mainstream platforms are now.