When I hear Katie Couric say on the lefty Bill Mayer show that Republican congressmen and women who were Trump supporters would need to be “deprogrammed” and listen to distainful remarks from Willy Geist regarding what constitutes almost half of America, I know something is terribly wrong. These are not hard line political commentators. These are soft side not particularly erudite TV hosts that would in normal times be overseeing cooking segments with celebrity chefs or chatting up an actor on his new film. Yet there they are chirping out dangerous comments on the American people.
They are part of a bubble that encapsulates the majority of our media. Most of the people they talk to and work with every day hold views similar to them — Trump bad, people who support or supported him, bad also. They believe they, the bubble brigade, represent the country. People who hold contrary opinions seem weird and even sinister to them or at best malprogrammed needing reprogramming or worst yet total silencing.
But there is a more dangerous component to this. The big tech leadership that controls modern communication and provides the screens that our children spend a great deal of time using are intrinsically linked to this bubble. Hence, they provide the people who want to shut down opposing viewpoints the tools for doing just that. We only have to look at how the New York Post was stopped from echoing negative but accurate information on Joe Biden during the election and worst still how President Trump and other conservatives have been banned from the major social media platforms. These corporations have grown so powerful that they can effectively squash free speech. It’s a new problem that requires new solutions, before unelected corporate elites who are part of the bubble control the flow of information for the entire country.
And the solution doesn’t lie just in finding and using other marginal platforms - you already see what happens there, Parler is just an example. We have to stand together on issues that are important - free speech the main one of them. Start locally. Blast the local paper with letters now. Contact your local and state representatives on this issue now. Stay on the main stream social platforms and blast away going to the pages of elected officials and influencers and insist that companies not be enabled to restrict our first amendment rights. It is nonsense to say that these social giants are private companies that can do what they want - they are monopolistic utilities that control access to huge populations. These platforms are the printing presses of today and we can’t be silenced on them if we are to remain a free people. We also need to resort to email, snail mail and other traditional ways to get our message out. - tmurtha