If we consider our enslavement by political correctness “small stuff we can sweat,” if we tell ourselves to be still as uncomfortable ideas around us are canceled, the story of America is finished. No other issue we examine in this book will matter, because the future will belong to the controllers forever and ever. Political correctness and its Big Tech hall monitors are more dangerous than any South American caravan or Middle Eastern mullah. If we lose, it will be the only fight that mattered. If we win, every future debate is a fair one and therefore we are the favorite to win them.
You never know when the mob will come for you—or for the voices that stir your American First ambitions. You must always be ready. The mob is always waiting for its chance to take your scalp. They are the witch-hunters who never want to run out of witches. Tweet the wrong thing and you’re erased, just like that. But preemptively give up the arena—the public square—and it will be like you never existed to begin with. Invisible.
Why bother with politics, why bother with anything, if nobody hears what you say or argues for a better nation? What if Reagan had been banned from TV? Or Obama from the internet? Or Trump from Twitter? As each of those communications revolutions occurred, those of us who wanted to partake and might have an unpopular view had the element of surprise. Now, though, we have targets on our back—every deplorable among us. That which our enemies could not achieve through election, they now seek to do through algorithm. It’s all about shutting us up. Well, I aim to misbehave. I was promised we would win so much we’d get tired of winning, and I’m not yet the least bit gassed.
Bill Clinton’s Democrats of the ’90s would “Mediscare” old people—especially in my beloved Florida—to win elections, making people think they’d be left without doctors. Those politicians, tactics, and targets may be fading away, though. Today’s woke Left is after the young, the future. It seeks to dominate them with debt and diminished expectations—but most of all by narrowing their intellectual horizons.
Millennials and zoomers experience the world principally through their phones. Control what they see, and you control their destiny—and ultimately all of ours. What sorts of things will trend on that phone? What ideas will be permitted? What arguments will be suppressed, curated, or promoted? Meme magic (manipulations through catchy ideas) is real, and there are magicians among us, with quite a few practicing the dark arts.
Like the president, I use Twitter to go directly to the people. And like the president, my successful use of technology angers my political opponents, precisely because I am so effective at it. They’d like to think that they alone control the conversation because they control the narrative. They tilt the field of debate in their favor. All tech companies go through an evolution: liberation, then corporate control, then government control, and ultimately woke left-wing despotism. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and centralized power makes controlling thought easier. Those who own the platform think they own the content—and therefore they have no need to debate; they simply bid ideas they dislike adieu. Shaming and shadowbanning are easier than winning the votes of real Americans, they’ve learned.
They really do shadowban the arguments they don’t want people to see—like when Twitter got busted by Vice News for shadowbanning the four members of Congress most aggressively defending Trump: Meadows, Nunes, Jordan, and Gaetz.
We are “too dangerous,” they tell us. But real danger befalls a people managed and programmed by prevailing thinking at Manhattan dinner parties or Silicon Valley gender-intersectionality seminars. The Left treats us as children. We are so weak that we cannot confront the strange, uncomfortable, and even horrid thoughts expressed in a free society, they say with their demands for censorship. But the First Amendment doesn’t exist only to protect pleasant speech. Sometimes we necessarily are all unpleasant—especially in politics.
Politics is inherently divisive. Congressmen used to cane each other. Roman senators stabbed Caesar. Cuban representatives break into fistfights in the Florida legislature every few years. Sure, we should all aspire to the most austere of political engagement. And yet when we fall short, now the digital death penalty is imposed, and it’s both prosecuted and enforced by faceless cogs who we will never meet. It is a cold regime. There is no appeal. It is un-American to be deprived of the opportunity to face your accuser. It is positively antihuman.
For the most part, the prison wardens of Woketopia are right that Republicans don’t know how to communicate, so censoring them isn’t really necessary. Few bother to seize the narrative. Instead, they sacrifice boldness at the altar of fear. To avoid Twitter Jail, they won’t commit the crime of independent thought or provocative speech—assuming of course they have either to offer. But then, it’s downright shocking how ineffectual most Republicans are. The court of last resort isn’t the Supreme Court but the court of public opinion. You should learn to joust and engage in combat if you ever expect to win. The public loves a champion and will tolerate you getting knocked off the horse and muddy if you get right back up and get back to it.
“We ain’t one-at-a-timin’ here, we’re mass communicating!” to borrow a line from one of my favorite movies, O Brother, Where Art Thou? When we’re tweeting nowadays, we’re governing and doing so at the speed of thought. We wanted flying cars, but we got 140 and now 280 characters. I intend to make every one of them count. Leftism requires carefully laid plans because it needs to work so hard to sell the lies it is peddling. Twitter allows us to disrupt the cycle and to always keep them on their back foot, unsure of when and where we will hit them next.
Twitter also has many participants who, like all cults, do little thinking and much signaling. Sycophants will happily retweet
