The Parler Problem

Conservative losers don't want "free speech." They want fact-free speech.

Photo by Andre Hunter on Unsplash

Republicans are total losers.

In the last seven Presidential elections, they have lost the popular vote six times.

Along the way, having failed to convince Americans they had the best ideas, Republicans (as I first tweeted in 2011) became the “Party of ID-ers.”

The biggest idea that the GOP has had since Obama got elected was to stop Black people from voting.

Primarily with new voter ID laws designed to, in the words of one appeals court, “target African-Americans with almost surgical precision.”

Also by relentlessly targeting Black voters with messaging designed to demotivate them from voting, as the Trump campaign’s “Deterrence” strategy did on Facebook in 2016.

And also by closing polling places to ensure long lines in minority communities on Election Day, a tactic known to “lessen the turnout of people who disagree with your position.”

In 2020, Black voters refused to be deterred. The GOP lost the popular vote again. Trump even lost bigly in the white-minority-rule-favoring Electoral College. Thanks to the great work of Stacey Abrams and others, Trump even lost Georgia (where the fight continues in January with two runoff races to decide which party controls the Senate.)

Loser Republicans can’t win on facts. They can’t win on ideas. They can only win by cheating.

They’ve mastered the art of cheating at elections. And now they have a new way to cheat on social media, too.

Enter Parler.

As CNN describes it:

Parler, founded in 2018 by John Matze and Jared Thomson, bills itself as “unbiased social media” and a place where people can “speak freely and express yourself openly without fear of being ‘deplatformed’ for your views.”

Parler is funded by Rebekah Mercer of the “deep-pocketed” Mercer family famous for running Trump’s 2016 “psy ops” campaign and for planting Steve Bannon and Kellyanne Conway into the first popular-vote-losing Trump campaign.

Parler also, apparently, has an interesting “origin story,” involving a tech guy who met a Russian tourist in Las Vegas in 2016. (I’m not saying all Russian “tourists” are spies, but.)

Since the election, millions of fact-hating conservatives, low-info voters and white nationalists have flocked to Parler for the chance to interact with their favorite GOP nutjobs and Fox News celebrities under the guise of “free speech.”

These corrupt politicians and Fox News grifters have heavily promoted the Mercer-funded (Russian-influenced?) site, quite possibly because they anticipate the possibility of their Dear Leader being banned by Twitter as early as January 21. (He has, after all, says the NYT: “posted over 300 tweets attacking the integrity of the 2020 election since election night, unleashing a cascade of false and misleading claims.”)

“Free speech” is a fine idea, but as PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel told me in an interview earlier this year:

Part of the problem is that our digital discourse and media landscape have become so fragmented that ideas may surface only in some narrow  estuary of the like-minded where they are never challenged or rebutted. Only when they build up momentum and attract significant followers do they become more visible to the mainstream, at which point the converted may be very hard to pry away with reasoned arguments.

Meanwhile, despite Parler supposedly having rules against posting “false rumors,” the site is also becoming the source of election disinformation such as the made-up story about a military raid in Germany that seized servers which revealed Trump had actually won the election, “with a whopping 410 electoral votes and Biden at just 138 electoral votes.”

After getting mentioned on video by reliably nutty GOP Congressman Louis Gohmert, the story went viral among RWNJs on Facebook.

Parler may or may not succeed in the long-term. But for now it’s a “safe space” for conservatives, Nazis and those who love them.

Liberals who go there to mock (or fact-check) these losers in the name of “free speech” report that they have quickly been banned:

Parler isn’t a welcoming place for liberals. But it is the new, respectable-seeming way for Republican politicians and right-wing personalities to connect with the racists, extremists and conspiracy theorists who previously had to hide in the darker corners of the internet, until Trump turned them into the new (easily monetizable) “GOP base.”

At a time when the country needs unity and sanity to fight the virus and rebuild the economy, Parler’s only apparent role is to deceive aggrieved white voters and reinforce the dangerous divisions in American society that Trump has so recklessly expanded.

As former TIME magazine science editor Charles Alexander writes in his new (free) newsletter here on Substack:

Decades of intensifying political warfare have divided us into rival tribes… Once you’re in a tribe, you don’t easily leave it. Your friends would call you a traitor…. the sad, banal truth is that most people voted for Biden or Trump out of habit and tribal loyalty. Facts and policies weren’t that much of a factor.

In this age of tribalism and misinformation, the sad truth is that Parler is just a gathering place that allows low-info losers to lie to each other as much as they want.

It isn’t a place for free speech. It’s a place for fact-free speech.

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