Jones confronted Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida outside the Senate Intelligence Committee meeting room Wednesday, where some members were grilling Big Tech over foreign government influence on the U.S. electoral processes via their platforms.
Initially, Jones asked Rubio about the shadow banning and censorship of conservatives on social media platforms. Rubio first seemed to blow off Jones’ line of questioning and he began to take questions from other reporters, The Gateway Pundit reported.
Determined, however, Jones persisted in his attempts to get Rubio both to admit that he knew censorship of conservative, pro-Trump media (including Jones’ Infowars and some GOP lawmakers). Again, though, Rubio ignored Jones.
Finally, Rubio seemed to suggest that Jones was little more than a heckler and even asked, “Who is this guy?” -- saying that he didn’t know who Jones was or anything about Infowars.
Then, as Jones reached up to pat Rubio on the back, he snapped, “Hey, don’t touch me again… Yea, but I don’t want to be touched,” as security moved in to separate them.
He even sorta, kinda hinted that he would “take care of” Jones on his own – a threat?
Rubio continued to answer questions from the fake news ‘establishment’ media as Jones continued to press him that not only was Infowars already banned and censored in a coordinated effort last month, but that the Democrat-aligned social media giants had plotted long ago to expand censorship of all Right-leaning voices, and especially those supportive of POTUS Trump.
Watch the tense exchange videoed by TGP reporter Cassandra Fairbanks:
https://twitter.com/CassandraRules/status/1037351378572730370
Rubio kept coming back to what could arguably be called a default talking point among the Washington elite: ‘Stopping foreign influence in our elections.’
Well, good luck with that, Sen. Rubio, considering that throughout the history of humankind rival nations have been attempting to influence each other’s’ political, social, and cultural values, policies, and mores.
In modern times this is especially true of Moscow, be it through the former Soviet Union or today's scaled-down version of Russia. We can’t forget China, either, or Iran, North Korea, and to some extent our allies as well. (Related: Forget ‘Russian’ meddling: Twitter is ALREADY shadow-banning GOP congressional candidates.)
Oh, and naturally the United States uses social media (to the extent it can in tightly regulated societies) to influence adversaries as well.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t try to limit the effect of foreign influence operations, but the big, fat elephant in the room that Jones was attempting to get Rubio to acknowledge was the influence operations being run by the Democratic Party via their allies at the major social media platforms.
Rubio did tell CNBC that he didn’t think regulations were the answer and that he hoped “competition” – a free-market principle, to be sure – would be enough to counter the likes of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google, and others.
But what about ahead of the midterm elections? Is Rubio interested in maintaining his party’s control over the House and Senate? Isn’t he concerned about the plot to deny backers of his party the right to speak freely on platforms that built their massive followings on the promise of free expression?
The Democrats and their allies are destroying our democracy because they’d rather tear everything down and steal power than work through the system and compete with Republicans on the level playing field of ideas and policy.
Rubio should know that.
Read more about the social media censorship at Censorship.news.
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