I had just finished reading about conservatives leaving Twitter for another platform because of Twitter’s favoritism toward the left when I came across a new Democrat Super PAC that will use President Trump’s own tweets against him. The Super PAC, known as Defeat By Tweet, launches today.
The left hates that President Trump has such a huge platform on social media, with 82.4 million followers on Twitter alone, every time he posts a tweet millions of people see it. There have been efforts to get Trump kicked off Twitter but so far the best that the people trying to deny the president his First Amendment rights have been able to accomplish is Twitter’s new warning tag on some of his tweets. Clearly, the warning tag was created specifically to ding Trump. The Defeat By Tweet PAC will allow supporters to give recurring contributions to the organization every time the president tweets.
The effort is being led by a Silicon Valley tech executive. Xander Schultz founded Complete Labs Inc, an app that allows people to organize and share their daily to-do lists. He is involved in venture capital as a partner at NextGen Venture Partners, a start-up investment fund. Now he is looking to get millions of micro-donors to raise money for organizations that work against the re-election of President Trump.
Those funds will then be used to finance get-out-the-vote organizations, along with criminal and social justice reform groups, such as the Color of Change and the Black Voters Matter Fund. The PAC also intends to reply to Trump on Twitter with a receipt of how much each tweet raised for the group.
The goal specifically is to finance get out the vote campaigns and to influence down-ballot races. The irony is that while the left is trying to pin all of the racial tensions and violence on President Trump and/or Republicans, the inconvenient fact is that the cities with the most problems making the news headlines are run by Democrats. Are the social justice warriors telling voters to vote out the Democrats in charge of those cities? Of course, they aren’t because this isn’t really a battle about racial equality or a protest against police brutality. This is a movement to fundamentally change America. The leftists among us are taking this time in history to try to usher in not just their socialist fever dreams but also a new era of Marxism. All you have to do is do a little reading on the Black Lives Matter movement to see the strong Marxist philosophy that lives within the founders of the organization. They are proud to call themselves Marxists.
In an interview with CNBC, Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Investment Partners, pointed to Schultz as the architect of the PAC, particularly as it pertains to the retail and grassroots approach of encouraging new donors to start giving anywhere between 1 and 10 cents per tweet.
“It’s all about funding these groups that help finance and organize for those down-ballot races. The single best thing to help criminal justice reform is to actually invest in these races,” Novogratz said. “That’s how people get to the ballot box and more than likely those people will also vote against Trump.”
Beyond his commitment of $1 million to this endeavor, Novogratz told CNBC, he made another major financial commitment of writing a six-figure check to the Biden Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee between Joe Biden’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
Schultz says he hopes the PAC raises over $100 million by Election Day in November, with the goal of helping these groups that are fighting for change in Black and Latino communities. Many of them vocally oppose Trump and are calling on voters to support Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Allegedly, the death of George Floyd is what inspired the creation of the PAC. Never let a crisis go to waste. The bad Orange Man tweets about law and order and holding people accountable for the destruction of public property, like monuments, and it offends them. So, a “tax” on Trump’s tweets, which they say is hate speech, will be used to work for Biden’s election in November. The tax is the micro-donations from the PAC’s supporters. And the PAC hopes to get lots of celebrities and influencers on board to use their large followings on social media. From the website: “Your donation is going to the Justice Fund, a portfolio of 32 excellent black-led and centered grassroots political organizations working at the intersection of electoral politics and justice reform in the swing states.”
Schultz said the PAC’s primary partner is the Movement Voter Project, which says it supports “hundreds of incredible organizations that both turn out unlikely voters and organize communities to grow their power and create transformation, from policy to the streets.”
They also connect donors “to the most effective grassroots voter organizations in the country that are mobilizing their communities in critical battleground states and districts where we must win in 2020.”
The emergence of this Super PAC falls on the same day that conservatives are hoping to promote an exodus from Twitter by other conservatives in response to Twitter’s continued liberal bias. Margot Cleveland, a free speech advocate at The Federalist, realistically cautions conservatives about jumping to Parler in hopes of doing real damage to Twitter. It will take a “critical mass of people engaging on the platform”, she says, or it will never compete with Twitter. She’s right. Conservative actions to switch social media platforms usually fail because there are simply more liberals on social media and conservatives aren’t natural followers, as a rule. Nonetheless, she is advocating Free Speech Friday today. She points to the warning tags on Trump’s tweets and the suspension of conservative accounts like that of Carpe Donktum as reasons for the move to Parler.
These incidents came on the heels of Google threatening to ban The Federalist from Google ad revenue based on offensive comments to articles left by third parties. The specter of a left-leaning big tech company deplatforming a conservative outlet in an election year prompted outrage from Republican politicians and raised the urgency for lawmakers to narrow the immunity granted social media platforms in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.
There is a consensus in conservative circles that Google, Twitter, and Facebook hold a bias against the right and as a result silence (or quiet) conservative voices. The right, however, disagrees on the solution. Amending Section 230 is one option, but exerting market forces is another, and a more, conservative solution.
But will it work? Or is Twitter too big to flay? There’s only one way to find out: exert those market forces.
It makes for an interesting end of the week.
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