Matt Gaetz: ‘Congress Not Going to Rein in Big Tech, Congress Owned by Big Tech’

Congress cannot be trusted to take on Big Tech’s political censorship because Silicon Valley has purchased politicians’ compliance through lobbying, warned Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), author of Firebrand: Dispatches from the Front Lines of the MAGA Revolution, offering his comments on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

“Congress is not going to rein in Big Tech, because Congress is bought by Big Tech,” Gaetz said. “There are just simply too many members of the House and Senate who are beholden to Big Tech either because of political donations or because their family members are getting employed by Big Tech.”

China similarly procures political influence across America by establishing financial ties — including employment — with the family members of politicians.

“What we need is a focus on appointments to the FCC and to the FEC with people who understand the extent to which Big Tech bias is actually election interference and is also a violation of our communication standards and that they wouldn’t fall under certain liabilities under the Communications Decency Act,” Gaetz said.

“Don’t count on Congress to ever solve this problem,” Gaetz said. “We need direct focus on the appointments to these boards, and it’s why the second term of President Trump is so important, because a lot of these boards have staggered terms.”

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Marlow asked about birthright citizenship. He said, “Birthright citizenship has always been an absurd premise to me, that the location of a woman’s anatomy would determine whether or not an entire human being is an American. It makes a zero sense to me. How did it get that way and what can we do to work on that?”

Gaetz invited observers to consult the Claremont Institute’s analysis of birthright citizenship.

Opposing views of birthright citizenship are reflective of a conflict within the Republican Party, Gaetz said. “Are we going to stay with the values of Trump — these America First values, where we hold precious that which is American, where we value it so highly that we wouldn’t allow it to be to be diffused or to be in any way neglected? Or are we going to go back to the invade-everywhere, invite-everyone approach of the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Romneys and the Kasichs?”

“Trump is the front end of the wave, and we need that next generation of leaders ready to step forward and grab that mantle,” added Gaetz.

Gaetz described political corruption he observed in Washington, DC.

“I got to Washington and I was disgusted [with] the way it was straight up money for favors,” Gaetz said. “I felt like being a member of Congress would be like the noblest of professions, and it felt like the oldest profession, where you just pick up the money on the nightstand and do the bidding of the special interests, and what I saw in President Trump was this patriotic sincere desire to break through that nonsense and to actually frontload solutions that could help the American people.

“It didn’t take me long to learn that sucking up to the leadership or paying off committee chairs with campaign donations wasn’t going to be my path to success, naming post offices for a decade before you actually get to do any substantive reform, and that the way we were going to capitalize on this energy in the America First movement was through the actions of the president,” Gaetz said.

Gaetz said Trump’s political rise ushered in a “political realignment” on issues of foreign policy, immigration, international trade, and populism.

“I am done with the Chimerica Dream that has become a nightmare that so many Republicans in the past have advanced, and frankly, a bunch of them have gotten rich off of it,” declared Gaetz, referring to the push for greater integration between the U.S. and China. “They leave Congress and then go and work for these companies on these boards where the Chinese Communist Party has extensive influence.”