Donald Trump Jr.: If We Don't Fight Back Against Big Tech Censorship Now, 'We'll Never Get the Chance Again'

Donald Trump Jr. appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight, Tuesday, to warn that if America doesn’t fight back against Big Tech censorship now, it’ll never have the chance again.

“You talk to a lot of Republicans in Washington, do you think they understand the threat of ‘woke capitalism’, the alliance between the activist left and Big Business that is shutting down speech?” asked Carlson.

“I think they’re starting to get it. I think they’re starting to see it,” replied Trump “That’s why I’ve tried to utilize my platform. I did an op-ed in Real Clear Politics the other day because I see it from so many real Americans, guys that are just Second Amendment accounts, people follow me, like my politics, whatever it is, and they’re reaching out to me when I made a big deal of this, saying, ‘Wow, it’s happening to me too.’ But I have a platform to actually do something about it.”

“There are guys… Kevin McCarthy’s been pretty vocal about it… But the reality is, nothing has changed. I put up an Instagram post two weeks ago about the Smollett thing, because I had the gall to be a little bit cynical about the entire ridiculous situation that was laid out, and Instagram just deleted it,” Trump declared. “I sort of responded in my normal fashion, rather aggressively saying, ‘What’s wrong with this, here’s the problem…’ and I got inundated, Tucker. Hundreds of people sending me DMs. ‘Don, my account was shut down because I tried liking one of your tweets,’ or ‘I tried liking one of your father’s Instagram posts that was him and his grandchildren.’ Nothing even controversial. And time and time again, ‘I had to follow you, Don, three times in the last week because they keep unfollowing you.’ It is really sad, and it’s happening, and the excuse that, well, it’s ‘spam-like behavior,’ no, spam-like behavior is not making Instagram unfollow people who want to follow my content and conservatives.”

Carlson then replied, “So free speech doesn’t mean anything if people can’t hear you speak. And this alliance between the activist left and big corporations is preventing people from being heard, so it is in effect an attack on free speech… The media benefits from our freedom of speech, they are the prime beneficiaries of our First Amendment, and yet they don’t even cover it, and places like CNN actually encouraged companies to deplatform voices they don’t think should be heard.”

“I think the majority of the press are now left-wing activists,” responded Trump. “They are on the side of that… they are not on the side that is being oppressed. You have guys like me… again, I can do this because I have a big platform, I have a big soapbox, I can get it out there, but some of the little guys, they can’t, they don’t have that ability. They just end up taking it. You’ve never seen someone on the left say, ‘Huh, it’s weird Don, all of a sudden I’m following Fox News, I was never following that,’ like many conservatives are complaining to me and saying that all of a sudden they’re following these crazy left-wing accounts that they never signed up for. This is happening. It’s a one-way systematic attack on free speech, and to me, it reads like a trial run for 2020. How are we gonna do it?”

“I’m not saying that every account is suppressed, but you do it enough, you take off x percent of the top, you cut the message in half, you get rid of some of the viral nature of what my father frankly did very well in 2016. He played monkey in the middle with the media and what they tried to do with messaging. He went right to his people, right to the people with his message,” he continued. “He didn’t allow them to manipulate it, he went right over them. I think, to me, it reads as though they’re trying to figure out how to minimize that ability again, and let the media, which again, what 93, 94 percent left-wing activists at this point, and let them drive that narrative. Make sure that that is the only thing that regular hard-working Americans see. And we gotta call it out, we have to hit it aggressively.”

After Tucker asked, “what is the point of having a Republican Senate if they can’t stand up for free speech, especially when their own voters are being targeted,” Trump proclaimed, “I hope that this creates a platform for them to sort of jump on board to get it. Like I said, if it’s me, and I’m seeing literally hundreds of people, those are just the people who actually saw that post and are willing to take the time to reach out and send screenshots, imagine how many other people it’s actually happening to. Imagine how many don’t even realize that it’s happening… A lot of these companies are getting a lot of benefits from the government… It doesn’t seem like it’d be fair to have a one-sided platform.”

“You saw it, you covered it in the opening section, what’s going on with PayPal. They’re not even hiding it anymore. They’re not even pretending anymore, it’s just become the norm,” Trump continued. “If Donald Trump has shown conservatives one thing, it’s that you don’t just have to take the loss when the other side wants you to, you can actually fight back. You can fight back and win. I think we have to take that message to heart. I think we have to start pushing back, and I think we have to start pushing back hard. If we don’t, we’ll never get the chance again, Tucker.”
Carlson concluded by noting, “And there’s Republicans, elected Republicans going, ‘Oh, it’s just the free market.’ No it’s not, it’s fascism.”

“100 percent fascism,” Trump agreed. “That’s not the free market.”