The effort to destroy Joe Rogan helps illuminate the nature of the current political battlefield. It’s not about normal partisan politics. Rogan isn’t a Republican. In December he said that if Michelle Obama ran for president in 2024 she’d beat Donald Trump.
Rogan is a thoughtful and curious interviewer who has attracted an enormous following of 11 million listeners, making his podcast one of the biggest in the world. The Left is going after Rogan to test-run a kind of political power never before so successfully exercised in America—autocracy. If the Democratic Party and its allies in the press and social media can topple one of the biggest media voices in the world, they will have shown they can shut down anyone.
What’s needed is a platform that guarantees freedom of speech for America’s pro-America majority.
Here’s where Devin Nunes steps into the fight. He retired from his Central California congressional seat in December to become Chief Executive Officer of the Trump Media and Technology Group. Τhe most pressing project there is Truth Social, a social media platform that will challenge established, and increasingly autocratic brands, that are in partnership with the U.S. political faction led by Joe Biden and his former employer Barack Obama.
“Social media and big tech represent an ideological battlefield,” says Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “And because these platforms are now inherently political, it’s good to have someone like Nunes who knows the stakes and the lay of the land. He understands that nothing is normal when it comes to these social media platforms, they are ideological.”
The plan is to have Truth Social ready to go by Spring, in plenty of time for the November midterm elections. Nunes served nine full terms in Congress and stepped down during his 10th. According to colleagues, he believed he would be more helpful designing the communication infrastructure that would allow Americans to communicate with each other and ensure space for elected officials and candidates to message the American public without interference.
“It couldn’t have been an easy choice for him,” says author and Hoover Institution Fellow Victor Davis Hanson, also a neighbor of Nunes’ in California’s central valley. “If Republicans take back the House in November, he would have been in line to become chairman of the Ways and Means committee,” one of the House’s most important positions, with jurisdiction over taxing and other revenue-raising measures. “But Devin thinks he can do more for conservatives and the country by ensuring Republicans and others fighting Orwellian censorship have a way to communicate without being censored.”
Unlike many on Capitol Hill, Nunes has run a number of businesses, his first as a teenager, but he has no experience as CEO of a large publicly traded company. What made him an ideal candidate for the post was, however, is his work on Capitol Hill, leading (as chairman and ranking member) the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. That background in intelligence work, how American enemies target us through all means of subterfuge, will prove indispensable in his new role.
“The Democrats and their allies will throw everything they have at TMTG,” says Fitton. “The company will be denied access to things you wouldn’t think they could be denied access to. There will be scorched earth attempts to shut them down. Nothing will be off limits.”
And Nunes knows they’ll be coming after him, with as much destructively maniacal force as they did trying to derail his investigation into the FBI’s probe of the 2016 Trump campaign. Nunes saw through the Russiagate narrative, and discovered that federal law enforcement had used programs designed to keep America safe from terror against American citizens. His 2020 book Countdown to Socialism is an account of the press and social media’s central role in pushing information operations against the Democratic Party’s enemies.
“I was among the many who were disappointed to hear he had left Congress since he was one of the few incorruptible figures there,” says Nunes’ publisher at Encounter Books, and author, Roger Kimball. “His dogged efforts to get to the bottom of extraordinary corruption were exemplary, especially as he took on a malicious cabal of deep-state operatives and the media who saw he was getting close to the truth about the Russia collusion narrative.”
Kimball says he was proud to publish Nunes’ book. “It articulates the disastrous hold social media and gigantic tech entities have on the free exchange of ideas in our country. In the book, Nunes describes ‘The Funnel,’ or how entities like Google, Facebook and Twitter shape what we see and read, distort the news and prevent us from knowing about important things, and affect our responses.”
What’s driving the decisions made by Big Tech and social media isn’t a business model dependent on the idea of rational self-interest. Rather, it’s ideological warfare in partnership with Democratic Party elites.
“It’s clear the big tech companies are not making real business decisions anymore,” says Fitton. “Their decisions are based on other calculations—they are hostages to the government. Reuters confirmed that the Biden White House is meeting with big tech companies to get them to censor people. And if they don’t? It’s like being a bar owner when local toughs come and extract protection money from you.”
Nunes’ role then is to make Truth Social the central node in a pro-free speech communications infrastructure. “It’s an alternative to Big Tech and social media, a foil to Silicon Valley and the culture of smugness and censorship,” says Hanson. “Devin has a sixth sense of what’s important and what’s not. He saw well ahead of everyone else what was going on with the Russiagate, and he didn’t back down. He will never back down if he knows he’s right.”