Five days after the violent insurrection by President Donald Trump’s supporters at the U.S. Capitol, there was no bigger story on Fox & Friends than the tech giants’ decisions to de-platform Parler, one of the primary apps used to organize the MAGA mob.
What started on Sunday with Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) whining to Maria Bartiromo that “Republicans have no way to communicate” now that the Twitter alternative has been effectively removed from the internet by Apple, Google, and Amazon Web Services turned into a full-on freakout Monday morning with both hosts and guests screaming that it marked the end of the First Amendment, or in Jeanine Pirro’s case, something “akin to Kristallnacht.”
After Ainsley Earhardt shared the big news with viewers during the first few minutes of the broadcast, co-host Brian Kilmeade asked: “How scary is this? I don’t care if you’re even interested in politics. This shows these aren’t independent companies. This is a monopoly.”
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“This to me is a five-alarm fire for America,” Kilmeade added, noting that President Trump has now lost millions of “followers” on Twitter and Facebook as well after those companies decided to permanently suspend his accounts for inciting violence. Nowhere did the host elaborate on why those private companies have taken this unprecedented action.
Later, they invited frequent Fox contributor and major Parler investor Dan Bongino to rant about the story. “Do you understand we were wiped out?” he asked. “Listen to me, America, we were wiped out!”
“I have not slept all weekend,” Bongino admitted. “They have effectively tried to bankrupt me and my investors on Parler. And you know what? They won!”
“Don’t be surprised if they come for Fox next,” Kilmeade warned. “They might not like what’s coming out of Fox.”
Then, in what resembled a threat, Bongino added: “You think this is gonna help? You’re worried about radicals, like everyone on this network is, including me? You think this is going to de-radicalize everyone? Pushing them underground? To have to meet in speakeasies? You think this is helping?”
And then there was Fox News host Jeanine Pirro, who, as could have been expected, went further than anyone else, when she compared the removal of Parler to the massacre of Jews across Nazi Germany in 1938.
“Look, they gave us a taste of this pre-election when they suppressed the Hunter Biden story,” Pirro began, referring to Twitter’s decision to block a misleading New York Post story about Joe Biden’s son. “And now that they’ve won, what we’re seeing is a kind of censorship that is akin to a Kristallnacht, where they decide what we can communicate about.”
When none of the three hosts pushed back on that, she falsely called Parler’s removal a “First Amendment” violation before asking, “Is this the America that our Founding Fathers intended? Since when are people telling us we can’t say x, y or z or if you say it, you'll be canceled?”
Pirro later attempted to clean up her comments with an out of context tweet that read, “Although book burning started earlier, Kristallnacht included the destruction of Jewish stores, homes & synagogues containing rare Jewish books & Torahs. My reference was in context of books.The Holocaust was the greatest hate crime the world ever tolerated. I abhor all violence.”
So to be clear, she does not believe preventing conservatives from inciting violence on social media is equivalent to the killing of Jews.
