This is a piece for you paying subscribers. Considering my own interest in this subject there is a possibility that I will make this one public in a week or so, but in the meantime, please feel free to share this with anyone that you think might find this interesting. Thank you for supporting my curiosity and work with your subscription.
Before there is any confusion on the matter, this is not an advertisement for Parler. On the contrary. This piece is an attempt to shed some light on this new-ish platform, the inherent racism and proto-neo-fascist being propagated on it that comes with some serious, more overarching questions.
A big question I asked myself before researching and writing about this was: should I? Fact is, Parler is a cesspool of racist & fascist white anglo-saxon nightmares and I firmly believe in de-platforming their nonsense. It is why I never allowed any of the death threats made against me on IG etc to be seen. On the other hand, I find it incredibly important to know what your enemy is doing and passing that information forward. Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away, sadly. Take that conflict of motivation with you as you read this. Researching the constructs, ideas, money trails of the far-right is fascinating to me, only to learn how to beat them, yet, talking about it also accentuates their status. Yes, I created an account to share some hot takes with you on here as well. A lot to take in for a Sunday.
I started hearing about Parler a few months ago, nothing significant, mostly just small time chatter in the background, however, the intensity of said chatter has significantly increased in the last few weeks. Initially, I put that down to twitter’s increasing flagging of Trump’s account but as always, there is so much more behind that assumption.
To start though - Parler is a twitter-like new platform for the extreme right. Obviously, that is not how they sell themselves but in a nutshell it is. Imagine being so far off the rails that places like Facebook and Twitter ban you - granted, if you are famous enough and generate enough engagement for these platforms to sell advertising on, you can essentially get away with a lot of heinous hate-speech. A few facts for a warm up round:
Parler (French: parler, lit. 'to speak') was founded by John Matze and Jared Thomson. In the last week of June 2020, it was estimated that the Parler app had more than 1.5 million daily users. As of July 15, 2020, Parler had 2.8 million total users and had been downloaded 2.5 million times, nearly half of which were in June. Throughout June and July Parler on several occasions was highly listed on both the Apple and Google Play app stores, in various categories and overall. The Parler app was downloaded nearly a million times in the week following the US Election Day on November 3, and became the most popular free app on both the Apple App Store and the Google Play Store. In November 2020, The New York Times reported that Parler had added 3.5 million users in a single week that month. As of November 2020, the service had about 4 million active users, and over 10 million total users. Incredibly, a lot of big time radical right to “centrist” conservative politicians, talking heads and propagandist are active on the site, you name them, they’re on their.
In December 2018, the site received a massive influx of new users thanks to publicity from “far right” LARPers Candace Owens and Cassandra Fairbanks. Many operatives reserved accounts that month as a result of this push, including Owens’ pal Kanye West. As the company grew in 2019, they turned to Jesse Benton, a political operative who had worked with Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell. Benton was indicted and found guilty of election finance violations. Benton is married to Ron Paul’s granddaughter Valori Pyeatt.
You can see where this is going, it is essentially aiming to be, if not already so, a right-wing platform free of their so-called media censorship. Ironically, it is also advertising it’s privacy dedication - considering that the money makers behind Cambridge Analytica are involved in this is just another extreme level of Orwellian Double-Speak.
Scratching the surface further, it becomes incredibly important to ask who is financing all of this and then why? As frighteningly entertaining it can be to dip into the mind of these lunatics we have to remember that it is 99% performative and paid for - the aim is to marginalize and radicalize portions of the mostly white public to destabilize our democracies. This is the play here - it is a global power play that the decline of the US imperialist position has created, a power vacuum that both China and Russia want to fill - that is the geo-political and capitalistic framework of all these events.
Dave Troy started putting out some serious research on twitter about the financial structures and ties of Parler and following are a series of screenshots that explain this better than I could:
Essentially, the picture becomes clearer and it is safe to assume that this platform is being financed by your usual extreme-right wing billionaires, predominately from the US. Their plans for the future are clear, their ties to Russia and China aren’t. I am still in the dark and fear that my gut call is a little too tinfoil hat conspiracy vibey at this point. I’ll say this though, the fact that billionaire US citizens are pouring money into infrastructure and people to deconstruct and destabilize western democratic countries and are potentially working with the actors that are eager to fill the vacuum created can be interpreted as the ultimate class struggle. Nationalities really matter not to the 1% - nationalism is nothing but a tool to keep us peasants entertained and pitted against one another. Maybe it is time to see these power plays in that context, it certainly makes sense to me. That, however, is the long term view, and the 1% thinks as it can afford to, multi-generational. In the short term we are looking at a small piece of the puzzle that should be a concern for many of us.
Not only is the increasing division of any public discourse extremely dangerous, but giving these lunatics a privately run platform without any public sway over their hate speech, pfew, I don’t know about you, but my fear-of-the-white-planet spider senses are tingling. Obviously, this train of thought then begs the question of social media as whole, that ties in to freedom of speech, propaganda, public vs private / corporate interests and rights and so far. It is a giant can of worms and I am nowhere near being informed enough to start that debate.
So what next? Is this something that “we” need to keep an eye on? I think so, but again, it is also important to not-overplay the importance of this when you have giant monopolies like Facebook still very much supporting Trump and Bannon’s plan for the future. Zuckerberg and his company require far more scrutiny and disruption than this place does.
Matt Binder over on Mashable wraps up his piece on Parler quite well:
Is Parler here to stay? It’s hard to tell. It's become very popular on mobile app charts before. But many conservatives didn’t stick around for long. No “alternative” social networks, like Gab or Minds or BitChute, have broken through the big social media platforms to become just as popular. For comparison, Facebook has 2.7 billion users. Twitter has 330 million. Parler has an estimated 4.8 million.
Parler faces all of the usual tech startup challenges: keeping users engaged on the site, staying competitive when most of its users' friends are on more popular platforms, signing up new users from different circles and communities.
And Parler also faces unique challenges due to its politics. How do you keep your platform from turning into a white supremacist haven like other right-wing social media platforms without losing your “free speech” bona fides? And, once you start moderating that content, what's going to keep conservatives from leaving a platform that no longer prioritizes "free speech"?
Perhaps, that’s a question for Dan Bongino to figure out. Bongino is a popular conservative personality. His posts on Facebook are often some of the most shared content on the entire site, beating out news outlets like CNN and Fox News and, sometimes, even President Trump.
In June, Bongino announced a partnership with Parler, including the news that he'd purchased an ownership stake in the company. The “free speech” social network has been plastered with his content ever since.
But, perhaps the biggest element determining Parler's future is the president himself. A majority of the content on the site is centered around Trump. Yet, while his reelection campaign is quite active on the site, Trump is MIA on the platform. He doesn't even have an account
There you have it, and admittedly I do agree with the above analysis for the future. It is definitely worth keeping an eye on this, a large part of anti-fascist work is research into who your enemies are and what they are up to. This is part of it. Thanks for stopping by and reading.