Let’s say you’re a conservative, and after watching Big Tech attempt to single-handedly destroy Parler, blame Trump for inciting riots in the Capitol, and try to shutdown legitimate stock trading on Robinhood, you’re now really worried about social media censorship. You probably saw my previous posts on MeWe and NextDoor, and think there might just be no options.
Don’t lose hope! Since I couldn’t get Parler to test out, I double-downed and worked through the MeWe interface. If you need help building an account, there are hundreds of “How to get started on MeWe” videos to watch. After you create an account, do the following:
If you liked memes, find a memes group. I would regularly browse Facebook and Reddit for memes. It brightened my days up and made me laugh. Reddit has become disappointingly hostile to conservatives, and Facebook is just part of the evil FAANG empire. MeWe has a pretty burgeoning list of meme groups. To find a meme group, on your home page click on “Browse Groups.” Simply type in Memes, and plenty pop up. I recommend “Meme’s From Everywhere” and “Funny memes and humor” as a start. There are plenty of darker and lighter groups, so experiment a bit and find what suits your tastes.
Start a family group. A big reason for Facebook’s success is sharing pictures with your friends. My wife and I still want to share our family’s adventures with our friends, without the creepiness of Facebook sharing our pictures with others. To do that, we created a Family group and invited our friends to it. Now we can share photos and let our friends download and comment. We can even chat our upcoming plans to them. With your own group, its easy to get back to enjoying your friends as friends instead of focusing on where their politics don’t align with you.
Replicate your interest groups. I never got into the groups on Facebook all that much, but on MeWe it really helps you link up with like minded people. I’m on a chainsaw group and I found a few home solutions for creosote buildup in my fireplace. The gardening group I’m part of helped me design a better fence for keeping the deer out of my garden. Its really easy to search the MeWe groups, find interests, and join groups.
Tell the businesses your frequent. The ballet studio my girls attend uses Facebook to push out updates. That’s pretty common across businesses, and if you don’t have Facebook you miss out. We’re encouraging the studio to dump Facebook and switch to MeWe, since privacy for a ballet studio is pretty important, and the studio has a Christian background. Many businesses don’t even know there are other options, so helping them make the switch is key to breaking Facebook’s grip.
Advocate for the missing features. I still need a livestream option, and neither MeWe nor Rumble have that yet. I also wish I could sell stuff on MeWe easily, but the privacy standards are pretty high, so NextDoor will have to suffice for now. You can communicate this to the developers, and with the explosion in growth they have, they are looking to keep their users. They are likely open to adding features, especially if its something their competitors don’t have.
I wish you the best on MeWe, maybe Peter will start a DaTechGuy group on MeWe so we can share thoughts about our favorite blog!
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
I’m not a fan of killing babies. There is just something so inherently wrong with taking a small, innocent child and murdering them in cold blood. Maybe its my Catholic upbringing. Maybe its my experience fighting so hard to keep a kid, only to lose them after heart surgery. Maybe its because I actually enjoy (most) of the time with my kids. Or maybe its a combination of all these things and more. I don’t really know. But murdering young babies, including unborn ones, is pretty awful.
Murdering babies is so awful that its pretty high on my list of “things I care about when I vote for someone.” Other things high up on the list include not infringing on gun ownership, insisting on following the rule of law, and avoiding dumb overseas conflicts while stepping in when needed to maintain good international order when needed. There is a lot in the middle. For example, I can be persuaded on different economic models, so if one is a bit more “left leaning,” but it has some data behind it, I can be talked into setting down my Ayn Rand novel and trying something new.
I’ve had this world view for quite some time, and then Donald Trump became President. Increasingly, when asked how I could ever vote for such a vile human being, I would find myself saying “I know he’s not a nice guy, but…” Recently, my wife almost had the same argument with a friend, who challenged her on her views on abortion. My wife had written a long response, including the obligatory “I don’t like Donald Trump either, but I agree with his views on abortion.”
When I read that, something clicked in my brain, and I asked out loud “Why do we feel we have to defend Donald Trump’s personal life?”
I’m not related to Donald Trump, nor do I have any control or influence over his decisions. As a politician, I voted for him ONLY based on his positions aligning with my own on a variety of matters. That’s it. His personal life doesn’t mean anything to me. Neither did any previous President’s life.
Almost every politician engages in some ugly behavior, and the ones that don’t seem to simply don’t get caught or highlighted by the media. John McCain dumped his wife for a younger, prettier gal. Joe Biden swam nude around female Secret Service agents and can’t seem to keep his hands to himself. Plenty of elected officials engage in insider trading and abuse their elected position for money. I’m opposed to all this behavior, and it disgusts me when I see it. I’m also not voting for these people to spend time around my kids. I’m voting for them to advocate and legislate for the policies that I agree with, which will cause me to vote for people I don’t like personally.
That vote doesn’t mean I have to defend their personal decisions. After reading my wife’s response, I recommended she take out all the defense of Donald Trump and simply ask “Why are you claiming to be a Christian and yet think its OK to kill unborn children?” Because, really, that’s what it is about.
The next time you hear yourself saying “I don’t like Donald Trump’s tweets/behavior/rhetoric/bombastic nature/etc.” stop yourself. Stop defending Donald Trump’s behavior. It’s not your job to do so. Stay focused on why him, or any other elected official, earned your vote in the first place.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
After hundreds—perhaps thousands—of demonstrations over the years in Washington, D.C., how could law enforcement officials have been so poorly prepared for the attack on the U.S. Capitol?
For the most part, that question has gone unanswered as the media and Democrats blame President Trump.
The chaos showed that government agencies had no coordinated plan to defend against an attack on the Capitol.
The U.S. Capitol Police chief, Steven Sund, said he asked his supervisors for the National Guard to be put on alert long before the rioters exploded into the House and Senate. That request was denied.
“If we would have had the National Guard, we could have held them at bay longer, until more officers from our partner agencies could arrive,” said Sund, who, along with other law enforcement officials involved in the mess, has resigned.
Sund said that House Sergeant at Arms Paul Irving rebuffed the idea, arguing he was uncomfortable with the “optics” that such a move would bring. Senate Sergeant at Arms Michael Stenger told Sund that he should informally reach out to his contacts at the Guard and ask them to be on alert, Sund added.
Both Irving and Stenger have since resigned from their posts in the fallout of the riots.
Despite numerous postings on social media calling for violent action, various federal agencies apparently failed to take the rhetoric seriously.
Dozens of posts listed assault rifles and other weapons that people claimed they were bringing to Washington. People discussed what types of ammunition would be best to carry and whether medical personnel would be available to treat the injured.
“It was such an embarrassingly bad failure and immediately became an infamous moment in American history,” said R.P. Eddy, a former American counterterrorism official.
Despite all of the red flags, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser sent a letter to top federal and local law enforcement officials that warned against massive police deployments. Bowser had complained loudly about the large presence of riot police during last June’s protests by Black Lives Matter.
All of the requests for support came far too late, resulting in National Guard troops arriving hours after the assault started.
“We rely on Capitol Police and federal law enforcement to provide an assessment of the situation,” Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Hoffman said. “And based on that assessment that they had, they believed they had sufficient personnel and did not make a request.”
Ultimately, the rioters are responsible for the mess they created.
Now the politicians are shoveling the blame toward Donald Trump when the House and Senate leaders didn’t like the optics of a sufficient number of cops to handle the rioters.
Kenosha, Wisconsin, after what CNN deemed “a fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”
By John Ruberry
Wednesday was a dark day in American history. Most of the blame for the riot at the US Capitol deservedly goes to the hooligans, about 1,500 of them, who broke through blockades and defied law enforcement and entered the Capitol building–the first such mass hostile group to do so since British forces marched in during the War of 1812 before setting it ablaze.
Many of the thugs who illegally entered the Capitol have been arrested and they deserve, if found guilty, to face the full brunt of the law.
This was not, as the media deemed last year’s many instances of “unrest” in American cities, “a mostly peaceful protest.”
President Donald J. Trump is by no means blameless. He should have conceded his loss to Joe Biden weeks ago. I support Trump’s fight for free and fair elections. But even in states where the vote count was the most questionable, Pennsylvania and Georgia, had their electoral votes magically gone to the president, Trump still would have lost. And while I disagree with the mainstream media blowhards and Democratic politicians who said Trump incited the crowd to riot, he gave some of the protesters hope. Normally hope is a good thing to spread but he gave some people the belief that their protest might have compelled Congress to ignore the Electoral College and keep Trump in the White House. That was never going to happen.
On Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show Thursday night he asked that we look at why the protesters–not just the rioters–attended the rally. They were angry.
Why?
In November a Rasmussen poll found that 75 percent of Republican voters believed the presidential election was stolen. Even many Democrats agreed. As for myself I don’t believe the election was stolen. My view is that the weak standards with mail-in voting, put in place on a widespread basis for the first time in many states because of the COVID-19 epidemic, has something to do with that. Mail-in voting, without safeguards, makes such crimes as voting twice or more, dead people voting, and voting in a jurisdiction when you live someplace else more likely.
While elections need to continue to be run at the state level Congress should, if such a thing is possible, have an open mind in regards to exploring new nationwide election standards, such as what was done after the Florida recount debacle of 2000. Banning ballot harvesting is a good place to start, as well as replacing early voting, that is “election season,” with–and this is an idea that comes from the liberals–making the day of a general election a work holiday. And photo ID should be required for voting too.
If millions of Americans don’t have faith in the election process then democracy rests on a flimsy leaf.
Now let’s look at the mainstream media and Big Tech. I’ll be brief only for the sake of not overwhelming you. I could bring up dozens of examples of media bias but I won’t for now.
For over four years most of the media flogged a dead horse of a story in Russian collusion. There was no Trump-Russia collusion. Zero. Robert Mueller’s exhaustive investigation found none. That didn’t stop the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC from hawking it, not so subtly, as the way to oust Trump from power for nearly four years nearly every day.
Meanwhile the Hunter Biden laptop story was minimized by that same mainstream media during the 2020 campaign. The younger Biden’s alleged influence peddling activities are not a nothing-burger. And Facebook and Twitter for a while blocked the posting the New York Post story about the deeply troubling news that the former vice president’s son might be compromised by foreign governments, including our greatest rival, China. Twitter, in a preview of 2021’s ongoing purge of conservatives that includes Trump, from the microblogging platform, locked the Post out of its account for nearly two weeks. Free press anyone? The suppression worked. Many people I spoke with, folks who only get their news from Facebook, never heard about the Hunter laptop scandal until I told them about it.
Trump’s core base of supporters are voracious consumers of news–and yes, to be fair of course some of their news stories come from Facebook and Twitter, unless of course they’ve been purged from those sites. And the double-standard of most of the media on those two stories seethes the Trump base.
After the riot the media continued its dismissive attitude of Trump supporters.
Anderson Cooper of CNN, a scion of the Vanderbilt family that got filthy rich during the Gilded Age, said of the protesters after the riot. “And they’re going to go back to the Olive Garden and to the Holiday Inn they’re staying at, or the Garden Marriott, and they’re going to have some drinks and talk about the great day they had in Washington … They stood up for nothing other than mayhem.”
Clearly Cooper dines at what he deems are better restaurants than the Olive Garden. And he can afford to stay at the finest hotels, places that are beyond my financial reach. And yes, I’ve stayed at those hotels Cooper denigrated. I’ve eaten at the Olive Garden a few times.
Another cruel irony of the mainstream media coverage of the Capitol riot is that they deemed it one, while they went to great pains to call the many urban riots of 2020–which occurred almost exclusively in Democrat-run cities–anything but that. While storming the Capitol is clearly a much different dimension than looting and arson, and yes, a very disturbing one, the hypocrisy of the media is apparent to a 10-year-old.
More than ever we need new media. If you agree with my post, especially if you dine at the Olive Garden, stop seething. Start your own blog. WordPress and Blogger.com are good places to start. Even if you have just ten readers a day–my own blog has many more than that in case you are wondering–you will be making a difference. Besides, much of the mainstream media, particularly daily newspapers, are endangered species. Warren Buffett, no conservative, expects only a few of them to survive and he made that prediction before the COVID-19 outbreak that has devastated their ad revenue. Those papers, for the most part, take their lead in reporting news from the aforementioned Washington Post and the New York Times. It’s where they learn not to use words like “riot” unless it involves conservatives. They invent terms like “mostly peaceful” or sugarcoat the carnage by saying it is “unrest.” Those last two newspapers aren’t going anyhere but we can fight back with reality. An army of mosquitoes can make a difference.
Update (DTG) I put something like this in as a comment but figured it belonged as a post update as this has gotten instalanched. (Thanks Ed)
John is one one my original magnificent seven bloggers/ He produces quality work and I’m proud to have him here.
I believe he is completely wrong about the election not being stolen, both math, the actions of the left and common sense in my opinion scream it to be the case, but he has the right to his opinion and I respect that he comes by it honestly and have no problem with him expressing it here.
If anyone has problem with him expressing that opinion on my site and want him off for having & expressing it, well that’s too bad.
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