Following action against the conservative social media site Parler by companies including Apple and Google — both of which removed the site’s app from their app stores — Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) sounds like he’s freaking out. During a rambling weekend appearance on the Fox show Sunday Morning Futures with host Maria Bartiromo, Nunes went so far that he claimed that “Republicans have no way to communicate,” which is just laughably untrue. Notably, the circumstances of his own comments proved the falsity of his point — Nunes was being broadcast on national television while claiming that Republicans have lost their communication abilities. Nunes was making up persecution, like he couldn’t bear a moment in which constantly self-aggrandizing GOP’ers weren’t depicted as victims.
Apple and Google took action against Parler in the wake of the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol building that took place last Wednesday. This riot put the lives of top leaders in imminent danger, as the outgoing president’s supporters rampaged through the building. One news photographer who was on the scene said that he heard people talking about wanting to hang Vice President Mike Pence — but unsurprisingly, Nunes failed to mention these facts and the role that Parler played in spreading incitement of violence. Instead, he presented a fantasy reality in which conservatives like himself are poor, persecuted victims.
Nunes belligerently ranted as follows:
‘There is no longer a free and open social media company or site for any American to get on any longer, because these big companies — Apple, Amazon, Google — they have just destroyed a what was likely billion dollar company — poof, it’s gone. But it’s more than just the financial aspect to that. Republicans have no way to communicate. It doesn’t even matter if you’re Republican or conservative — if you don’t want to be regulated by left-wingers that are at Twitter and Facebook and Instagram… it’s preposterous. So I don’t know where the hell the Department of Justice is at right now, or the FBI. This is clearly a violation of antitrust, civil rights, the RICO statute — there should be a racketeering investigation on all the people that coordinated this attack on not only a company, but on all of those like us.’
Nunes’s idea that social media companies should be prosecuted under the RICO statute — which is federal legislation that covers organized crime — is just laughably unhinged. Subsequently, Nunes petulantly insisted that social media companies are “working for the Democratic-Socialist Party” and being “cheered on” while supposedly conspiring to silence conservatives. Notably, as of Sunday morning, the Parler website remained apparently perfectly functional, no matter Nunes’s insistence that the the company was “destroyed.”
Check out Nunes’s comments below:
