Donald Trump Jr. said in an interview for Newsmax conducted this week in conjunction with the latest installment of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that PNC Bank ditched a news aggregation app he founded called MxM News.
The platform was designed to collect other sources of news for easy reading rather than itself providing a space for original content. He didn’t provide many details about the bank dumping his operation, although he predictably tied what happened to that favorite right-wing boogeyman, so-called cancel culture.
“I got an interesting letter from a bank this week that [I] work with on a small business [initiative],” Trump Jr. told interviewer John Bachman. “It’s just like, the cancel culture that’s going on in our country right now. The weaponization of corporate America.” Asked for specifics, Trump Jr. provided more details.
“MxM News, which I started,” he said. “News aggregator, right? Because our news was getting censored everywhere. Newsmax — you’d never find it online. Breitbart — you’d never find it online. Now, we put out The New York Times, but basically, PNC Bank sends us a letter, we’re done. Not even a phone call! It’s like the break-up through text. A letter with a cashier’s check for what we had — a significant amount of money that we had in an account for a news aggregator… Everyone says build your own, right John? So we do. And then when you do, they cancel you.”
It is obviously entirely incorrect that right-wing sites like Newsmax and Breitbart were somehow entirely inaccessible online, let alone made inaccessible because of some systematic conspiracy to target right-wing platforms on the basis of the political beliefs espoused there. Googling Newsmax or a similar site doesn’t produce a notice saying something along the lines of, “Oops! You’re not allowed to read that!”
Trump Jr. then got into complaints about supposed suppression of past reporting on a laptop tied to Hunter Biden, a son of the current president. While major social media platforms temporarily restricted sharing that link, the coverage was still widely accessible — like, extremely accessible — and the limits weren’t overly comprehensive. Limiting a link doesn’t completely shut it down. Past attempts from Trump to tie Facebook’s handling of the coverage to some intervention from the feds were faulty. The FBI provided neither a specific warning nor a specific directive for that company about that story. Meanwhile, watch Donald Jr.’s rant below:
Don Jr breaks news on Newsmax that his news aggregator site was dumped by PNC Bank pic.twitter.com/rEuB7oC1PK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 2, 2023
