What is it they say about flak and targets?

After weeks of blatant, unapologetic shenanigans by Big Tech, conservatives are beginning a mass exodus off of mainstream social media platforms and seeking out alternative communication apps and platforms.

Enter Parler. They’ve been around for a while but as Twitter banishments picked up steam in the last few months, the social media app began to see their numbers explode as people sought out censorship free social spaces. Made famous by major investor Dan Bongino, Parler has gone from being an experimental right-wing alternative to being a major player on the social media scene.

You’d think that would make liberals happy. We’re leaving their spaces. We’re removing our disgusting, revolting, upsetting presence away from their precious, righteous, justice-focused eyes.

But no. Even though they’ve basically cheated their way into the White House, the liberal left is still angry that we on the right exist at all. They’re like spoiled children at Christmas time after they’ve opened the last present only to look at mother and father and ask, “Is this it?”

It isn’t just enough to force conservatives out of public spaces. They don’t want us to have any spaces, any conversation, any success at all. It’s frothing hatred and it makes them all completely irrational.

Case in point, Dave Troy, a left-wing TedTalk speaker who bills himself as a “disinformation analyst.” On Friday Troy decided that perhaps Parler was getting a bit too big for its britches and needed to be looked at a little closely. For the progressive left, it isn’t enough for them to deny you access to their toys, they want to take away your toys too.

Thus Troy begins an epic thread on the “nefarious” origins of Parler, beginning with every liberal’s favorite boogeyman…you guessed it…Russia.

One of the Parler investors had the audacity to marry a Russian woman so, naturally the fix has been in from the start. And in case his intimation isn’t clear enough, Troy makes it even clearer for the reader…MUELLER!

(This sounds a lot like this USA road trip taken by Anna Bogacheva and Aleksandra Krylova in 2014.) https://t.co/xBBwAoqQXl

— Dave Troy (@davetroy) November 13, 2020

The very important TedTalk guy goes on to detail the pre and post-nuptial movements of John and Alina, including their frequent travel to Russia off and on to visit Alina’s family and presumably (although it seems like a detail Troy has no interest in) to take care of whatever legal red tape is involved in immigrating by marriage from Russia to the United States. You don’t need to read that whole thing. They married, they traveled back and forth, then John bought into Parler.

From here Troy drops the Russia angle and begins to take issue with the people who actually used and promoted Parler, as if it just wasn’t fair that celebrity political figures on the right have that kind of influence.

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.

— Dave Troy (@davetroy) November 13, 2020

So far Troy’s big discovery is that the beltway crowd is a bit incestuous. Congratulations on crawling out from under that rock you’ve hiding under, Dave! The air is fresh out here.

Mr. Disinformation moves pretty quickly from that mind-blowing revelation to his most compelling argument yet:

“All those conservatives just wanted to be able to have their own social media and challenge the dominance of the current cabal. How dare they???!!!1111!!”

As the company expanded in 2019, it has been squarely focused on creating conditions that would challenge section 230 of the communications decency act. The company’s purpose seems to be expressly political and aimed at eroding US social media firms.

— Dave Troy (@davetroy) November 13, 2020

Troy is actually suggesting that market competition is a deliberate “eroding” of other firms. This is presumably a very serious person with very serious credentials.

He then goes on to claim that there isn’t enough evidence of where the money is coming from to fund Parler. Troy questions Dan Bongino’s claims of being a partner (he couldn’t possibly have that kind of money) and says that there is a no way a social media company can run that rate of growth without a team of thousands of employees and a very hefty savings account. Troy’s entire argument is that Parler isn’t staffed enough or papered up enough to be competing in the big leagues so soon.

It’s not fair, you guys. Obviously this money is from Putin!

However none of this passes the sniff test: any company aiming to challenge firms at Twitter scale needs a massive supply of funds to hire employees competitively and pay for rapidly scalable computing infrastructure.

— Dave Troy (@davetroy) November 13, 2020

It can’t possibly be that even Parler was surprised by the massive, nearly-overnight exodus from the Twitter gulags and has been playing catch-up for the last few months. I don’t know if that’s the case, but given my experience with other fledgling platforms, it seems logical to me that this is a case of a start-up gaining traction fast thanks to one or two fortuitous events. The fact that they’re maintaining their platform isn’t necessarily a national conspiracy, it may just mean they struck gold and are now in the process of hiring to match their growth.

Troy can’t except that, and even goes so far as to call Parler a “bizarre, anti-social mission.”

Seriously, Dave? These people don’t listen to themselves. Twitter is banning conservatives left and right and forcing them off the platform but it’s Parler that has the anti-social mission? The childishness of the left is becoming exhausting. It truly is.

Next up: Bongino’s a liar because big tech investment norms blah blah blah or something. And clearly Troy is getting himself all worked up into a temper tantrum as he reaches the end of his pointless rant. “Shit noise” – is that the technical term for disinformation, Dave?

Additionally, flooding the zone with shit noise about the company’s ownership would seem to be a way of deflecting attention away from valid questions about that exact question. Who does own it? Where is the money, tech talent and infrastructure coming from? Follow the money.

— Dave Troy (@davetroy) November 13, 2020

Troy proceeds to urge tech reporting publications to spend more time investigating Parler’s investment structure, I guess so the left can put Parler on a “list” of some sort. As if Parler isn’t already on every liberal’s “I’m Telling Mom On You” list right now.

The rest of the thread is an obsessive verbal vomit of Russian conspiracy theories and then concludes with questions about how on earth Parler plans to make money with no real funding model in place.

Also, Alina’s favorite show is The Americans! And she has the nerve to be proud of her daughter’s citizenship. This is the type of journalism America needs right now…and definitely the type we deserve.

It’s true. THE AMERICANS is a very good television series. It’s a favorite of Alina’s it seems. And she is proud of her newborn daughter’s US social security card. And loves the Russian flag. Fun fact: Izzuminka means “cherry on top.” pic.twitter.com/WRezVaYAWw

— Dave Troy (@davetroy) November 13, 2020

Troy is supposedly a smart man (it says so in his Twitter bio) but I guess his brain wasn’t able to harken back to the beginning of Twitter and Facebook when they were doing nothing but gaining accounts and losing money. Social media is a hard game to profit from. Parler is barely three years old. It hardly seems like a conspiracy theory that they may just be in the same infancy stages that all of Big Social Media was just over a decade ago.

The whole thread is insane. Let’s just pretend for a moment that Dan Bongino is a Russian operative who has taken their money in order to build …*checks notes*… a massive disinformation network aimed at… *checks notes*… conservatives who are already racist, sexist, homophobic Baby Hitlers. What does Dave Troy care? Why should he give a rat’s ass about conservatives retreating to their own bubbles and letting the liberals stay in theirs?

It makes no sense…unless you think that the alternative media bomber is flying right over the target and the incoming flak is a dying left wing media complex that is watching their uncontested grip on the hearts and minds and free time of Americans fade away into the sea of capitalism.

Parler and conservative alternatives are either irrelevant or a danger. To consider right wing media the former would seem to be the biggest blow to conservative growth, but guys like Troy aren’t smart enough or diverse enough in their thoughts and discussions to get that. If he wants to label conservative business ventures “dangerous”, he may well be adding more fuel the fire that is about to burn down Big Tech.