Meta’s Foot off the Throttle, Congress’s First Order of Business & It’s About Time – Top 3 Takeaways – January 8th, 2025
- Foot off the throttle. Yesterday was a big day for free speech in the United States and eventually around the world as well. With Elon Musk now at Trump’s right hand it’s almost hard to imagine a time when the world’s richest, and truly most interesting man, was a leftist, but such was the case. In the words of Elon’s father Errol to the Daily Mail, Elon used to be such a flaming Democrat. No, Elon’s dad wasn’t saying that Elon was once upon a time flamboyantly homosexual, however the political metamorphosis of Elon was essentially that dramatic according to his accounting of Elon’s change in political perspectives over time. But then again, Donald Trump was once a registered Democrat and a reliable donor. This brings about thoughts of the famous saying: If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain. If you doubt that one just look at, or better still listen, to Joe Biden... In any event the point is that Donald Trump and Elon Musk most certainly aren’t alone in their political transformations – they just happen to be the most prominent examples of it. But the growing question is whether they have company? Jeff Bezos caught my attention as a potential candidate when he fled Seattle for Florida in November of 2023...especially since one of the reasons cited for the move had to do with taxes. Another indication came when he personally stepped in to keep the Washington Post, which he owns, from endorsing Kamala Harris. The next potential tea leaf from Bezos was the $1 million personal donation he recently made to President-elect Trump’s inauguration fund. Has Bezos joined the MAGA movement? I’m not so sure, but he’s certainly not the same hard-core leftist he was before...speaking of which. Neither is Mark Zuckerberg...who incidentally, like Bezos, recently made a personal $1 million donation to Trump’s inauguration fund. While it remains unclear if Mark Zuckerberg and team Meta have begun to turn towards MAGA, they have decided to stop throttling conservatives on their platforms. On Tuesday Meta announced their new “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes” initiative that puts an end to numerous practices that served to censor conservative speech. As they announced... Starting in the US, we are ending our third party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model. We will allow more speech by lifting restrictions on some topics that are part of mainstream discourse and focusing our enforcement on illegal and high-severity violations. We will take a more personalized approach to political content, so that people who want to see more of it in their feeds can. For some this might not sound like such a big deal. But for people like me and the dissemination of content its huge. This was something I spoke of last April, a little over a month after Meta put its censorship program into place. As I mentioned: The most illustrative example (of Meta’s election interference initiative) of this are my Instagram reels. As recently as two months ago I had a Reel with over 1.3 million views. The largest number of people I’ve reached since Meta enacted their new censorship policy is...7,100 people. I’ve now posted 17 videos to Instagram since the new censorship policy went into place. What was the average reach of the 17 preceding videos prior to Meta’s censorship policy...? 89,200 people (that does not include the reel with over 1.3 million views – it’s a true average of regular engagement)... How about the average of the 17 I’ve posted since? 2,250 people. That’s right, my daily reach on Meta’s platforms has been reduced by nearly 40x, or to put it another way, my reach is only about 2.5% of what it was prior to Meta’s 2024 Election Interference Campaign. But we’re now told the censorship campaign has come to a close and hopefully for good this time. And who knows, maybe Zuck is undergoing his own Musk-like political metamorphosis. Speaking of political change...
- First on the agenda. So, what’s first on the Congressional agenda? As House Speaker Mike Johnson outlined yesterday – it'll be the Laken Riley Act, named after the murdered UGA student who was horrifically attacked by an illegal immigrant. As Johnson mentioned: If you polled the populace and the voters, they would tell you that that was the top of the list, and we have a lot to do there to fix it. It's an absolute disaster because of what has happened over the last four years, and the Laken Riley Act is a big part of that. The proposed bill would mandate ICE arrest and detain all illegal immigrants who commit any criminal offenses in addition to providing states with the legal ability to petition the federal government to enforce immigration laws within their jurisdictions. Remarkably, the bill, which passed by a 251-170 vote in the House was never taken up in the then Democrat-controlled senate in the previous congress. Yesterday, we saw two key changes with the new congress. First, despite Republicans having a narrower margin in the House, the bill passed by a wider margin, 264-159, with additional Democrats joining Republicans to pass the bill. Second, and most notably, Democrat John Fetterman has joined 40 Senate Republicans in sponsoring the senate companion to the bill. Republicans, who now have a senate majority with 53 seats, will need at least six other senate Democrats to do the right thing and support the bill that will quickly be coming up for a vote. Trump’s day 1 executive orders on the border will be huge for immediately reinstating his successful policies from his first administration. But to have a lasting impact that transcends administrations, beyond the resumption of the construction of the border wall, new laws are needed and that’s why quickly passing the Laken Riley Act alongside Trump’s EO’s will be key. But also on the agenda...
- The Sunshine Protection Act. Yesterday in speaking with Senator Rick Scott about his ambitious legislative agenda, he indicated that he’s optimistic that with Republican control of congress and a Floridian who is also president, this might finally be the year... The year that we put an end to time changes. Once again Senator Scott has sponsored the Sunshine Protection Act. Just as was the case with the law that he signed when he was governor, should his proposed bill become law this year, we would reenter daylight saving time this spring and never change the time in Florida again. And while Senator Scott won’t have his wingman Marco Rubio to lead on this issue with him in the senate once again, he does have the added outside support of team DOGE. Both Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been outspoken critics of time changes since Election Day. In the words of Musk on X: Abolish the annoying time changes! And to that I say Amen. You might say that there’s no time like the present...