At a rally near Stop the Steal that same day, the president complained that armed protesters were not allowed to join the crowd. former aide, Cassidy Hutchinson, who Trump had demanded the removal of the steel detectors. “I don’t care if they have guns,” he told staff. “They’re not here to hurt me. . . You can walk to the Capitol here. “
From his couch, watching Trump’s rally, Miller ordered a hot bird sandwich at one of his favorite restaurants, a bar a few blocks from the Capitol. He saw Trump falsely claim that he defeated Joe Biden in the 2020 election “by a landslide”; than the result “pure theft”, “illegal”. The word “fraud” appeared 22 times in his speech.
Outside the Capitol, a crowd coordinated by right-wing extremists armed with attack rifles began shouting “Hang Mike Pence!”A makeshift gallows appeared, with an orange rope of electric cable. The day before, Miller had drafted a statement, largely dictated through Trump and issued without Pence’s knowledge, that falsely claimed that the vice president had the legal authority and preference to block certification of the election result and thus keep Trump in power.
The Jan. 6 committee shared Miller’s filmed testimony on this and other occasions leading up to that day. Wearing a face mask, he told the panel that Trump had rejected his knowledge expert’s verdict, which he was “going to lose,” when the effects came. on election night, and instead sought the recommendation of a “definitely drunk” Rudy. Miller later accused the committee of selectively changing its interviews to make it seem more critical of Trump, telling me he “warned the president about an announcement too soon. “. . . Obviously, he didn’t agree. “
In conversations over the past few weeks in London via email and video chat, Miller said he had “watched in horror” as the events of Jan. 6 unfolded. , where there are only non-violent behaviors, and then a little more than a kilometer those acts of illegality. “
But I had known Trump for more than a decade at the time; the two men had first discussed a presidential election in 2011. They had come to the White House not of joy and peace yet through social media, and the cruelty and incorrect information that proliferate there. It’s Trump’s social media crusade against the 2020 election. It is through social media that Miller hopes to bring Trump back.
Miller remembers hunting his boss. Suddenly it became clear to him who was going to win and why. “Senator,” he told Cruz, “the words “subcommittee” and “good fortune” have never been used in the same sentence. “He left shortly thereafter to become the main spokesman for Trump’s crusade and, after the 2016 election, he again had a normal media presence in the administration. He returned in 2020 as a senior adviser to Trump’s re-election crusade and again specialized as a “field marshal” in his defense against a moment of impeachment. after the Capitol revolt.
The former president’s “superpower,” as Miller described to me during a recent stopover in London, “was his ability to evade the mainstream media and speak directly to voters. “She did so largely because of her immediate and insulting tweets, five times more common and 3 times more engaged than Hillary Clinton’s. That increased social presence translated into a greater television presence: Miller remembers Trump sitting in a green room, letting an hour pass while television networks broadcast photographs of the empty podium where he was. to talk. ” It was ranked gold. Trump was omnipresent. The Clinton campaign’s most popular tweet, in which he told Trump to “delete your account,” ended up hunting more like a plea than an order.
But in 2020, Miller argues, “the purpose of the posts was changed. “”- other people and messages that may have led to a momentary Trump victory.
There is little evidence of this; however, if it did happen, it was not in the least effective. On Twitter and Facebook, Trump maintained an even greater lead over Joe Biden than over Clinton. Two years later, right-wing or right-wing pro-Trump media outlets like Fox News, Breitbart, and commentators Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro continue to dominate top-hit link posts on Facebook in the United States, while pro-Trump host Tucker Carlson remains America’s best-known journalist.
However, Miller describes 2020 as “the worst year of political discrimination we have ever noticed in U. S. history. “USA. ” Obviously, this is not the case in a country where slavery has been widespread for nearly a century. But a large majority of the Republican electorate ( more than two-thirds, in repeated polls ) continue to say that the 2020 election was rigged. Miller says millions of other people stopped using major social media platforms after Trump was suspended for inciting violence on Jan. 6. This creates a political and commercial opportunity that Miller is determined to conquer: a massive, monetizable audience, waiting for the return of his most productive performer.
Gettr was introduced on July 4, 2021 as a network committed to those principles. It looks a lot like Twitter, only in red and white, and (for my enjoyment of browsing for several days) has a user base that is completely committed to the politics and culture of the American alt-right. It joins a developing sphere of “alternative technology” platforms: Gab was introduced in 2016 and Parler in 2018; Trump’s own social media platform, Truth Social, was unveiled in February of this year. Gettr now claims a user base of 5. 5 million registered accounts.
In person, Miller is an American political strategist in the central cast: he’s affable, with a fancy suit, a rough voice, and the simple confidence of someone who spends a lot of time in front of the camera. He has worked on Republican campaigns since the 1990s and has the gift of pushing many words to reaction and staying on the message. “I need to attract other people from all ideological backgrounds,” de Gettr says, despite evidence to the contrary. “Our north star is to make sure that no one’s freedom of political expression is ever hindered. “
Miller was in London to meet with the belligerent parties to Britain’s online protection bill, adding Laurence Fox and Tothrough Young. The bill includes measures to make online platforms more to blame for problems such as bullying, exploitation and children’s access to pornography. It also includes a plan to the expression considered “legal but harmful”, and there is great concern – through the platforms of GB News to the Economist – that it may give the Secretary of Culture broad powers to restrict what is said on the Internet. Miller’s concern is that any precedent set in the UK may allow for similar legislation in Europe (which is preparing to pass a virtual facilities law), as well as influence the way the US is able to pass a virtual facility law). The U. S. uses their social media.
“It’s such a slippery slope toward an authoritarian-type regime,” Miller said. “You start suppressing loose speech, and then there’s not much difference between the Western world and, say, Russia, Venezuela or China. “
He deserves to know. While Miller worked for Trump, the president declared the loose press to be “the enemy of the American people” and, in 2017, threatened to replace defamation legislation so he could sue his critics (that legislation is limited in the United States through the First Amendment). loose speech protections). The Trump administration has even controlled the language used through its own officials: the Energy Department has been asked to chant the term “climate replacement. “
While no politician has benefited so much from social media, Trump has been outraged by the freedom he has given others to criticize him and has threatened to repeal the law that gives him such power: Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code. This small but small American law states that Internet sites like Twitter and Facebook are not guilty of their users’ posts or comments. Miller told me he pleaded with the president to oppose repealing 230 (Gettr couldn’t work without him), but he thinks so. “it needs to be reformed. ” According to him, it is a “privilege” that comes with a legal responsibility not to “play with numbers or fiddle, so that other people are heard and other people are not heard. “
[See also: Roe vs Wade and the Land of Lost Freedom]
For a well-meaning progressive like me, touring Gettr is taking a look at what Hannah Arendt called, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, a “disorganized and unstructured mass of livid individuals” united solely by the confidence that “the most respected, eloquent. “and the representative members of the network were fools and that all the powers were so bad that they were also stupid and fraudulent. “
Part of the business opportunity for Miller is that the global maximum that Gettr users live in is in fact fraudulent. It says they live in the richest country in the world, nearly a third of American staff (another 52 million people) earn less than $15 an hour, with no paid vacation or pension entitlement; a million of those other people don’t even earn the federal minimum of $7. 25 an hour. Medical debt bankrupts part of a million Americans a year. Low-income people in the United States live in a world so different from Bill Gates that it’s no surprise that some of them believe he’s an alien. In Gettr, they place negative solidarity by rejecting everything the elites have to offer: vaccines, warnings about climate change, gun control.
Cruelty thrives on Facebook and Twitter, but in Gettr it’s inevitable. As Arendt wrote of interwar Europeans who embraced totalitarianism, Gettr users seem “satisfied with blind partisanship in all that respectable society had forbidden. . . a distinctive feature because it contradicted the liberal and humanitarian hypocrisy of society. “
It is, for example, a traditional View of Gettr that the killing of 19 elementary school youths in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, was a “false flag” operation, the real goal of which was to restrict Americans’ access to attack rifles. (Uvalde is the 212th mass shooting in a year in which, at the time of writing, 825 young men under the age of 17 were killed with firearms in the United States. )a small minority; in Gettr, they are mainstream.
In his own chronology, Miller recently shared former White House strategist Steve Bannon’s claim that the war in Ukraine is “a cash laundering operation for global elites. “, the president’s son, “raises express questions about what frames Joe Biden’s decision-making procedure regarding [Ukraine]. “
This kind of accusation would once have been limited to radio and the strangest corners of the Internet. (To be clear, Miller is insinuating that the president of the United States is not a single person. foreign commercial interests). One of the wonderful achievements of social media is the normalization of deviation in concepts and discourse, to the point that someone like Miller can present a wild conspiracy theory like this with an affable shrug, as if it were a moderate analysis. It can be simply any talking head on any TV in the lobby of any hotel.
Miller’s most-winning arguable podcaster, Joe Rogan, who joined Gettr in January in case Twitter gets even dumber. However, a few days later, Rogan discovered that his account of nine million fans on Gettr far exceeded the number of other people on the platform, and described the site in a podcast as “fugazi” (fake). Gettr explained that the combined number of Twitter and Gettr followers of this Rogan, and has since divided the number to make it clearer. While Rogan remains on the platform, he hasn’t posted since January.
Research suggests that recruiting strong voices seeking status is a smart strategy. Last year, Dutch political psychologists Alexander Bor and Michael Bang Petersen published a study looking at why online debate makes other people more aggressive. Being on a computer makes other people hostile, but the way social media links other people with hostile people, who “have much broader online success: they can identify targets more easily and their habit is more visible. “
For Facebook, “connectivity” has been the basic purpose and, in the words of one of its vice presidents, Andrew Bosworth, in 2016, a “de facto good. “people with terrible things to say to more people than ever before.
Miller’s Gettr feed is packed with examples. In an article she shared, Elise Stefanik (a “good friend,” chairwoman of the House Republican Conference and named Trump’s running mate in 2024) claims that Democrats are “pedophile scammers. “Miller does not accuse Democratic politicians of being pedophiles himself, many in Gettr have (this is a component of the QAnon conspiracy theory). So why publish it?” I just thought it was a laugh,” he explains. provoked and whirlwind in the media – it was a laugh to see the conflict.
The truth is, like Trump’s motion itself, Gettr is a corporate and political project. Maybe the platform will make money (Miller has a plan to promote it using a style of cryptocurrency), but lately it’s not monetized. millions of dollars” to build a new social network, he said, though he did not call the two personal equity firms that provided the millions.
He told me that the “initial money” came from other people “close” to the circle of relatives of exiled Chinese businessman Guo Wengui, a close associate of Steve Bannon. During the platform’s growth era, he said, “some other people who had worked for Mr. Guo in the past came to work for Gettr. But neither [Mr. Guo] nor Steve Bannon are direct investors or hold control positions within the company.
Last month, ABC News journalists in Australia reported that they had gained access to discussion forums committed to following Up on Gettr. They took screenshots of groups that agreed to delete messages criticizing Guo, Bannon or the two men’s organization, the New Federal State of China (NFSC), which pledges to criticize the Chinese Communist Party. The investigation revealed that “criticisms about Mr. Bannon and Mr. Guo, their organizations, and Gettr himself are temporarily known through NFSC members and are removed. “
I asked Miller if he rejected ABC’s findings. “I can’t communicate about the authenticity of ABC’s screenshots,” he said. “All I can communicate is about the authenticity of our protocols and standards. our moderators conduct their charts in accordance with our Terms of Service and Community Guidelines, and without favoring or harming any person, group, or political viewpoint.
I performed a fundamental verification of ABC’s claims by creating 3 other Gettr accounts. Two posted random updates or nothing at all, while the third posted links to the ABC report and a Reuters news article in which Donald Trump criticized Guo Wengui. The first two accounts continue to function and gain subscribers; the third was deactivated within a week, without explanation.
But it’s possible that the demanding legal situations and the doubt everyone sows about the integrity of the upcoming U. S. election are part of something bigger. The big lie is older than many think: the “Stop The Steal” movement started earlier. the 2016 election, as a crusade through political strategist Roger Stone to preemptively question Clinton’s victory. It has been built ever since.
Steve Bannon calls it the “composite strategy”— a plan to install the paranoid far right as members of the Republican Composite Committee, underage officials, election officials, party lawyers and district attorneys— to challenge large-scale votes in the upcoming general election. According to meetings noted through Politico, those other people are largely recruited under the idea that the 2020 election was a fraud. There are signs that it’s working: At the recent Republican conference in Texas, the party passed a solution that the rights of others who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6 “were violated” and that Biden “was not legitimately elected. “
Texas also passed a new big lie law. Texas House Bill 20 (which is temporarily blocked by the Supreme Court) states that “a social media platform would possibly not censor a user, a user’s expression, or a user’s ability to obtain another person’s expression. “As the U. K. and Europe prepare legislation designed to prevent misinformation, “HB20” would allow Texas Republicans to sue any primary platform that refuses to heed the claim that Trump has never stopped winning.
Meanwhile, Trump himself strongly supports applicants for elected office in the Senate, House of Representatives, and at the state level. Most are other people who have blatantly supported the Big Lie. “Before mass leaders capture the strength to adapt the truth to their lies. “Hannah Arendt wrote, “their propaganda is marked by its excess of facts. “The origins of totalitarianism were written five decades before social media, but they perfectly describe the new global they are building: “a false global of coherence that adapts more to the desires of the human brain than the truth itself. “
In the end, this is what Gettr, Truth Social, and other alternative technology platforms are for. Any semblance of festival between them is an illusion: they push all other people into the same rabbit hole. The purpose is not so much a network as a swarm of links that can then be shared across the broader fields of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, pushing crazy concepts into the mainstream debate and repeating them in a moderate voice until millions of people agree. that the news is fake, that guns are safe, and that their president, like the presidents of China and Russia, is someone no well-thought-out voter would ever betray.
[See also: America’s New Age of Darkness]