I got an epiphany for my birthday, after a conversation I had with our management at TheBlaze this week about the future of our industry.

I believe the No. 1 issue in the country is Big Tech censorship. It is the issue that will determine the future, because this is how information gets distributed in our culture.

Martin Luther was perhaps the most important man in the last millennium and changed the world to this day, but only because Gutenberg invented the printing press that provided him the means to do so. Without that, Luther is just another martyred would-be reformer lost to history. Without that platform, Luther's 95 Theses don't survive the week, let alone 500 years and counting.

Imagine living in Bible times, and your views weren't permitted at the City Gate where community business/information was done and made. Imagine being denied access to the world the telephone opened up because of your views. You are essentially relegated to cultural serfdom.

In our time, Big Tech is those things. Except they not only are distributing the information we see, but deciding the information we see as well and doing so while selling our personal information for profit and collecting it for their own use. This is perhaps the most sweeping and dangerous monopoly in the history of market-based economies.

It's the equivalent of Ma Bell a century ago deciding who gets a telephone based on whether you align with their corporate views, and then deciding what you get to hear when you answer the phone.

If Big Tech censorship is permitted to go on unchallenged, you're looking at a new Dark Ages when it comes to the information age. You can have all the conservative, religious, traditional, or even radical views you want, but if you're cut off from the world with them it doesn't matter. You have no means to bring them to light. You are not an influencer. You basically don't even exist. You're off the grid.

In this scenario, the American church becomes like the church in China. People are still getting saved underground, because God's Word does not return void, but above ground its cultural influence/impact are null and void.

And don't think for a second that isn't the end game here, and we're in that end game now.

And no, it's not as simple as "go build your own Facebook then." You cannot. All the means by which you would bring such a product to market is all controlled by the same Big Tech giants trying to control us now. Go ask the CEO of Parler what it took to get the alternative to Twitter listed in the app stores, for example I have. And those restrictions will only grow harder to navigate as these Big Tech companies become increasingly politically aggressive.

See, the same Big Tech that owns a monopoly on the distribution of information is approaching monopoly status on the means of information production, too. And once they reach critical mass on that front, it is game over.

Big Tech as a private industry has grown beyond our traditional small government creeds we lost on every front already anyway, when you look at the size and scope of government even if Big Tech never existed. Denying the reality of what's happening here on small government grounds is like denying you're pregnant in the delivery room. Since we already lost every small government argument anyway, we set the stage for a behemoth like Big Tech to arise.

No, it's not about small government. It's about alternative government, because that's what Big Tech is forming. Or, at the very least, an alternative ecosystem that will determine who gets to serve in the government we have.

What we're witnessing here is a hostile takeover of a country. Albeit one that looks different from how it historically has. There will be no tanks down main street. There will be no book burnings and mass cancellations. There will be no riots spilling over into outright insurrection. Nor will there be jack-booted thugs knocking on our doors.

Because when all these things happen, Big Tech won't permit you to see it.

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