NEWT:
I think that’s right. I think he created a national audience, could communicate every day for free, and he educated 30 or 40% of the country on what was going on. I think to imagine that period without him, it makes it vastly harder for us to have gotten our messages across.
NEWT:
Look, I think there are two different questions. First of all, these monopolies have enormous power, and never in American history have we allowed economic power and political power belong to the same people. Every time that’s tried to happen, we’ve had a populist rebellion change the laws and broken them up. So I would say, the easiest solution is to make them public carriers who are liable to lawsuit — for example, President Trump could sue them for the total economic cost of what they’ve done to him over the last six months. Or “The New York Post” could sue for the damages done during the period just before the election when they banned the Post. You would suddenly be fine then behaving like economic entities and not like playthings of oligarchs, and that would bring you a balance. Second, I absolutely believe that conservatives should create as many alternative messaging systems – and that really gets you involved with Google. With the Apple cloud operation, more than with Facebook or with Twitter. You cannot afford to have Google decide to take people off or to have apple decide, as they did with one competitor, that they just close them down. This is a kind of use of power which really destroys any kind of free enterprise system because it eliminates the free enterprise and turns it into the playground of billionaires, who then use their power in ways that are impossible in a free society for us to put up with.
