What Happened to Parler Could Happen to You, Former CEO Mark Meckler Warns
00:05This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, June 9th.I'm Doug Blair.And I'm Rachel Del Judas.The former CEO of Parlor, Mark Meckler, says conservative organizations need to be prepared to face opposition from big tech companies just as Parlor did.Today we share Virginia Allen's recent conversation with Meckler.They discussed the fight to get Parlor back online after Amazon, Google, and Apple essentially canceled the social media site and what other conservatives can learn from the ordeal.Don't forget, if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.Today's interview was recorded at the Heritage Foundation Resource Bank Conference in Austin, Texas, so please excuse any background noise and chatter.
00:51And now, on to today's top news.In an interview with NBC's Lesterholt, Vice President Kamala Harris defended the fact that she has not yet visited the southern border amidst the ongoing border crisis.Harris, who was assigned March 24th by Biden to be his point person on the border crisis,still has yet to visit the U.S.-Mexico border.Harris did visit Guatemala on Monday and told migrants do not come.But here's what she had to say in her conversation with Holt via NBC.Just quickly put a button.Do you have any plans to visit the border?
01:31At some point, you know, we are going to the border.We've been to the border.So this whole thing about the border,border. We've been to the border. We've been to the border. You haven't been to the border.And I haven't been to Europe. And I don't understand the point that you're making. I'm notdiscounting the importance of the border. Well, I mention it because I know Republicans have certainlycome at you on this, but Democratic Congressman Quayar as a border district has said to you andthe president come. You need to see this. Listen, I care about what's happening at the border.
02:06A group of senators, including Democrat Gary Peters and Amy Klobuchar, as well as RepublicansRob Portman and Roy Blunt, announced Tuesday the release of the first congressional report detailingsecurity failures in the run-up to the January 6th attack on the Capitol. The report detailsthe numerous security, planning, and response failures that led to the January 6th assault.Additionally, the report provides recommendations to various departments responsible forcapital and D.C. security on how to prevent such an incident in the future.In a statement, ranking member of the Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee, Rob Portman said, quote,the January 6th attack on the Capitol was an attack on democracy itself.
02:47Today's joint bipartisan congressional oversight report from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committeeand the Rules Committee details the security and intelligence failures in the days leading up to the attack,the lack of preparedness at the Capitol, and the slow response as the attack unfolded.He continued, quote, we must address these failures.and make the necessary reforms to ensure this never happens again.Congressman Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, and some of his colleagues on the House Judiciary Committee,are asking that Attorney General Merritt Garland investigate an Antifa attack on journalist Andy No.In a letter to Garland obtained by Town Hall, Jordan asked that Antifa's attack last month on Noe be investigated.
03:29On June 2nd, No tweeted with pictures of his injuries that he was treated in the ER for multiple injuries to my head andbody. The letter asks, please explain the Justice Department's current efforts to identify andprosecute individuals involved in the assaults of Mr. Noe and other journalists in violationof federal statute securing their civil rights. Please explain how the Justice Department,in coordination with other relevant federal and state law enforcement agencies, is working toprevent individuals from engaging in violence and intimidation designed to impair the freeexercise and enjoyment of their rights and privileges that Mr. Noe and other journalists,possess under the Constitution and laws of the United States.
04:10No was also attacked and beaten by Antifa in June of 2019.On Tuesday, Circuit Court Judge James E. Plowman Jr.ordered the Loudoun County School System to reinstate PE teacher Byron Tanner Crossafter it suspended him for opposing policies that would require all teachersto refer to students by their preferred pronouns, regardless of the student's biological sex.The school system suspended Cross, a Christian, after he told the school board during a May 25th public hearing that he could not comply with two proposed transgender policies.Eventually, the Alliance Defending Freedom, a prominent Christian legal aid group, took on Cross's case and sued the school district.In a written statement celebrating the judge's decision, Alliance Defending Freedom President and CEO Michael Farris said,
04:57quote, advocating for solutions they believe in should not cost teachers their jobs.School officials singled out his speech, offered in his private capacity at a public meeting as disruptive and then suspended him for speaking his mind.That's neither legal nor constitutional.Dozens of other teachers have shared their beliefs on various policies without retaliation.Tanner deserves to be treated with the same respect.As of yet, the school board has not released a statement.Now stay tuned for Virginia's conversation with Parlorist former CEO Mark Meckler.Conservative women.
05:34conservative feminist. It's true, we do exist. I'm Virginia Allen, and every Thursday morning onproblematic women, Lauren Evans and I sort through the news to bring you stories and interviewsthat are a particular interest to conservative leaning or problematic women. That is women whoseviews and opinions are often excluded or mocked by those on the so-called feminist left.We talk about everything from pop culture to policy and politics.Search for problematic women wherever you get your podcasts.I am so pleased to be joined by Mark Meckler, the former CEO of Parlor, and the co-founder of Tea Party Patriots, the president of Citizens for Self-Governance and Convention of States Action.Thank you so much for being here.
06:25Glad to be with you.All right. So let's jump right in.You served as a CEO for the social media platform Parlor for about six months.You joined, obviously, during a very, very rocky time.Yes.Parlor had just been kicked off of Apple's App Store out of Google.So talk a little bit about that decision of deciding I'm going to step into this role in this critical time for Parlor and act as their CEO.Yeah, you know, it wasn't so much to act as CEO.
06:54My first thought was I had a friend who was the financier behind Parlor.And so when I saw Parlor get taken down, and the big hit was really Amazon.web services. When they shut off their servers, they went dark, right? So that was the real bad thing.I saw that. I'm just the kind of a person. If there's a firefight, I'm going to run towards thegunfire. And so I called her up and just said, you know, are you okay? And do you need any help?And this is something I find in the conservative movement that's a problem, really, which isa lot of us, when we see somebody get attacked, we see somebody go down, we kind of step back.There's a natural tendency among conservatives to think, well, maybe they did something wrong.
07:30I don't really know. You know, I don't know what's going. I'm busy with that.my own life, my tendency is to step in and lean in.And so really the way it started was me just leaning in and saying, are you okay?And do you need anything?And do you need help?And her immediate response was, yes, I need help.And so that's how the whole thing started.And it really wasn't, do you need help?
07:50Do you need a CEO?It was just do you need help?And I have a background in technology and I have a background in building large organizationswith a technological foundation.So it just seemed like I could offer some stuff and moral support as well,well. And so that's really what I went to the table with. And over time, as I started to help,as we had to let the former CEO go, it just seemed like, you know, it was one of those moments,I think, wherever January, somebody says, yeah, we need a CEO and everybody looks at you
08:19and you look over your shoulder like our, who else is here? It was me. And so that's how I ended upas CEO parlor. Wow. Wow. Well, and that was such a, such a critical time for Parlor,like you said, after the January 6th attacks on the Capitol, Parlor,wound up in a really, really challenging position.And Amazon, Google, Apple really went after you guys.Yeah.So what were your thoughts as you were stepping into this position as CEO?What were your thoughts of, okay, these are the things that we need to tackle.
08:53These are the things we need to get resolved in order to get Parlor backup and online for users.Well, obviously, there's a lot.And I've done turnarounds before.So coming in and doing triage is something.I'm pretty comfortable with.And so there are multiple layers to it.You know, you've got to figure out where the bleeding is worst first.And so in this case, it was just the fact that they were dark.
09:12Right.So they were completely offline.They had no technology that allowed them to get back online.So the very first thing was start to find a way to get them rehosted.And hosted, obviously, somewhere off of Amazon Web Services, off of big tech in general, in a safe way.To be fair, there was a great staff in place.And so a lot of this stuff when I stepped in was already going on.It wasn't like I came in and, you know, with a Superman cape and saved the day.
09:36There were great, there was a great team there.They'd been working around the clock.They'd been in the trenches together.They'd been under attack for a while.Stuff was in motion.So what I came in is just triaged, tried to figure out what I thought was good, what was not good,and try to solidify the direction of the organization to getting the technology back online.That was step one.
09:55Yeah, yeah.What did Apple and Google want Parlor to do in order to restore the app to their platform?forms? Well, so there's actually three pieces to this and the sequence matter. So the first thing thathappened is the Google Play Store announced they might be taking Parlor off of the Play Store after theJanuary 6th events. That happened specifically because Cheryl Sandberg from Facebook the day beforesaid all of this stuff took place on Parlor. They have an inability to moderate their content forthis kind of stuff and it's all their fault. And by the way, history has proved that to be completelyuntrue. It was really Facebook and Instagram. They represented over two-thirds of the quote-unquote
10:34planning that took place online. It was on Facebook and Instagram. Also, Twitter had a chunk of it.Facebook itself was 54% of all charging documents in the crimes related to January 6th.And mentioned Facebook, 14% Twitter, 14% Instagram, 5% Parlor. So Parlor had almost no rule in this.So she points at Parlor. Google says, we might be taking you off. Apple then doestake us off the app store. Both of those things, in my opinion, are survivable hits, right? Peoplealready have the apps on their phones, so the apps will still work. We're going to be okay. The nextstep is the one that really killed us, which is Amazon flip the switches. So the website was hosted onAmazon. This is a warning, by the way, for everybody in the conservative movement. If you're
11:18on AWS, you should contact me. I'll teach you how to get off. They can flip the switch on anyof us at any time. I've had a bunch of people tell me, well, you know, you should sue Amazon, and certainlyParlor has done that. They have a billion dollar annual litigation budget. I would challenge anybodyas a lawyer, I can tell you, you don't want to face off against that. So those were the threesteps that happened. Amazon didn't want anything from the company. I mean, it was just you're down,you're done, you're gone. There was no negotiation. No negotiation whatsoever. It was just,they flipped the switches and we were off. Apple, there were a lot of ongoing negotiations thattook place until we came to the current moment a couple of weeks ago when they got back on the app store.
11:57Google, the company never tried to negotiate with Google, and the reason is Google are, they're just censorious tech oligarchs.They were never going to allow Parlor to be a free speech platform.And frankly, because of the operating system, that's an Android operating system, it allows side loading.And for your listeners, you don't know what side loading is.It means that you can download an app straight from a website.You don't have to go through the Google Play Store.And so Android folks could always get the app from Parlor once the Parlor site came back in line.But with Apple, it's 55% of the U.S. phone market.
12:29Only way to get the app is from the app store.So that's why there was a different approach for Google versus Apple.Also, one last thing to say about Apple, well, I don't appreciate what Apple did.I think what they did is very wrong.Apple has a different perspective than the other big tech companies.I don't trust them.I don't like them.I want to be really clear with that.
12:48But they have a pension for data privacy.And that's a big hallmark of parlor, as we believe in data sovereignty.data privacy, data security. Apple is the same way. They don't cooperate with the government inregarding turning over data unless they're forced to. And so this is an important thing thatApple and Parlor had in common. Even though we were at odds, this idea of data sovereigntyor data privacy is common to the two companies. That's fascinating. Well, so now Parlor is back up.You were able to work out that negotiation with Apple. What about with Amazon, though? Becausethey didn't want to negotiate. So how were you all able to get back up and running without
13:25Amazon. So first I want to clarify what happened with Apple, because this is important. So it was not atotal win for Parlor. It was about a 75% win, I would say. And I'd have to give credit where it's due.Our Chief Policy Officer, Amy Peacoff, is an absolute genius. And patience of a saint. We workedwith Apple for a long time to make this happen. And the compromise, which again, we're not happy with,but was the best we could do. And we're continuing, the company's continuing this negotiation,was that there are certain things that Apple said couldn't appear on the version of the app that'sin the app store. So there's a certain amount of content that Apple will censor required was censoredin the app. That content is content where somebody is attacked on the basis of immutable characteristics.
14:12So it's race, it's sex, it's gender, it's religious belief. These are things that, and frankly,these are discussions that serve no purpose. Most people don't want to see that content anyway,but that stuff will be filtered outand there's a pop-up that comes upand says Apple doesn't believeyou should see this content.If you really want to see this content,use the Android app or log on to the website
14:33at parlor.comwhere Parlor doesn't filter any of that stuff.Parlor believes in a First Amendment free speech standardmeaning if it's legal to say it in the town squareyou can say it on parlor.It means it might be unpleasant.And we have a troll filter.There's a troll filter on parlor.
14:47It pops up.You wouldn't normally see that kind of content anywayunless you wanted to.But that's the distinction.that had to be made with Apple.And as far as I know, those negotiations are still ongoing with Apple to prove Apple that we thinkthat's the better way to censor or not even censor to produce content that people can maketheir own choices of what they want to see or not see.
15:05So that's the Apple piece, the Amazon piece to go there.It just required going out and finding people who knew the hosting space in the United Statesof America because we wanted to be hosted onshore who could find us hosting providersthat were safe, secure, and would stand with.us in a firestorm because there's a chance they're going to get hit by the woke mob and attackedfor hosting parlor so we needed to know that we had safe and secure hosting and what is parlor'srelationship with google right now really no relationship so in other words we're not they're not on the appstore or on the google play store at all don't really care the android users get the app directly
15:43from parlor.com moving forward do you feel confident that okay you know parlor has been able tonavigate these conversations. Well, we're not going to see this again where, you know,we're essentially forced to go dark. Or is there still something in the back of your mind thatthinks we're still in a little bit of a danger area? No, I'm very confident. I think Parloris set up technologically. Their tech stack is completely off of big tech. It's non-big techreliant. They continue to build redundancies into the stack. That's really important for anybodyout there who's in our movement who wants to be sure they're secure. You know, I talked to a lot ofpeople, they said, well, we trust our hosting provider. I asked them, well, how many hosting providers
16:24do you have? And if they say one, which is what most people say, you don't want to duplicate yourexpense, my saying in tech is one is none. Because all it takes is one minute, they decide they're goingto shut you off and you're dead. I recommend that people have two to three hosting providers.If you have three hosting providers and you lose one, you've got one in a backup. Having one is verydangerous. Parlor has been, is continuing to build redundancy. I'm really comfortable with thesolidity of the technology. They've rebuilt the platform from the ground up, literally, so thetechnology is now much better than it was before they went dark. I think they're positionedreally well on a go-forward basis. And you have just announced that you have stepped down.
17:04Yep. As the CEO of Parlor, George Farmer is taking over. Talk a little bit about that decisionto step away. Yeah, for me, it was never intended to be permanent. I didn't go in expecting tobe CEO, right? And so I have a passion, and that's restoring the country to self-governance. The reasonthat I went to parlor, I explained I had a friend who was behind parlor, but also the fight for freespeech is the fight. In other words, it doesn't matter if you're a conservative, libertarian, a free thinkerin America, it doesn't matter what your issue is. If you're issues guns, if you're issues taxes,if you're issues regulatory reform, if it's Convention of States like me, if you can't speak online,you're done. It's that simple. And so to me, Parlor was the point of the spear. And if we allowed
17:49big tech and the big tech oligarchs to take parlor offline and leave it offline permanently,it drew a line in the sand that we might never be able to cross again. So for me, the issue wasget parlor back online, help them get back into the app start. And again, it's important to me to bereally clear. I didn't do all that, right? There's a great staff there. Amy Peacoff is incredible.George Farmer has now taken over to take the company into the future. Becca Mercer,who is the financier behind Parlor, a great warrior patriot. This was very,really a team effort. I stepped into the middle of a team, so frankly, I deserve very little of thecredit. That's so, so critical to have that solid team behind you and working with you.
18:29Well, you know, I think one of the reasons why Americans were so frustrated by what they were seeingwith Parlor is, you know, for so long, especially as conservatives, we hold to a value of,okay, you know, if you're seeing something that you don't like, be entrepreneurial. Go startyour own. That's what Parlor did. It said, we don't like what we're seeing, you know, on Twitter, onFacebook, they started their own social media platform, and then they were essentially punishedfor doing so. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, so I think it's a moment of reckoning,and I would agree with you. This is what we've always been told, and this is what the left says tothe right, hey, if you don't like Facebook, if you don't like Twitter, build your own. It's not easy
19:07to do, by the way. And it's not really the technology. It's getting the people onto the platform,that's the hard part. And so once Parlor had done that, I think it was seen as an existential threatby folks at Twitter and Facebook.We know that Cheryl Sandberg struck out against the company.And there are a couple of reasons why.One is they frankly have enough money.I mean, how much money does Zuckerberg need or Facebook need or Twitter need, right?It's not a money thing for them anymore.
19:35It is a control thing.And what they didn't like is Parlor was outside of their realm of control.Parlor truly is a free speech platform.They don't like free speech.So that was very threatening to them.A lot of people were going there for free speech.That's number one.Number two, it breaks their financial model.
19:51Their financial model is that they own your data.They own my data.They consider you and I a commodity, not human beings, but numbers and facts and figures andtraffic, right?That's how they look at human beings.Parlor was an entirely different and is an entirely different model.Parlor believes in data sovereignty.And what that means is you own your own data.
20:10Your data is yours.You are your data.And Parlor doesn't monetize data.And so the idea that a social media platformcould exist without monetizing data is very dangerous to Facebook and Twitter and these other socialmedia platforms. Parlor is monetized through advertising dollars only. It's actually more like a radiostation. So when people want to advertise on Parlor, they're advertising it to the stream of one ofthe influencers and they're buying ad space in those streams. I would say in generally, it's not as
20:40lucrative as selling people's data, but it's also moral and ethical. And I don't believe that sellingpeople's data is. Yeah, yeah. So as we have these conversations about big tech, how do we think aboutactually accepting that challenge as conservatives and, you know, taking practical steps topush back? I think the biggest thing is to take a big swig of reality, and it's not very tasty,and it's really ugly. And my experience now in going around the conservative moon and talking to peopleabout it. Most people still have not accepted that what happened to Parlor could happen to them.They see it as some sort of outlier, but it's not an outlier. You know, it's happened to James O'Keefeat Veritas. It's happened to other people in a variety of ways. Prager, you demonetized on YouTube.
21:28We are under their thumb. And any conservative, whether you're a conservative business personor you're running a nonprofit organization, if you believe that it's not going to happen to you,then you're just foolish. Eventually it is going to happen to you. By the way, it might be happeningto you right now and you don't even know it. Fifty-five percent of all websites in the world arehosted on AWS Amazon Web Services. That means they could look at your data. And they are lookingat your data if they can. It also means they can flip the switch on you anytime they consider youtoo dangerous, inappropriate, politically incorrect, and there's not much you can do. So we asconservatives have to accept that reality and then we have to build around it. We have to build
22:08a conservative libertarian infrastructure that supports free speech.I briefly want to ask you about Section 230.That's a piece of legislation that really protects social media platforms from being held liable for what is posted on their sites.There's a lot of talk about reforming Section 230.What are your thoughts on this?Yeah, I've been involved in the technology industry.I actually remember when 230 was put in place as part of the Communications Decency Act.I've been doing Internet advertising law since 93.
22:38So that was in 1996.You got the CDA.230 is part of the CDA.the real question in the in in in two 30 is about good faith there's these words good faith and thenthere's another phrase in there otherwise objectionable so in other words these social media platformshave the authority to remove content that's otherwise objectionable as long as they do it in good faith sothe question what does that mean and those are incredibly vague terms right well now they're using itto take down things that they find politically objectionable or objectionable to their standards of
23:11what's politically correctIt's a very dangerous place we find ourselves in.My position is very similar to what the Heritage Foundation believes.They put out a paper, a great paper, about we need to reform 230, not remove 230.I think if we remove 230, what happens is comment sections, for example, on the daily signal,you would be able to have no comment section because you would be liable for everything in the comment section.And companies that exist on the web, they just can't do it.It's impossible to survive.
23:39So I think reform is necessary.but I also want to caution conservatives on this issue,we're not going to get it done with Democrats in control of Congress in the White House.And so that means for now that's not our focus.The theoretical discussion can be had.We shouldn't waste a lot of energy on it because it's kind of dead letter until we have a Republican Congress.Yeah.Well, and right now, as the new CEO of Parlor, George Farmer,
24:03why do you see him as the right person to be really moving Parlor forward right now in really critical times?Yeah, you know, I mean, it's time.will tell, I would say there's two reasons. I mean, he's young, which is a good thing, I think,for a social media platform. He grew up in the social media era. I'm an old guy. I'm 59 years old.So comparatively, really, he's a young guy. For those who don't know, he's married to Candace Owens,who obviously is in the heart of the conservative movement. It's kind of a firebrand and a lightning rod in the movement.Absolutely a free thinker. And I think also importantly, somebody who falls in the center of what wereferred to as the red pill movement, right? So she came from the left, came to the right,
24:44working to help other people transition over. It seems to me that's a good influence for thecompany right now. Yeah. Well, talk a little bit about what you're up to. I know you never stoppeddoing your other job, but talk a little bit about what you're focused on now. Yeah, so my main passionis to take power away from Washington, D.C., and give it back to the people. I was one of thefounders of the Tea Party movement. So I watched that wave in 2010. We took over Congress. WeWe had the biggest sweep since 1938.I thought everything would change and nothing changed.I mean, it was really, it was stunning, it was disheartening.
25:19It made me a lot more cynical.We heard that if we took the Senate in 2012, everything would change, nothing changed.And so I realized that there was a bigger problem.The bigger problem is that it's not about personnel.We have a structural problem in Washington, D.C.We've broken the structure of our system of governance.The founder set up this beautifully well-balanced structure.it was intended to balance the states against the federal government, the branches against each other at the federal level.
25:45Over the last 115 years, we've broken that in a lot of different ways, primarily Congress doing things,and then the Supreme Court and the federal court saying it's okay.Simply put what we've done is we took a government that was designed around a limited set of enumerated powers,and we flipped that on its head, and we've given them broad unenumerated powers in the interpretation of the Commerce Clause,and general welfare clause, necessary and proper clause, right?things that the founders never intended, and we've taken all that power away from the people in the states.So the Convention of States Project uses Article 5 of the Constitution.The second clause says whenever two-thirds of the states should ask for it, then Congress calls a convention.
26:24We get together in convention.We debate and potentially propose amendments, and we send them out to the states for ratification.The purpose is take the power away from the federal government and give it back to the people in the states where it belongs.So that's my passion, and that's what I'm back to doing full-time.That's wonderful. That's such critical work so important, and we're glad that you're pursuing that.Thank you. Mr. Beckler, thank you so much your time. We really appreciate you coming on.Thanks for having me.And that'll do it for today's episode. Thanks for listening to The Daily Signal podcast.
26:53You can find the Daily Signal podcast on Google Play, Apple Podcast, Spotify, and IHeart Radio.Please be sure to leave us a review and a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe.Thanks again for listening and we'll be back with you all tomorrow.is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.It is executive produced by Kate Trinko and Rachel Del Judas,sound design by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop.For more information, visit DailySignal.com.
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