Confusing: Trump seeks to protect Big Tech from European tax collectors but won’t protect his own supporters from being banned and censored?
12/06/2019 / By JD Heyes
If anyone has been wronged by the social media giants — Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube — it’s supporters of President Donald Trump.
For going on three years now, we have been shunned, silenced, punished, censored, and banned from one social media platform after another, in addition to big tech payment platforms and others that, once upon a time, competed for our business.
The president’s reelection is being targeted for disruption by these same tech giants which are all run by Left-wing Marxist Democrats who hypocritically label the president and media that cover him fairly as “tyrants” and “authoritarians” — all while banning us.
It’s maddening and confusing, then, why President Trump would move to protect them from European socialism while allowing them to continue crapping on the First Amendment in our own country by blunting our pro-Trump messages.
As PJ Media reports:
Donald Trump is trying to protect American-based technology giants from the socialists in Europe who think they are making too much and not paying their “fair share.” After France slapped a tax on digital services, Trump has threatened taxes on French luxury goods like cheeses, beauty products, handbags, and sparkling wines such as champagne.
The Trump administration had already imposed tariffs on about $7.5 billion worth of European goods; the latest threat by the president to go a step further to defend our tech giants threatens to open a second front in the global trade war (after China).
The Hill noted further that the fight is increasing pressure on international trade negotiators to come up with a way to tax technology companies that are global in their reach. But as those talks begin, the Trump administration is threatening new retaliatory actions.
“USTR’s decision today sends a clear signal that the United States will take action against digital tax regimes that discriminate or otherwise impose undue burdens on U.S. companies,” Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. trade representative (USTR), said earlier this week.
Most of the roughly 30 business that would be most likely to be targeted for digital taxes are located in the United States; they include Amazon, Google, and Facebook. (Related: Amazon, which provides computing services to the CIA, will soon be running the code that powers many U.S. elections.)
Big Tech owes this president big time
And while there is no shortage of people who would love to see these tech behemoths taxed to support the outsized social benefits programs throughout Europe, the president said in London at at NATO summit he would move to protect American businesses.
“I’m not going to let people take advantage of American companies,” Trump said Tuesday, CNN Business reported. “If anyone is going to take advantage of the American companies, it’s going to be us, it’s not going to be France.”
Of course, French officials are aghast, as they threaten to retaliate themselves. “It is not what one would expect from an ally, it is not what one would expect from the United States,” said French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire.
Well, obviously, our president and our trade representatives could say the same thing: We wouldn’t expect an ally like France to penalize our corporations either, and yet they see nothing wrong with doing so.
And equally apparent, given the president’s oft-stated objective to “Make America Great Again,” it makes perfect sense that he would move to protect American corporations from being exploited by anyone, ally or nemesis.
But come on. The president knows that many of the social media tech giants who may be targeted by European socialists have themselves been targeting his American supporters.
Yet up to this point, his administration hasn’t done much to stop the abusive censorship except make idle threats.
Trump’s reelection campaign is already being censored by YouTube, though the Google-owned video company is taking the campaign’s money.
It’s okay for the president to want to protect American companies from exploitative practices abroad, but he’s got to do more to prevent them from targeting him because they don’t like him.
These companies will owe him a huge favor if he goes to bat for them.
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Tagged Under: Amazon, American First, ban, Big Tech, Censorship, economics, exploitation, Facebook, France, Google, President Trump, social media platforms, tariffs, taxes, trade war, Trump supporters
