Save for a $13 million donation to a super PAC supporting Ted Cruz’s failed 2016 presidential bid, the Mercers, a family of powerful right-wing bankrollers, have a proven track record of picking winners—especially when it comes to the ever-evolving and expanding conservative-media landscape. Hedge fund manager Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer used the family’s fortune to help turn Breitbart News into a highly trafficked right-wing media powerhouse and a go-to propaganda arm for Donald Trump. Robert also invested $15 million into Cambridge Analytica long before it became known as the voter data-mining operation that helped propel Trump into the White House. Now, as Twitter cracks down on the president’s unfounded election “fraud” conspiracies, comes word that the Mercer family is involved in a right-wing competitor.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Rebekah Mercer is a leading investor in Parler, a social media and microblogging app founded in 2018. Following the Journal report, Rebekah Mercer wrote from her “verified” Parler account that she and CEO John Matze aim “to provide a neutral platform for free speech, as our founders intended,” adding, “The ever increasing tyranny and hubris of our tech overlords demands that someone lead the fight against data mining.” While Parler fashions itself as pro-free speech, in reality, it is more of a “for us, by us” right-wing alternative to Twitter and Facebook. It’s become a de facto safe space for Trump supporters participating in the “Stop the Steal” protest campaign—a group shut down by Facebook—and others perhaps trying to ignore the reality of a race that the Associated Press and major networks, including Fox News, called for Joe Biden on November 7. Surging in popularity, the app was downloaded nearly a million times between November 3 and November 8.
Conservative politicians, such as Cruz and Rep. Devin Nunes, have been singing Parler’s praises to their followers and have been joined by right-wing media personalities. Parler is also catching on with top conservative media celebrities, including Fox News host Sean Hannity, talk-radio host Mark Levin, far-right activist Laura Loomer, and Fox News contributor Dan Bongino, who is a Parler investor and one of the site’s loudest advocates. One of his colleagues at Fox appears to be just as dedicated to making Parler happen. “I will be leaving [Twitter] soon and going to Parler,” announced pro-Trump Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo earlier this month, following in the footsteps of other conservatives who previously protested Twitter by threatening to quit the site—or, at least, by claiming that they can quit anytime. “Please open an account on @parler right away,” she urged. Dinesh D’Souza, the conservative writer and filmmaker pardoned by Trump, urged his Twitter followers last Thursday to also join him on Parler. On Sunday Victoria Toensing, one of Trump’s attorneys, tweeted: “Go to @Parler to read facts @Twitter won’t let me tell you.” The litany of right-wing pundits voicing outrage against the platform in recent weeks was kicked off by Twitter initially censoring the Rudy Giuliani x New York Post “October Surprise” piece targeting Hunter Biden, and then proceeding to slap a content warning click-through on Trump’s post-loss tweets baselessly whining about the election being stolen or outright declaring victory.
In the past, Trumpworld pundits have carried out boycott campaigns against Twitter in favor of sites like Parler, usually over claims that conservatives are being shadowbanned by the Big Tech liberal cabal. (Such cries come as right-wing news and opinion content, from Bongino and others, dominates Facebook.) Threats to quit Twitter are relatively common on the right, though few have followed through with deleting the bird app. Candace Owens was one of the first to attempt the feat last year, but 11 months later and the Blexit founder’s Twitter account is as active and as it ever was. (She was trending on Monday after calling for a return of “manly men.”)
Additionally, Parler is not the first Twitter rip-off to advertise itself as a free speech paradise. The year 2016 saw the launch of Gab—the first iteration of the far-right approach to social media. With anti-Big Tech sentiment and supposed social media censorship steadily becoming a bigger issue in the GOP, the site was still receiving some attention in the fall of 2018, when it was linked to the slaughter of 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue. While Gab was initially billed as an environment for free speech lovers, it became apparent that some of its users were also lovers of, say, the Third Reich. The Pittsburgh mass shooting marked yet another instance of right-wing extremists either becoming radicalized in social media cesspools or using platforms to plot and broadcast such bloodshed. But even before the site was linked to far-right domestic terrorism, it had descended into irrelevance, a kind of purgatory for far-right personalities banned from Twitter.
The recent rise of Parler, on the other hand, is part of a larger trend that threatens to reshape the conservative-media landscape for the foreseeable future. With the Republican base under Trump shifting further and further away from the parameters of reality—a phenomenon that exploded with the president’s compulsive lying and conspiratorial theorizing but is now best exemplified by the massively popular QAnon movement—many of the media staples that conservatives relied on for their red meat diet no longer satiate. Even long-standing powerhouses like the Drudge Report and Fox News are suddenly facing real competitors—Revolver News and One America News Network or Newsmax, respectively—that have learned to copy their business and production models while offering the extreme content and perspective demanded by this new breed of conservative consumers, including many of Trump’s supporters and the outgoing president himself.