Making Sense of Zuckerberg’s Political “Epiphany”

As Donald Trump was sworn in as president for the second time, he was surrounded by the men who deplatformed and silenced him four years ago. Google CEO Sundar Pichai banned Trump from YouTube and removed his app, Truth Social, from Google Play. Mark Zuckerberg sat flanked by Republican politicians despite banning Trump on Facebook and Instagram following the January 6 protest at the Capitol.

Whether it’s due to political opportunism or a real change of heart, the tech moguls’ now cozy relationship with Trump is one of necessity. It was easy to censor someone they thought would never become the most powerful man in the country again.

The question of how conservatives should respond to Big Tech’s sudden embrace of Trump is an important one. For too long, conservatives have insisted on purity tests for their allies. This is less about making sure your allies won’t turn on you and more a strange insistence that every convert must be a true believer. The problem is that the Left abandoned this notion a long time ago to their benefit.

Consider what Zuckerberg said when he was on Joe Rogan’s podcast. He’ll be introducing a community notes type of fact-checking system to all Meta platforms, which will significantly reduce the mainstream media’s power over Americans’ free expression via third-party fact-checkers.

Zuckerberg’s reasoning for making such a move becomes clear once you consider the timing. Less than two weeks before the inauguration of the man he had censored, and after an election that has been aptly described as a “mandate,” Zuckerberg sensed the vibe shift. Americans had thoroughly rejected the regime’s goal of limiting speech because of perceived “threats to democracy.”

“The good thing about [changing Meta’s censorship rules] after the election is you get to take this kind of cultural pulse as like, OK, where are people right now? And how are people thinking about it? We try to have policies that reflect, you know, mainstream discourse,” Zuckerberg told Rogan regarding his decision to change policies.

He didn’t necessarily have a come-to-Jesus moment on the First Amendment—and we really shouldn’t care if he didn’t. It is certainly frustrating that Zuckerberg seems to take no credit for acting as one of the regime’s stooges for years. But harping on this will get conservatives nowhere.

Instead, we should acknowledge that Zuckerberg is now doing our bidding, which is the most important takeaway. When the national will leans in a certain direction, even the elites bend with it. Zuckerberg may very well still be as leftist as they come. Or, for all we know, he could have been right-leaning the whole time he was doing the Left’s dirty work. But that Zuckerberg is more interested in political expediency than political principle should come as no surprise.

The point is, you don’t necessarily have to change the very hearts and minds of each person who currently supports, for example, gay surrogacy or sex changes for kids in order to move the Overton Window. Once the shift happens, the Left will submit to the cultural zeitgeist building against them.

Conservatives don’t have to make it illegal to be transgender to successfully counter the Left. We instinctively know that even in the most Christian society, someone somewhere will put on his wife’s dresses to satisfy his gender dysphoria or sleep with his male “roommate.” Capricious raids on bedrooms to ensure compliance with heterosexual norms have never occurred in America. Even the raid that led to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Lawrence v. Texas was carried out due to reports of a weapons disturbance, not acts of homosexuality.

We must make it clear that the “majority” is silent no longer. Legislation, executive orders, and lawsuits are important, but they follow the cultural zeitgeist—which most of the time is created by a loud minority. The key for conservatives is to make leftist subversives feel a high degree of social pressure to keep their views hidden so they cannot make new converts in the first place.

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