The free speech social media site Parler is finally coming back online, having been nearly destroyed by Big Tech giants Amazon, Google and Apple for allegedly facilitating the planning of the January 6th Capitol riot. That’s the story pushed relentlessly by leftwing media outlets, who live in constant fear that anyone anywhere might be engaging in free speech that they disapprove of. We’ve heard all sorts of things about how eeeevil Parler is on Facebook and Twitter, those two paragons of woke righteousness.

But just as with most of what’s passed for common knowledge about that day, the more time that’s gone by, the more we learn how badly the public has been bamboozled. Like what caused the death of Officer Brian Sicknick, which took the “fact-checkers” at PolitiFact over six weeks to get right.

Not only was the attack being planned long before Trump made the speech that allegedly “incited” it, but we now know that Parler was hardly the preferred tool of riot planners. Rachel Bovard at the Federalist analyzed the 223 charging documents filed by the DOJ against people who were allegedly involved in planning the attack. Here’s what she discovered:

They cite 20 posts on Instagram (owned by Facebook), 24 on YouTube (owned by Google), 73 on Facebook and a whopping eight on Parler.

As Ms. Bovard points out, if any single platform could be called the favorite of the Capitol rioters, it was Facebook, which along with its subsidiary Instagram hosted nearly a dozen times as many relevant posts as Parler. Yet nobody has kicked Facebook off of the Internet and vilified it. YouTube also helped the planners three times more than Parler, but I don't see Google banning its own company from Google searches and app downloads.

Ms Bovard writes, “Somehow, Facebook—which, in 2018, was used to facilitate a genocide in Myanmar, and still can’t manage to stop ISIS from circulating recruitment materials—is Teflon in the face of the same charges that take down competitors like Parler, one of the very few Big Tech alternatives that has managed to break through to mainstream status. And that is because this issue is not really about content moderation policies. It’s about narrative control.”

Read the entire article. She goes on to talk about the concerted effort to silence conservatives, to take away our services and force us into “dusty corners” of the Internet on platforms with no reach that can’t compete with the tech monopolies. Parler had to be taken out because it was the first one that threatened their stranglehold on the flow of information. Well, as I keep reminding people, we’re at least 75 million strong. If we all go together, wherever we go will become a force in social media, and whatever we abandon will be hurt by the loss.

For the record, here’s my Parler account. Join me there, won’t you?