NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana — Down on the bayou, the conservative grassroots are preparing for another epic battle—this time with the titans of technology in Silicon Valley.

Alex Marlow, the editor-in-chief of Breitbart News and moderator of a Thursday night panel in Metairie, said:

Not only have the handful of unelected Big Tech oligarchs obtained unprecedented power and influence, but they’ve done so operating almost entirely clandestinely. They’ve used savvy marketing, addictive products, and billions of dollars to influence politicians and citizens alike to turn a blind eye to the full extent to which they can censor, control, and manipulate. Tomorrow night, we begin the process of exposing the Masters of the Universe for what they are.

On Thursday night in the suburbs of New Orleans in Metairie, Breitbart News Network will host a town hall aimed at exposing what Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called “The Masters of the Universe.” Close to a thousand people are expected to attend what is expected to be an action-packed town hall event in person, with countless more watching online.

When Sessions was still serving in the U.S. Senate before his appointment as Attorney General, battling the globalist forces pushing for open borders amnesty policies, he popularized the phrase “The Masters of the Universe” to describe particularly Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg but more generally the entire Silicon Valley elite who act like they are better than ordinary Americans.

At the time, Facebook and Zuckerberg were pushing hard for the “Gang of Eight” amnesty plan that would have left America’s borders and interior insecure but provided citizenship to every illegal alien in America. That was long before the rise of Donald Trump, who in 2015 launched a presidential campaign focused on building a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico and deporting all those illegal aliens that Zuckerberg wanted to force taxpayers to subsidize with amnesty.

Zuckerberg spent millions upon millions of dollars pushing for amnesty, but Sessions—armed only with his voice on the floor of the U.S. Senate and a handful of crusading right-wingers fighting at his side—defeated him. The amnesty plan did pass the Senate in 2013, but thanks to Sessions’ efforts he stopped it in the House, preventing any amnesty from making it to then-President Barack Obama’s desk.

Then, in 2014 as the battle turned from stopping a legislative amnesty to stopping executive amnesty, Sessions used his most powerful weapon—his voice—again to speak up on the Senate floor. It is here that Sessions spoke out against “The Masters of the Universe” specifically in relation to Zuckerberg on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Sessions said on the Senate floor, a now infamous speech:

One of the groups that have joined the chorus of special interests demanding executive action on immigration is FWD.us, run by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. He just turned 30, and I understand he is worth about $30 billion. Mr. Zuckerberg has been very busy recently. One of his fellow billionaires, Mr. Carlos Slim — maybe the world’s richest man — invited Mr. Zuckerberg down to Mexico City to give a speech. What did Mr. Zuckerberg promote in his speech? Well, this is a report of it. I guess I will first note that young Mr. Zuckerberg maybe doesn’t know there is a deep American tradition — a tradition in most developed nations — that you don’t go to a foreign capital to criticize your own government. I suppose he doesn’t know about that. They probably didn’t teach him about that when he was at one of the elite schools he attended. This is what he said in Mexico City: ‘We have a strange immigration policy for a nation of immigrants. And it’s a policy unfit for today’s world.’ Well, the ‘masters of the universe’ are very fond of open borders as long as these open borders don’t extend to their gated compounds and fenced-off estates.

The debate and battle over amnesty continued into 2015 and 2016, as Trump crushed amnesty backers one-by-one in the GOP presidential primaries before Sessions triumphantly endorsed him, not too far from here, just outside Huntsville, Alabama.

The phrase came up again at the 2016 Republican National Convention, when Alabama blog Yellowhammer Politics noted that Sessions—the first major politician, a U.S. Senator, to back Trump—defeated the “Masters of the Universe” by getting Trump the party’s presidential nomination and beating amnesty for years.

Now, those same very powerful “Masters of the Universe”—particularly Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Google’s leadership—are rearing their ugly heads again to push to silence conservatives and manipulate the masses with misuse of data surreptitiously collected. That’s where Breitbart News comes in, along with Free Our Internet—the group sponsoring this Breitbart News Townhall—to pick up the mantle where Sessions, who is now the nation’s top law enforcement official, left off: Battling the “Masters of the Universe.”

The Thursday evening panel will feature syndicated columnist and multiple New York Times bestselling author Ann Coulter, Breitbart News senior editor-at-large and Government Accountability Institute president Peter Schweizer, and senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology Robert Epstein. Marlow will moderate the panel, which will be live-streamed on Breitbart News and on Facebook.

The event begins at 7:00 p.m. central time at Andrea’s restaurant in Metairie, and it is open to the public.

The renewed focus on the “Masters of the Universe” comes as Facebook, particularly, but others in Silicon Valley are under fire. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is scheduled to testify before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Energy and Commerce on April 11 and on Wednesday told reporters in a conference call that his company made significant mistakes with regard to the handling of people’s data.

“We’ve seen some scraping,” Zuckerberg told reporters on a call Wednesday. “I would assume if you had that setting turned on that someone at some point has access to your public information in some way.”

He also, according to Bloomberg News, admitted to Facebook scanning links and photos people send on the private messenger app.

Zuckerberg added that Facebook will only apply privacy protection measures “in spirit” to most users.

“We’re still nailing down details on this, but it should directionally be, in spirit, the whole thing,” he said, per the Independent, when asked about Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Facebook’s CEO admitted during the call with reporters that his company may have improperly shared the data of 87 million users with Cambridge Analytica.

JUST IN: Facebook: "We believe the Facebook information of up to 87 million people—mostly in the US—may have been improperly shared with Cambridge Analytica." https://t.co/rzEohH1FEb pic.twitter.com/TmlOuQOenM — ABC News (@ABC) April 4, 2018

All of the issues swirling around Zuckerberg and Facebook at the moment should not detract from what mega-search engine firm Google is doing to silence conservatives.

Fired Google engineer James Damore, who has since become a whistleblower against the tech giant, has exposed what he says in a class-action lawsuit against the company is severe political, racial, and gender-based discrimination that Google engaged in to further a leftist agenda.

As Breitbart News has reported, the lawsuit shows widespread alleged discrimination against conservatives at Google.

“The lawsuit alleges that, ‘Google employees who expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google’s employment policies and its business, such as ‘diversity’ hiring policies, ‘bias sensitivity,’ or ‘social justice,’ were/are singled out, mistreated, and systematically punished and terminated from Google, in violation of their legal rights,’” Breitbart Tech’s Lucas Nolan wrote in a lengthy piece about the lawsuit.

Schweizer, an expert on corruption who authored Clinton Cash as well as the newly released Secret Empires, another number one bestselling book, says this whole Facebook operation is not just a data privacy issue: It’s about how Facebook takes the data, packages it, then sells it to companies who aim to “manipulate” consumers.

“The issue is not just privacy,” Schweizer, who will appear on the panel on Thursday evening, said in an email. “These big tech companies gather information on us to sell them to companies but also to manipulate us. And they manipulate us without us even knowing it’s going on.”

Misuse of user data is just the tip of the iceberg with regard to Facebook’s mistreatment of users for corporate, financial, and political gain.

“Internet censorship is the most important issue facing the nation, after immigration,” Coulter, who will also appear on the panel Thursday evening, said in an email. “The left is desperate to prevent conservatives from communicating information that the MSM would prefer to keep secret.”

Coulter is exactly right: Facebook’s algorithm changes crush conservatives across the new media, including even President Donald Trump himself. Trump’s Facebook page, as Breitbart News has reported, has seen as high as a 45 percent drop-off since algorithm changes went into effect recently. Most conservatives have seen similar if not more drastic hits in traffic as Facebook seeks to marginalize conservative and anti-establishment voices from every perspective, and amplify voices that protect the status quo and the political and cultural establishment.

Thursday’s panel is going to explore all of these things and more.

“It’s going to be a blockbuster!” Coulter added of the panel.

Grassroots conservatives from across Louisiana and throughout the South are expected to make their way by the hundreds to the event. Enthusiasm, two-time U.S. Senate candidate Rob Maness told Breitbart News, is off the charts.

“The grassroots in Louisiana treasure their hard won freedoms,” Maness, who now runs the conservative grassroots political group Gator PAC, told Breitbart News. “We fight to protect them here and are energized across the state to free our internet! Expect many excited activists to attend the town hall.”

Local Republican clubs and conservatives as well as Tea Party activists and Trump supporters are making their way to the event.

To attend, please RSVP to RSVP@freeourinternet.org. All attendees must RSVP in advance.