Communications technologies have always played a substantial role in political realignments. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s skillful use of radio in his day ensured the New Deal coalition, Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph helped pave the way for Republican control of government. This trend still holds true today.

The tech-left’s creative use of online movement building, coalition organizing, and millions in liberal foundation and Silicon Valley financing largely dominated the online political dialogue during the Obama years. But while radical netroots progressives have long paid lip service to an “open Internet” as an essential tool to ensure a free press and political transparency, their openness sophistry has always been a clever rhetorical head fake. The truth is they care nothing for Internet openness. For them, the end game is about Internet control.

Control the Media

As the Internet upended the advertising revenue model of traditional media in the last decade, the liberal foundations and uber-globalists quickly filled the vacuum. George Soros alone is said to have contributed more than $48 million to dozens of leftist investigative news outlets like ProPublica.

Since 2006, the Ford Foundation has invested a stratospheric $288 million globally in media, $162 million of which has been invested in the U.S. – largely as part of its “media democracy” movement, a sophisticated activist movement comprised of social justice radicals and hard leftists intent on supplanting objective journalism with sophistry masquerading as legitimate news.

Control the Internet’s Infrastructure

In early 2015, President Obama passed rules regulating the internet for the first time in history. While leftist foundations were the primary financiers (Soros and Ford shoveled $196 million to so-called “open Internet” advocates) they were joined by Silicon Valley monopolies like Google and Facebook who opportunistically saw regulation as a way to further leverage their monopoly control of the Internet, in a bid ironically called “net neutrality.”

It helped of course, that companies like Google seemed to own the Obama White House: Google officials visited the White House more than 425 times during Obama’s two terms, and more than 258 officials and executives spun through the Google-Obama revolving door during his two terms.

Control the Platforms

More than any other event, the 2016 election exposed the left’s “open Internet” charade for the fraud that it always was. In the closing months of the election, Silicon Valley companies prodded on by their leftist activist and liberal foundation allies launched an all-out assault on Trump supporters, banning Twitter users, censoring Facebook content and even allegedly manipulating Google search results and Google autocomplete to favor their preferred candidate and disfavor her opponent.

Silicon Valley-owned mainstream outlets like Jeff Bezos’ personal blog The Washington Post published outlandish News of the World-style stories suggesting that Vladimir Putin poisoned Hillary Clinton — the supposedly real cause of her infamous collapse. Google and Facebook waded into the news process directly, declaring themselves arbiters of the truth by rolling out new “fact-check” features to debunk news stories that diverted from the official Google/Soros globalist narrative.

Taking Back the Internet

Into this fray marched a new breed of scrappy, rowdy, pugnacious activists that no one predicted. Soros’ henchmen and his Silicon Valley allies were caught flat-footed by a new group of real Internet freedom fighters.

Armed with clever memes and immersed in Internet culture, this new conservative army used crowd-sourced activism, viral content, and humor to reach their audience. Today the same leftist “open internet” LARP’ers who championed internet freedom only two years ago have branded chilled-out frogs as hate symbols. Former presidential candidates even argue that conservative speech is not constitutionally protected.

To keep the Internet truly free and open, Americans that support true internet freedom need to make their voices heard. This is the most important battle of our generation. It’s a fight against the tech-left, their corporate fellow travelers, and their big government allies working together to silence dissent and solidify their power once and for all. Join us in the fight to Free Our Internet.

Christie-Lee McNally is the Director of Free Our Internet. Free Our Internet (www.freeourinternet.org) is a non-profit citizen group whose mission is to educate the public about how leftist super-elites and their powerful corporate allies in Silicon Valley have methodically used their wealth and political influence to erode the public’s internet freedoms and destroy alternative media. Our goal is to empower the public to fight back against the tech-left’s well-funded war to control our means of communication, information, organizing, and mobilizing: the internet. Free Our Internet and its supporters stand for free speech and expression online, protecting the diversity of ideas, and opposing government actions that undermine Internet openness and transparency.