 Twitter also, as we reported or as we covered on Friday, kicked Katie Hopkins from their platform. And this, it seems, has created a bit of a tidal wave of right-wing figureheads moving from Twitter to this new application. Now, what is Parler? We can get it up. Get up an image of the app. Parler pitches itself as a version of Twitter that supports free expression. It boasts that it's uncensored and it has become the home, basically, to the online far right and the Trumpian right. Since May, the website itself has been promoting what is called a twexit campaign. It's a Portmanteau Twitter exit, like Brexit, but Twitter. To get right-wingers to a look from Twitter, this was especially after the row between Donald Trump and Twitter where they sensed, well, they didn't, they just put a warning in front of a tweet he had put out, which basically most people interpreted as calling for violence against protesters. It was the one where he says, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. But it took a month for this to hit British shores. And this weekend was when we saw twexit take hold in the UK. I found it very surprising, actually, because I often thought that many of these people on the right wanted to have this sort of barrier between themselves and Katie Hopkins where they're like, she's beyond the pale. We're not like her. But actually, it was her getting kicked from Twitter that created this move. Let's get up. Some of the characters that went over, one of them is Darren Grimes, right-wing fund it, Brexiteer. Hopefully, Parler app will work out. The chilling effect that Big Tech is placing on free speech, free expression and freedom of association is deeply troubling. Conservative for mainstream for is under attack like never before. We'll see in a moment how mainstream the four is on there. But it wasn't just right-wing pundits like Darren Grimes. Also Tory MPs moved over to Parler this weekend. Let's take a look at a tweet from Ben Bradley. Having a crack at Parler gives a follow. He wasn't the only Conservative MP. Eva Steve Baker and Angela Richardson also joined. Emily Hewittson, who is another sort of popular right-wing pundit, often appears on Sky News. Sometimes a BBC as well, I think. She tweeted, Parler is brilliant. Such a contrast from this depressing left-wing echo chamber. Then a few hours later, it didn't take long. Only thing I would say, please don't use this app as an excuse to be racist. It's grim. It didn't take very long to work out what this was really about. In case you were wondering, is this app really racist or are we tarnishing it? Is it just about free speech? Let's get up some of the hashtags that were going down on it yesterday. This is Emily Hewittson again. Just saw someone call Parler the racist app. Do people ever learn calling people racist? Just because you disagree with them isn't normal behavior. Let's get up the hashtags. It's not just abnormal to call this stuff problematic. This was a Twitter user who typed in Muslims. This is what you get if you type in Muslims on the Parler app. Muslims, no Muslims, is a second most popular. Muslims are invaders, Muslim brotherhood, deport all Muslims now. Muslims are terrorists, ban Muslims. Muslims are not refugees, Muslim peace, ban Muslim government. Let's get up the next one. I think we've got the idea. This is George Soros. George Soros is always one of the trending ones on there. Arrest George Soros. I can't even read that one. George Soros is BL's a Bob incarnate. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? The devil. Ah, okay, good. George Soros plays Antifa. George Soros for the gallows. And then I think we can get up the general trending. So these are when you, that's when you search Muslims or George Soros. Now let's get up the general trending hashtags on the app. Fox News, deep state propaganda, hashtag civil rights. I imagine they're not for them. Pray infiltration treason, hashtag KKK, Democrat Party, voter fraud, which is the big Trump line at the moment, Obama gate, which still no one understands what Obama gate is, deep state and voter ID. Again, this the big Trumpian issue that people are going to try and steal the election. I suppose you're, I mean, there's a few, there's a number of things to sort of question about this. I mean, one of them is does the argument that Katie Hopkins getting banned from Twitter means that people will move into these underground applications, which means they can be even more violent and that you've pushed it underground. And ultimately, I mean, the hope of the right wingers is that they'll create this new platform where they can get more powerful. I mean, Twitter has 327 million users, I think parlor at the moment, less than a million. So it's probably not the best argument. Well, what do you make of this, this exodus from Twitter to parlor? I'll go to Ash first. Well, one of the things that I find interesting about the far rights tactic is that they're in power, right? They've won, you know, they've got a government in Britain and America, two of the most powerful nations in the world. They've got a government which is very much aligned with their politics. And still, in order for their story to work, they've got to act as though the left are hegemonic everywhere, whether it's in the government, whether it's in the state apparatus, whether it's in the culture industry. It's actually Michael May, you and Aaron, who are running everything. And so what that speaks to is I was listening to the new season of slow burn, which is about David Duke, the KKK Grand Wizard, who won, I think, a race as a state senator in Louisiana in the 1980s, I believe it was. And he would appeal to his base by talking about being a forgotten majority. And so what they're trying to do is speak to this idea that, you know, as Darren Grimes put it, mainstream opinion is, you know, now becoming, you know, somehow shameful and dirty. And it's being censored. Well, if that was the case, it would no longer be mainstream opinion. You're having to hold these two completely contradictory ideas in hand at once. And it's about fostering the sense that really, it's, you know, you know, white, reasonably well off, right? They're often young people speaking to an audience of older people, Gen Xers and boomers who are truly oppressed. It's you who don't have a stake in society purely because you're operating within a, you know, pop cultural environment that thinks that you're all dinosaurs. And that's apparently an assault on your free speech rather than other people using theirs. So strategically, moving to an app like, you know, Parley, it might make it easier to organize certain things. For instance, I think it was highly likely that, you know, a significant amount of what I experienced was due to, you know, organization on that app. However, you're only powerful when you're speaking to that forgotten majority within the social and social media environment. You know, you don't have the majority of people in the electorate who are on Twitter. But then again, you know, Twitter is the, you know, biggest political social media app around. And even that's a minority of your electorate. And you're going to an even smaller one. I think that strategically, it might not be that smart. Aaron, I want to get you to comment on the Tory MP element of this, because, you know, as I said, the timing of this isn't coincidental. On Friday, Katie Hopkins gets banned from Twitter. Over the weekend, lots of British right wing pundits start tweeting the hashtag, twix it and moving over to parlay where she's just moved. And, you know, you could say this is just, you know, marginal people. It doesn't really matter. But you had free Tory MPs tweet that they were doing the same. So Ben Bradley, Stephen Baker, and Angela Richardson are basically all joining in a movement to go to a far right application or an application that's become home to the far right. Precisely because Katie Hopkins has moved over there. I mean, it seems bizarre that they felt comfortable tweeting about that this weekend. Well, these are the sort of hardcore of their cultural worries. And I think, you know, if you're a conservative, why would you be on Twitter? You've got you've got the mainstream media. You know, Darren Grimes and Emily Hewittson go on the BBC every day. And people say, well, I've already gone there, too. Well, actually, nowhere near as much as them. And I think we've actually got something to say. But secondly, look, if you want, if you want to get the radical left off the BBC and off sky, and you want to do the same to people like Hewittson and Douglas Murray, and I don't think our politics are analogous. But if you want to do that, the right are going to take a far bigger hit than than the left are, you know, BBC question time every week has somebody with those politics, whether it's an Isabella Oakshore or a Julia Hartley Brewer. If you look at the roster on LBC, Faraj left recently, he was there for a while. Katie Hopkins used to have a show there, Nick Ferrari. You know, so I Ian Dale, you know, Ian Dale was listed, he did the show there with Peter O'Born and Peter O'Born is listing all these sort of racist things which Boris Johnson's done. He said, well, I don't think they're racist. He goes, what are you a racist then Ian? Perfectly normal question. Ian Dale gets, you know, don't don't call me a racist. Of course, Ian Dale constantly, his career is apologizing for people who are racist, you know, his great line in the 2017 general election was, let Linton be Linton, that Linton and Crosby be Linton Crosby, i.e. let the conservatives win this on the basis of racism, bigotry and division. That's what he, his stock in trade is. So in a sense, I wonder why they get so upset about Twitter. It's the one thing they don't do particularly well at. As Ash has said, it's not particularly influential in the grand scheme of things. It's good at sort of setting the landscape for broadcast journalists. But other than that, not really. If you think about it, they're even sort of, they've got this victim complex, even regards to the BBC and the new director general. The new director general was literally a member of the conservative party in the 1990s. He was running as a conservative councillor candidate. What more would you like? It kind of defies belief. But again, it taps back into a really essential point. The modern right has no understanding of political economy, has no solutions to big crises of our era. Nobody thinks that things have gone forward in the last 10 years. We've had 10 years of Tory government. Everybody knows things have gone backwards, whether it's home ownership, living standards, wages, schools, hospitals, public transport, nobody thinks things are getting better. All they have is this paranoid style. That's what they have, the paranoid style, great essay by Richard Hofstadter in the 1960s. And it seems to be getting worse. And what I think this reflects is actually the politics of anti-communism. Of course, anti-communism was a huge substrate of right-wing thinking during the Cold War. It feels like anti-communist sort of thinking and rhetoric is now just basically going on to social democracy. And I think that's what happened to Jeremy Corbyn. And I think a lot of the left, a lot of the sense left, because they don't like Jeremy Corbyn, don't see that for what it is. The same thing more or less happened to Ed Miliband. The same thing will happen to Geert Starmer. You know, anti-communism, the lens of anti-communism is now inflicted upon anything which deviates from right-wing social conservatism and effectively sort of neoliberal economics. And for a free society, that's really, really troubling. And so there's the explanation as to why they have this victim complex. It's kind of, it's constitutive of their apolitics, because without it, they have nothing else.