Glenn Beck compares tech’s ban on Trump to Nazis putting ‘Jews behind the wall’

Conservative commentator and founder of TheBlaze Glenn Beck said Tuesday that President Trump’s exile from social media following last week’s Capitol riot is like a “digital ghetto,” comparing it to “Germans with the Jews behind the wall.”

Appearing on Fox News, Beck told host Tucker Carlson, “The government and high tech need each other. So this — with the implosion of trust, they have to join hands. And it’s extraordinarily dangerous.”

Trump has been permanently or temporarily suspended from various social media websites since the deadly Capitol breach that took place after a rally he spoke at in Washington on Jan. 6. Twitter has banned the president permanently for repeatedly violating its rules of conduct, while Facebook has suspended his account until at least one day after President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.

“You can’t have freedom of speech if you can’t have — if you can’t express yourself in a meaningful place,” Beck said. “This is like the Germans with the Jews behind the wall, they would put them in the ghetto. Well, this is the digital ghetto, you, you can talk all you want to, Jews, you do whatever you want behind the wall. Well, that’s not meaningful and that’s where we are.”

Beck also compared Trump’s ousting from social media to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, at one point holding up a pair of wooden shoes he claimed belonged to a woman from San Francisco who was placed in an internment camp.

Carlson noted during the interview that Democratic politicians have so far not objected to Big Tech’s actions against Trump.

“No, because the liberals aren’t liberals anymore. And that’s the problem. We need good classic liberals, people who believe in the Bill of Rights. I don’t care who you vote for, what you do, how you live, who you have sex with. … Do you believe in the Bill of Rights, do you believe in those things if you do, that’s our ‘unum,’ that’s what we can unite on,” said Beck.

Democrats have applauded Trump’s expulsion from Twitter, saying he regularly spread falsehoods and incited his followers to violence. The latter accusation is the basis of the House’s second impeachment effort against Trump, which is set for a Wednesday vote.

During a Reuters interview on Monday, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said that her company “had no plans” to lift the ban on Trump’s accounts.

One site popular with conservatives that would likely have served as Trump’s next platform, Parler, has effectively been taken offline, with Apple and Google removing it from their app stores and Amazon Web Services suspending the website. Parler has since sued Amazon to have its website reinstated.