The America First movement needs to take control of the narrative when it comes to the core issues that define the 2022 and 2024 elections. Chief among the crises facing our nation is the rise of Big Tech.

Silicon Valley quickly became some of the most authoritarian overlords in America, especially during the pandemic. It is not a question that Big Tech poses an existential threat to the American Republic. Take this last week as a prime example: Twitter banned Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and the inventor of the mRNA vaccine, Dr. Robert Malone, for “wrong speak” on the issue of COVID. Because they can, and no one will do anything about it.

And while the economy has clearly presented an opportunity for Republican candidates to differentiate themselves from the disastrous and inflationary mess of Biden and the Democrats for the 2022 midterms, we cannot focus there alone. Instead, Republicans must pivot to the cultural fronts that have allowed the Democrats to seize near-total control of every major institution in American society. At the forefront of this culture war is the behemoth of Big Tech.

The threat of Big Tech goes beyond their efforts to censor conservatives, which began long before Donald Trump first came down the escalator in Trump Tower. When all major social media platforms almost simultaneously banned President Trump in January, they were making clear to the entire world that they had become more powerful than the President of the United States. In that moment, Big Tech became the Fifth Estate, and has since worked hand-in-hand with the Biden regime to continue cracking down on political dissent, essentially acting as a new branch of government.

Even as the GOP gradually shifts to more conventional political issues, a handful of candidates have continued sounding the alarm on the threat of Big Tech. One of the most prominent members of this category are U.S. Senate candidate Blake Masters in Arizona.

Masters provided a comprehensive diagnosis of the Big Tech problem as an op-ed in the New York Post. The interference in the 2020 election went far beyond the usual pattern of social media platforms simply censoring conservative voices, and even greater than all of the tech giants’ coordinated efforts to censor the damning Hunter Biden laptop revelations.

As the article notes, and as Masters had previously pointed out on Twitter, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg effectively staged a corporate takeover of the public operators of elections in key battleground states. And he’s out for more.

(Mark Zuckerberg also donated $300 million to organizations to distribute to local election officials in order to “bolster democracy.” No doubt all that cash was spent in a nonpartisan fashion!)

— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) September 23, 2021

The Facebook chief deployed over $400 million to various organizations, especially government election boards, aimed at “getting out the vote” ahead of 2020 under the guise of “coronavirus safety voting projects.” The only problem is that his funds overwhelmingly went to heavily Democratic cities and counties in the crucial swing states, artificially tilting the scales in favor of Joe Biden when all the usual electoral and historical trends pointed to President Trump getting easily re-elected.

The Big Tech issue is only going to worsen over time. In just a matter of years, the social media giants went from systematic censorship of conservatives to openly financing election fraud, and then banning the sitting President of the United States when he dared to call it out. The increasingly institutional approach of Silicon Valley is going to get stronger as 2024 draws closer, when they will surely wage a total battle to keep Donald Trump from returning to the White House.

Clearly, the preponderance of the Republican voter base finds Big Tech odious and yearns for candidates willing to dismantle these monopolistic companies. But many in Congress, including many Republicans and Libertarians, either do not grasp the intricacies of Big Tech’s threats, or are unwilling to provide a reasonable solution other than “start your own Facebook.”