I love Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) about 90% of the time. He's usually a good legislator. He’s a serious and principled conservative. But the 10% that he’s wrong on isn’t just a deal-breaker for me — it’s a deal-breaker for free and fair elections in America. Yes, I'm talking about Big Tech.
We need to be honest. Jordan has actively subverted our ability to pass legislation to stop Big Tech from rigging our elections for Democrats. He stopped Section 230 reform. He blocked antitrust. And he's offered no solutions of his own.
Jordan does all of this while holding up the "limited government" banner — if Facebook and X want to censor political speech or even news stories, they can try, but conservatives should disagree. Maintaining the integrity of our elections is everything.
But apparently, Jordan believes that tyranny is acceptable as long as it is passed and approved by corporate shareholders. The 2020 election was rigged, yes, but not just by mail-in ballots or late-night ballot dumps. It was rigged by Big Tech blocking voters from accessing information.
Fewer than 50,000 votes decided the 2020 election in three swing states. Do you think it wasn't a big deal that Big Tech colluded with the FBI to keep the Hunter Biden laptop story from going anywhere? They silenced the New York Post!
That story was deadly to Biden’s campaign. Biden's son used his father’s official office to enrich their family while smoking crack with hookers. In normal America, that story might have shifted not just 50,000 votes, but millions of votes. Big Tech stopped it, and that made the difference.
Republican voters were understandably furious. But when it came time to check Big Tech’s power and influence over our elections, Jordan wasn’t just AWOL — he was actively fighting against it. He was fighting to protect Google, for crying out loud!
Jordan talks a lot about "limited government," which is scary when you understand the words of our founding fathers, “Government is founded among men to secure our rights.” Secure our rights from whom? From a powerful government? What about other bad actors?
We want the GOP to protect the American people from multinational corporations, NGOs, and billionaires like George Soros, who want to thwart our ability to choose our representatives. Without a doubt, Big Tech and its allies have already proven to be a threat to our rights.
But Jordan did nothing. Remember Section 230 reform? Jordan killed it.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act protects social media sites from libel suits, treating them as platforms rather than as traditional publishers. A few years back, Jordan constantly went on TV to talk about getting Section 230 reform done. He oversaw a task force and told us everyone would get behind it. Nothing happened. Once Elon bought Twitter, Jordan abandoned any pretense of reform, and the issue was shelved.
Jordan will tell you he introduced a Section 230 reform bill — this is true, but Big Tech lobbyists almost certainly wrote it. The bill had no enforcement mechanism and would have failed entirely to prevent censorship of conservatives.
Even worse, he never put his weight behind it — no effort to get the bill out of committee. Meanwhile, Jordan was actively killing other conservatives' Section 230 bills behind the scenes. We know this to be true for one of them because my organization helped write it.
Jordan has publicly opposed all antitrust enforcement efforts, not just the bipartisan bills from that last Congress but also bills introduced on the Senate side by conservative Senator Mike Lee (Digital Advertising Act) and Marsha Blackburn (the Open Apps Market Act).
He's also apparently opposed to the Kids Online Safety Act, another bipartisan bill from Blackburn that most conservatives like. No one knows why. The only groups vocally opposing KOSA are Big Tech-funded or trans activists. I'm sure he has his reasons.
We know Jordan is a good conservative on most issues, and it's unlikely that Google's past contributions to his campaign have impacted his decision-making. However, being this wrong about Big Tech is a major problem.
Big Tech stole the election in 2020. Everyone knows this, even Jordan. And yet he's made no progress toward ensuring that never happens again. We are sitting ducks again as we head into 2024, when Meta, Google, and yes, even X are likely to censor political speech aggressively again.
If the House GOP had chosen Jordan over Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.) as speaker, we would have worked to fix this. An outside chance remains that Jordan could get the job. As we head into 2024, conservatives need to understand that as strong as Jordan may be on most issues, he is a weak link in protecting our elections from social media meddling.
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a thread on X (formerly Twitter).
Terry Schilling is the president of the American Principles Project and founder of the Big Family, where they work to make the American family the most powerful and influential special interest group in the country. You can find him on X and Instagram at @Schilling1776.
