Fox News host Judge Jeanine Pirro compared a handful of Big Tech companies ceasing their relationship with Parler, taking the Twitter alternative offline, to one of the earliest events of the Holocaust.
Parler is offline as of Monday morning after Amazon ended its relationship with the conservative-targeted alternative to Twitter. Amazon provided Parler with cloud computing power, but that ended as the clock hit midnight on the West Coast Monday morning. Apple and Google also removed the app from their platforms, and all three accused Parler of not doing enough to stymie posts inciting violence following the attack on the Capitol.
Parler CEO John Matze warned users that, “We will likely be down longer than expected.”
In an appearance on Fox & Friends Monday, Pirro said the decision for those Big Tech companies to stop working with Parler was “akin to a Kristallnacht.”
“Well, look, they gave us a taste of this preelection when they suppressed the Hunter Biden story,” she said. “And now that they’ve won, what we’re seeing is the kind of censorship that is akin to a Kristallnacht, where they decide what we can communicate about. You know, social media right now is the communication effort of our generation. It’s the way our generation talks.”
On Nov. 9, 1938, violent anti-Semitic riots broke out in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia. In the following days, hundreds of synagogues were burned to the ground, approximately 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools were trashed and destroyed, 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps while 91 Jews were murdered, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.
The attacks became known as Kristallnacht, which translates to “The night of broken glass,” a reference to the shattering of windows and doors that littered the streets after the attack.
“We communicate, we emote, we persuade, we dissuade,” Pirro said. “They want none of that. So you’ve got these monopolies that are monster monopolies. They’re almost bigger than the government. They’re coming in and they’re saying, ‘If you’re on the Right, we don’t want you to speak. We don’t want anyone to hear what you’ve got to say because that’s not whatever, the American way.’ Or whatever they want to say it is. But they can’t deny the fact that there are 75 million people who voted for President Trump, 88 million Twitter followers.”
Pirro addressed the comments on Monday afternoon on Twitter, sharing, “Although book burning started earlier, Kristallnacht included the destruction of Jewish stores, homes & synagogues containing rare Jewish books & Torahs. My reference was in context of books.The Holocaust was the greatest hate crime the world ever tolerated. I abhor all violence.”
Despite the visceral connotations of Kristallnacht, Pirro is not the first person in recent history to compare current events to the infamous attack.
Former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger compared the tragic night to the attack on the Capitol last week that left a handful of people dead. The president encouraged his supporters to go to Capitol Hill to pressure congress not to certify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory and chaos ensued.
In November, CNN International anchor Christiane Amanpour compared the Trump administration’s “modern-day assault” on “facts, knowledge, history, and proof” was akin to “the Nazis warning shot across the bow of our human civilizations that led to genocide against a whole identity, and in that tower of burning books, it led to an attack on facts, knowledge, history, and proof.”
She later apologized, saying that “Hitler and his evils stand alone, of course, in history.”
