Andrew Torba revealed that Jared Kushner would not allow President Trump onto Gab unless the free speech platform banned criticism of Jewish people and Israel.
Torba, the CEO of Gab, spoke to Lauren Witzke of TruNews on Tuesday, and discussed his attempts to bring President Trump onto his free speech social network after he was “totally nuked from the entire mainstream internet” in January this year. “All I wanted to do was to give him his voice back, because there’s a hundred million people or more that want to hear what he has to say,” Torba told Witzke, but as previously reported, said that Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, and his “cronies” were the ones that blocked access to Gab.
Torba said Kushner and his cronies tried to get Torba to “sell out” and “compromise on Gab’s free speech policies,” suggesting that Gab “clean up [their] image,” before President Trump was allowed on. Witzke queried Torba into exactly what people Kushner wanted banned, and Torba revealed that he “specifically had problems with people criticizing Jewish people and Zionism and policies related to Israel”:
“That’s specifically what I was told, in that you have to do something about these people. He called them Jew-haters, I call them Jew-criticizers,” said Torba. “Some of these people believe that anyone who criticizes or even has remotely any sort of criticism towards Jewish people or towards Israel or towards international policy, is all of a sudden an anti-Semite right, which is totally absurd on its face.”
He added that all people were welcome on Gab, be they Zionists or people who are against Zionism. “We’re a content-neutral platform. It’s a free speech platform,” Torba said. “So as long as you’re not saying anything illegal, as long as you’re not making threats of violence, you’re allowed to speak your mind and have an opinion about things.” This is something that he was clearly not going to compromise on, as that selling point is “what made Gab as successful as it is, and that’s what’s going to continue to make Gab successful in the future.”
Kushner and those around him didn’t care about free speech, Torba said, but only how they could monetize the platform. “All I wanted to do was to give him his voice back and all that the people around Trump were interested in was grifting,” he continued, claiming that they told him that they were in “make money mode.”
President Trump’s blog, “From The Desk of Donald Trump,” was permanently shut down last week, with spokesman Jason Miller confirming that “it was just auxiliary to the broader efforts we have and are working on,” and not key to the President’s messaging or public outreach. The statements put out by the blog, received as many engagements on all of the Big Tech platforms combined as they did on Gab, which mirrored them.
