Federalist Publisher Ben Domenech railed against Wall Street and Big Tech elites for exploiting the current stock market situation created by individual investors to abuse their power and change the rules mid-game.
“The rules are different for different players,” Domenech said. “The Wall Street folks, who have viewed retail investors as just being commission farms over the years, they have different rules for them versus these retail investors, and that’s a very dangerous thing, particularly when you look back at the way that this whole approach is branded.”
One example of this, Domenech explained, is Robinhood’s severe public relations pivot from “we are all investors,” offering investment opportunities to anyone stuck at home during the pandemic, to “the rules are different for some than they are for others.”
“There is a backlash to that, a natural one,” Domenech said. “I think that’s something people need to be very afraid of in this moment is increased populism, increased tension on so many different counts.”
Facebook shutting down stock trading groups for “violating policies,” Domenech said, only contributes to the backlash.
“It’s complete Calvinball. There’s no real rules here. They’re just guidelines, and when they go in and try to find a justification for shutting something down, you can always find something. It’s the internet. People say crazy things in crazy places all the time,” Domenech said. “You can use any kind of excuse to, I think, achieve this end, but people don’t believe it anymore. They don’t have faith in it. And because the process really isn’t transparent and hasn’t been to this point, I think that they are right to have a distrust for not just Facebook but really so many of these other Big Tech companies that, it seems, work hand in glove, in many ways to, you know, to support their friends and to crush the little guy.”
Because of Wall Street and Big Tech elites’ negative reactions to the rise of the “little guy,” Domenech said this should be considered “a significant event” that “people point to as perhaps a change in their attitude toward the markets.”
“That’s something that I think is dangerous for the country,” Domenech said.
