Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump suggested closing the Internet in order to combat terrorism.
In a speech on Monday, Trump began his rant against the Internet by saying,
We have kids who are watching the Internet and they want to be masterminds. And then you wonder, ‘Why do we lose all these kids?’ They go over there. They’re young. They’re impressionable. They go over there—they want to join ISIS—and we have our anchors—I think I got them mostly stopped—did you notice that? I don’t hear it too much. But they say, ‘The young mastermind. Oh, he’s brilliant! Oh man, he’s brilliant!’ I don’t even think he’s got a high I.Q. In Paris, I called him a guy with the dirty, filthy hat. Not a smart guy. A dummy. A mastermind? Bing bing bing, starts shooting everybody.
The press has to be responsible. They’re not being responsible.
We are losing a lot of people because of the Internet and we have to do something. We have to go to see Bill Gates and a lot of different people that really understand what’s happening. We have to talk to them, maybe in certain areas, closing that Internet up in some way.
Trump then mocked opponents of the shutting down the Internet as “foolish people.”
“Some will say, ‘Oh, freedom of speech! Freedom of speech!’ These are foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people. We have a lot of foolish people.”
He continued, “We’ve got to maybe do something with the Internet because they are recruiting by the thousands.”