Jeff Brain of CloutHub. Jeff Brain of CloutHub. Jeff Brai…….

It’s the first day of the big Republican conference CPAC and a star has already been born.

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel has been keeping his Twitter followers up to speed on the comments from the various speakers at the conference today, and it’s mostly been the usual parade of clowns like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz. But then, Weigel tweeted the following words:

“Jeff Brain of CloutHub asks the audience to put their hands up if they’ve lost followers on social media. #CPAC2021.”

What a tantalizing sentence. It sounds fake. It sounds like a gag from The Simpsons. It’s just a straight-faced account of what happened when Jeff Brain of CloutHub took the stage at CPAC. Mr. Brain asked attendees to raise their hand if they’ve lost followers on social media, and a sea of hands went up across the audience. But the incident will live in infamy as the moment the world met Jeff Brain of CloutHub.

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Mike Isaac of the New York Times tweeted, “‘jeff brain of clouthub’ now on repeat in my brain for the next two weeks.” Journalist Ashley Feinberg requested “a clip of Jeff Brain saying ‘I’m Jeff Brain,’” saying that she doesn’t “care about anything else.” Unfortunately, for Ashley and the rest of the world, Jeff Brain didn’t say “I’m Jeff Brain” during his appearance at CPAC. (You can see the full speech here starting around 18 minutes in.)

I also have to apologize to my readers for putting a big picture of Jeff Brain at the top of this blog post, robbing you of the pleasure of imagining what he looks like. Not knowing Jeff Brain, I pictured a bald man with a big ass head like Marc Andreesen with extra brains leaking out of his ears. But Brain’s head is basically normal-sized and topped with what appears to be hair.

CloutHub is a new social media platform that’s trying to pull in the aggrieved conservative audience that Gab and Parler have targeted with mixed results. With that knowledge, you can probably imagine what Jeff Brain’s short talk was all about. He stirred up the audience with reminders of Donald Trump and the MyPillow guy getting deplatformed, warned that Big Tech is invading your privacy, and promised to provide a safe space for conservatives to talk about whatever they want. What’s more, his platform does it all. “Imagine if you read this morning that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram all merged together,” Brain said. “That is actually what CloutHub is.”

But I’m not here to talk about CloutHub or the fact that its privacy policy is pretty standard fare for a social media company. I’m not here to say that responsibly running Facebook is such a monumental job that Facebook fails to do it on what seems like an hourly basis. I’m not here to talk about how much harder it would be to run Facebook if you bolted Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram onto it. I’m here to talk about Jeff Brain.

And now, I’m done.