How Twitter transformed itself from a frivolous online message board into the leading digital innovator of 21st-century techno-fascism, turbocharging censorship from the mere deletion of words into erasing human beings entirely.
“The liberties of our Country, the freedom of our civil constitution are worth defending at all hazards: And it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair Inheritance from our worthy Ancestors: They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood; and transmitted them to us with care and diligence. It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation, enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle; or be cheated out of them by the artifices of false and designing men.” Samuel Adams, October 14, 1771
I always liked Twitter. It was lively, snarky and always challenging to get your bon mot into 140 characters. My feed was not for the faint-hearted. It was pungent, pugnacious and some times risqué. Not as over the top of the hordes on twitter who have threatened to kill me, my wife, my kids and my dogs but then Twitter doesn’t seem to care about banning them. The imbecile Keith Olberemann drops the F-bomb on President Trump daily but Twitter looks the other way. Twitter, it seems, holds me to a different standard.
It is only by the grace of the Lord God Almighty that Twitter’s murky star chamber of sneaky, faceless censors, and the craven, disingenuous corporate autocrats behind it, were not around when the likes of Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams and many more brave rebels chose to publicly revolt against constant royal subjugation.
Given how boldly those men defied convention and correctness, rejecting sanitized platitudes in favor of incendiary, seditious, do-or-die rhetoric, it is a safe bet they would have been quickly and summarily silenced, suspended in secret by Twitter’s selective political minders and disappeared without a trace, had they found themselves at the mercy of the Twitter content police.
Harsh, insulting, profane, indelicate, over-the-top and even outright nasty public rhetoric in the heat of partisan combat is an inherent and arguably-healthy feature of a centuries-old American political tradition.
In other words, Americans engage with our political opponents, no matter how ugly it might get. We have traditionally eschewed any resort to disingenuous offense-taking or phony outrage or any other species of whining victimhood as a proxy for cheap point-scoring or advantage-taking over opponents.
What Americans do not do is try to censor or silence our opponents, or our opponents merely for not agreeing with our own ideology or for not conforming with some arbitrary restriction someone might try to put on our rhetoric to pre-empt full-throated engagement of any opponent.
No segment of the American political spectrum has been better acquainted with, and more prolific in, the use of mockery, profanity, contempt and, yes, hatred as means to go after opponents than the American political left.
One need not look past the instant stream of non-stop hatred, abuse and defamation that has been spewed about me, and to me, in the reply comments of nearly every Tweet I ever posted in the last two years, to see how true this is.
It is also true, and certainly curious, that none of this endless torrent of hatred and invective towards me has ever resulted in any action by Twitter against of the cyber lynch mobsters that viciously assault me on a daily basis. It would seem that if one is a good little leftist and attacks the right people (or wrong people, as the case may) then no assault is too nasty to overlook.
Totalitarian Corporate Thought Police
It is perplexing, to say the least, how it is that Twitter treats certain public figures on their platform as though they are delicate snowflakes in need of Twitter’s special vigilante protection from big bad meanies like me.
Yet, I am treated by Twitter like a human punching bag with a target painted on it, with open season for any sort of attack to be launched against me, no matter how repugnant or hate-filled it is on the face of it, without need to stretch one’s imagination to suss a “micro-aggression.”
If Twitter’s passive inaction towards hatred spewed my way by its fellow traveler members on the screeching nasty left is any indication of its “standards” for policing offensive words toward public figures like myself, then it is absolutely within the realm of acceptability to take salty pot shots at nationally-known network “news” personalities who not only choose to be public figures but are also handsomely paid for it.
If one adds to this the overarching fact that these personalities deceitfully masquerade as reporters or journalists, of some sort, while effectively acting every bit the partisan propagandists one would expect to find as low-level hired campaign hacks, then the notion that I must be turned into a non-person in order to protect them from my salty expressions of contempt is beyond laughable, totally bizarre, and extreme to the point that there is simply no other valid explanation for it than the partisan animus of the creeps behind the Twitter star chamber.
Aside from the inherently extreme and patently discriminatory nature of my being instantly turned into a non-person by Twitter over mere insults that contained no threats or really anything of any consequence at all, except perhaps to the delicate feelings of the partisan media hitmen it was directed towards, the attempt to justify this cyber beheading by resort to “Twitter’s Rules” is too cynical and disingenuous to stomach.
Only the sneakiest and most craven of corporate fascist bullies would actually hide behind a bunch of vague, if not totally-undefined, “rules” that they alone can summarily change in any way at any time…that they alone impose whenever they want for whatever reasons they want, selectively, yet arbitrarily, without warning, hearing, or even explanation.
The plain truth is that anyone who doesn’t immediately recognize that totalitarian leftist orthodoxy is what is really at play here, maniacally intent on suppressing undesirables and their “hate” speech, is paying absolutely ZERO attention.
Regardless of who or what is involved, on any level, Twitter’s thought police are never going to qualify as some sort of high, holy tribune of rule enforcement and the maintenance of supposed “standards”.
They are clearly discriminatory, dishonest partisans who saw their chance to drive a truck through an insulting, but effectively harmless, few Tweets to run it right over me in a calculated partisan takedown.
The Twitterati, however, will soon find the runaway truckload of bullshit they ran me over with headed straight for them…..with the pedal to the metal.