Twitter censors Donald Trump again, as is its custom. Twitter is taking political sides. Twitter’s programs, people and operatives do not possess objective truth. They can’t unerringly say that what Trump tweets is wrong, inaccurate, dangerous, misleading, misinformation, or not in the public interest. They cannot justify their censorship in terms of good and bad tweets. They are way out there on a very shaky censorship limb.
Twitter is discriminating against Donald Trump. Censorship is discrimination. It’s subjective discrimination. In this case, it’s political. Twitter’s people claim to know what’s good for us to read and what’s bad. They claim to know what’s good for us to say and what’s bad.
Why is Twitter’s discrimination not criticized heavily by those self-made and self-proclaimed activists among us who keep harping on the most minor slights imaginable? Obviously, it’s because they do not mind discriminating against people with political and social views they dislike. In fact, we now have a crew of activists who consider anyone who does not join in and approve their speech as doing them violence! And if your speech happens to go against their speech, why, to them, that automatically qualifies as violence, worthy of attack and suppression. So Twitter’s censorship becomes, in what passes for the minds of today’s activists, a perfectly right and acceptable thing.
To perverted activists who give activism a bad name, if a silent statue is an insult to one’s integrity and well-being, if plate glass is something that must be smashed, if all police are people who don’t catch lawbreakers but kill random black people, if looting is perfectly okay, then surely Trump must be shut up and it’s okay. In this view, Twitter is absolutely doing the right thing, and the only wonder is why they don’t do more of it.
A shooting incident involving police and a black man has occurred in Kenosha, Wisconsin. This has triggered rioting and looting. Widespread race riots in America have occurred before, most memorably for those now alive in the 1960s. The 1992 Los Angeles riots didn’t spread. The 2014 Ferguson riots were a warning sign for those now happening.
Chicago’s Mayor Lori Lightfoot belatedly changed her tune in now speaking out against the looting of the Magnificent Mile. A lot more like this is needed from the opinion leaders in many quarters of our society in order to help stem the social instability. And that’s only one step in what we need to do in order to right the ship and generate positive momentum. Unluckily, the habitual Trump-haters are not about to change their tune. Unluckily, our authorities have done great damage to our social, political and economic systems in their management of the novel virus. The powers that they have so woefully misused are powers we allowed to accrue over decades, and now the chickens have come home to roost.
10:33 am on August 24, 2020
