But it’s close
Loser Don tried to get around his banishment from Twitter by using the official POTUS account, but he failed because oddly enough Twitter understands that Trump tweeting as POTUS is still Trump, and they zapped the tweets immediately.
This is built in. Loser D can of course use another outlet, or perhaps use another IP address to set up a new Twitter account, but he can’t do it as himself, because Twitter won’t let him, and doing it as someone else is no use to him. He already has plenty of slavish someone elses who will praise him from now until the earth falls into the sun, and what he wants is to speak in his own glorious albeit vocabulary-deprived voice. He can’t do that on Twitter any more, not nohow.
President Donald Trump continued tweeting Friday evening using the government-owned @POTUS account, despite having his @realDonaldTrump account permanently suspended by Twitter earlier in the day.
“As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me,” Trump wrote in a series of tweets that are no longer visible on the social media service.
The tweets were removed from the service almost immediately. It’s unclear what steps Twitter took in the handling of the @POTUS account.
The last sad cry of a broken psychopath.
I’m afraid I have to agree with him that some of the most vicious people are allowed to speak freely, but probably not the same ones he means. I doubt they can shut down all of his followers (but maybe they can), but they show no inclination to shut down the vicious misogynistic voices of the trans lobby.
Ooh, yet another big announcement coming soon. Don’t hold your breath, MAGA fans. Actually, on second thoughts, MAGA fans please do hold your breath, I’m sure he’ll be announcing his big announcement real soon. Any second now…keep holding…
I’m not sure when “patriotic” came to mean hypocritically debauched and cravenly egomaniacal but at least it can be captured completely in one handy label: Republican. MAGA’s handy too but republican’s more inclusive.
It’s been a word with loaded meanings for a long time. “Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel”. Samuel Johnson. 1775. Some people use it with pride, but many of us have used it as pejorative for a long time.
I heard that Trump tried to use Melania’s account to tweet but the password was Barron’s middle name and birthday…
Of course, now that Parler is dead or dying there’s a ready-made platform for Trump to resurrect and lurch around in for a while.
The appeal to ‘Free Speech’ once again, as though it were some simple, uncomplicated principle existing above the ‘smoke and stir of this dim spot’ in a metaphysical space, a sort of academic common room, where John Stuart Millian rationalists may dispassionately discuss differing ideas. ‘Let’s massacre the Jews’ – discuss. For Trump, free speech is not of any importance, so long as it gives him access to power. And access to power is what Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. gloriously provide. What is good about ‘free speech’ when it is used to justify a flood of powerful lies and propaganda to pour and seep into people’s minds? What was good about access to the power of Facebook when it was used by the army in Myanmar to stir up rage against the Rohingya, resulting in massacres and (that lovely euphemism) ‘ethnic cleansing’?
We have a certain biologist on his blog complaining about Simon & Schuster refusing to publish a book by Josh Hawley and appealing to the principle of ‘free speech’. The naivety of the man astounds me. What Simon & Schuster, as a reputable and well-known publisher (which means they possess power), do, is to provide an imprimatur to their authors, which is to say, they express their willingness to allow their reputation and power to be used to advance the fortunes of a book, which they publicly deem as a result of their imprimatur to be worth reading, and an author, whom by their support they recognise as someone who is worthy of their using their power to gain him, in this case, a wider audience. That is to say, their reputation is bound up with that of the book and its author. They are putting their reputation on the line. For publishers are not mere passive passers-on of things; they are recognised as giving works their approval.
In any event, this author is perfectly free to place his book with any number of right-wing publishers, who would almost certainly be happy to publish it, and, if he wishes, to put up the money and publish it himself, if he wishes. His ‘free speech’ is in no way impaired.
Similarly, this biologist, whose specialty, I recall, has been in the study of generations of fruit flies, creatures that, so far as I know, have no great interest in politics (though I may be wrong), draws attention to a woman academic who has got into trouble with the ‘woke police’ at her university for not being sufficiently enthusiastic about ‘Critical Race Theory’. I know nothing about Critical Race Theory, and have no great wish to study it, but have on a number of occasions observed racism at work in real life, and, from the account of the biologist, rather sympathise with the plight of the academic. Nevertheless, she, in a passage quoted, carefully puts ‘systemic racism’ in quotation marks, as though to suggest that it doesn’t really exist. How can anyone seriously believe this, given what we have seen recently of attempts to suppress and, more, deny, the black vote by powerful people, including the President of the United States? Not to mention the response to peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors, compared with the kind of welcome that some of the Capitol Police, at least, appear to have given to that almost lily-white mob who stormed the Capitol the other day.
The call of Trump for “free speech” is, of course, ironic given his push to get laws that would allow him to sue social media platforms if people say bad things about him – not the owners of the platform, but just their users. Most of the platforms allow a high level of “free speech”, and often take a long time to limit (unless you think only men have penises). What he would like is to be able to penalize these platforms for allowing free speech.
Of course, Trump’s irony meter was broken before he was born, or maybe he stomped it to death in a childhood tantrum. He is unable to see the contradiction behind his own words. But why should this topic be any different than other topics? He can never see that, because he lives only in the moment, and only for his own id.