President Donald Trump is known for using Twitter to hurl insults and accusations at his political opponents, and now he’s feuding with Twitter itself. Which makes for an interesting feud, and raises some important questions.
The social media platform has lately appended warnings to two of Trump’s recent “tweets” about the dangers of voting by mail, directing readers to stories by the Cable News Network and the Washington Post and The Hill and other sources, which prompted Trump to “tweet” that Twitter “is now interfering in the 2020 presidential election. They are saying my statement about Mail-In ballots, which will lead to massive corruption and fraud, is incorrect, based on fact-checking by Fake News CNN and the Amazon Washington Post.” Twitter has also apologized to the family of a woman Trump has repeatedly “tweeted” was possibly murdered by cable news host and frequent critic Joe Scarborough, although it hasn’t deleted or added any warnings to any of the apparently baseless claims.
Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media have long allowed users to promulgate all sorts of patently false propaganda, but have lately made promises to crack down on that, which has led to a public debate about free speech in the internet age. Twitter and Facebook and all the other social media are now an important part of the public square, where the soap box orators go to express whatever crackpot opinions they might have, and Trump’s supporters share his “tweeted” concern that “the Radical Left is in total command of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Google.”and they fear for their free speech rights.
We have liberal friends who contend they’ve had Facebook posts deleted because of all the right-wingers running the company, though, and our old-fashioned and pre-Trump conservative instinct is to side with the right of any company to conduct its business in any that doesn’t present a clear danger to the public. Every print publication we ever worked for retained its right not to publish what we wrote, and although they occasionally did so we were annoyed but never felt we’d been deprived of our rights in any meaningful way, and we occasionally decline to publish some of the asinine comments we get in our small portion of the internet public square.
The internet is still a giant free-for-all, and if any Trump conservatives or pre-Trump conservatives or Trump-hating liberals or white supremacists or communist revolutionaries don’t like it they can still find a space on the infinite internet. It’s so easy, in fact, that even such Luddites as ourselves figured out how to do it. There are still the mimeograph machines that the lunatic fringes of the left and and right used to use, too. You can still compete in the marketplace of ideas, and see how you fare.
>President Donald Trump is President of the United States of America, so he needn’t worry that people won’t hear what he has to say. They’ll also hear what other people have to say, but as much as Trump hates that it’s just another peril of being president in a constitutional republic that allows a free press and free speech, so he needs to come up with more persuasive arguments. Which raises an even more interesting and troubling question for us, which is why Trump daily “tweets” the most embarrassingly misspelled and grammatically incorrect and provably dishonest and undeniably vulgar and unbecoming of his high office things?
The Washington Post and CNN and The Hill and those other fact-checkers have the better case about mail-in voting, which Trump himself and all the military deployed overseas and millions of other Americans have long used, but at least we can understand his political reasons for opposing it. Why he’s taking to Twitter to accuse a “low-rated” cable morning show host of murdering an aide nearly two decades ago seems inexplicable.
If you haven’t been following this sordid subplot of the Trump reality show, Trump is “tweeting” about the 2001 death of Laurie Klausutis, who was working for then-Rep. Joe Scarborough in his central Florida office, where she died of a head wound. A coroner’s report found that she fainted from an undiagnosed heart condition and suffered a fatal blow, Scarborough was in Washington at the time, and the police found new evidence of foul play. Scarborough was a Republican know for his tight-fisted fiscal conservatusm, however, and such loony lefties as Michael Moore spun conspiracy theories that Scarborough murdered her to cover their illicit affair. Because there was absolutely no proof for any of it, the theory faded away until Trump revived it.
Does Trump believe that this will win him any new votes in his reelection campaign? There’s a coronavirus pandemic and a Great Depression going on at the moment, and most people have more pressing concerns than age-old loony left conspiracy theories revived by Trump about a morning show host that he derides for having poor ratings. To the extent that people do follow the story, they’ll likely conclude that Trump is crazy. Trump fans will be satisfied that at least he fights, but they wouldn’t have noticed that he didn’t make any baseless charges of murder against low-rated cable news critic, and we can’t see how any way this furthers a political agenda to make America great again or expands that base.
We’ll all see how it plays out, and in the meantime we’ll continue to take our place on the soap box in this thing portion of the internet’s public square and fail against the way things are.
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 