So Twitter has gone and done it: they’ve banned Donald Trump from his favorite online hangout, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Naturally, Trump’s fans on the far right are acting as if Twitter has fired the first shot in an literal civil war.
Some suggested that Twitter’s attempt to shut down incitement of yet another attempted coup … is the real coup
Some saw it as a victory for … China?
James Woods was less upset by the Trump ban than he was about his apparent loss of Twitter followers.
Others thought that a private company’s ban of the literal head of state was somehow evidence of totalitarianism.
I’m not sure what this guy is up to but he seems awfully familiar.
Best of luck finding your way around Twitter, John Barron!
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I find it slightly funny that so many conservatives think it’s a coup or censorship for Twitter to ban Trump. Surely he can simply use a competitor, it’s their beloved free market out there.
Spoken like someone who has never read 1984.
Look! It’s the door! Don’t let it hit you on the way out!
I wonder how many of Woods’s supposedly vanished Twitter followers were bots. And if he understands the concept of bots.
Trump’s bullshit will still find outlets. I wouldn’t be surprised if OANN or some talk radio station in one of the big markets offers him a platform. The fact that Gush Dumbcrap is supposedly on death’s door may soon open a giant gap to fill.
@tim gueguen:
The fact that Gush Dumbcrap is supposedly on death’s door may soon open a giant gap to fill.
At least he finally got his medal for smoking cigars: https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-trump-rush-limbaugh-medal-of-freedom-20200204-rkzdehibuvazxmvb6j2sv6zeki-story.html
@tim gueguen
Oh, I’m sure Trump already has a plan for a TV show, which is why it’s all the more important for states to press charges and send him to jail.
I thought people on the right believed in the free market. So don’t they have right wing hangouts?
Google just dropped the Parler app from their app store. Never looked at the website, so I have no idea how fucked up things are on there.
If they knew just how unhinged they sound.
It’s a private company with rules they signed up to to use the platform. Alternatives exist – he can always hop to Parler.
They really do live in an entire other universe.
“Today will be seen as when the banana officially split”
I wonder how many of James Woods followers were
a) real people purged by Twitter as alleged.
b) bots purged by Twitter.
c) real people who unfollowed him themselves because they don’t like sedition and coup attempts.
Oh man I’ve been retweeting the hilariosity of my Twitter feed like there’s no tomorrow and laughing my ass off. It is like second Christmas!
I wonder how many of James Woods’s followers are bots that reply to all his comments with Videodrome quotes. Whatever that number is it should be higher.
Bannon’s War Room channel got deleted by Youtube.
All this scurrying around reminds me of teens frantically last minute clearing up the signs of a party before their parents get home.
@Katherine
Unlike the left, the right organizes around common hatred and enemies, so on every right wing platform they end up turning on each other. With no “liberals” to troll, they have no choice but to attack each other. This is why when Parler was founded, the founder was desperate for liberals and leftists to come, even claiming that leftists would miss all the conservatives from Twitter. What they seem to have missed is that no, most people don’t miss conservative trolls.
@Steph
Ah, but the ethos of conservatism is rules for thee and not for me, so they’re not used to following rules of any sort.
Yeah, me and my boyfriend have a bet about that: not on whether it happens, but how long it takes, for Parler followers to start attacking Trump for not being aggressive enough to actually manage a coup. Not saying that’s a bad thing, but haters always gotta find something to hate and eventually Trump will no longer be useful enough.
@Sheila:
I would guess that (B+C) = (A+B+C).
Well, okay, being generous, (B+C+1). Forgot that they purged Trump.
@threp
Always worth remembering that the frantic scramble by “big tech” happened after it became apparent which party would be chairing any committees formed to examine the previously laissez-faire attitude to moderation on their sites.
OT, but I just saw this hilarious mockery of the newly elected (?) congressgangster Lauren Boebert:
Reductress » Why I Will be the First Congressperson to Carry My Packer Inside the Capitol Building
Probably the most brilliant piece from Reductress ever.
@Skiriki:
and Pie:
I’d hold off on celebrating just yet. This is serious, and I am very worried:
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2021/01/09/plot-j09.html
(Note: site has a notable tendency toward class reductionism.)
If a similar betrayal happens on the 20th, you might be wanting to book passage out of the United States rather than celebrate. The danger is far from over.
@Naglfar:
As exemplified by this scumbag who participated in Wednesday’s attempted coup:
(From The Nation, via https://freethoughtblogs.com/pervertjustice/2021/01/07/more-quick-thoughts-on-1-6-2021/)
@Surplus to Requirements: I read the article you first linked to. I assumed there were insiders involved in Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol. It enrages me.
There’s an article in the Washington Post about the many peaceful protesters who’ve been arrested at the Capitol during the last few years. One woman was arrested because she LAUGHED at Jeff Sessions🙄 – I’m sure most of the Americans here remember that incident.
It’s a really sad day when private companies have to take action to try and make sure the guy who suppose to be the leader of the country doesn’t start an angry mob to kill people who told him no.
I had a very different reaction to the capital storming then my mother then. Really had to explain to her that no one under the age of 40 really expects anything good to happen ever again.
@Lainy: My husband mentioned to my mother, a month or so ago, that he feared violence would break out in DC, the nearer we got to Inauguration Day. She poo-pooed it, even laughing at the possibility. After all, it’s only Antifa and BLM who are violent, right? I’m being sarcastic. She’s a Fox News watcher, of course.
This is off-topic, and I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but…there’s so much she’s unaware of, as a result of tuning in solely to that Faux crap. She was unaware of how terrible the US COVID response is, when compared with just about every other country. She also didn’t know about the ban on US citizens entering nearly every country in the world. She didn’t know what Citizens United is.
@Dormousing_it
Yeah mine was different. My mom was crying while she watched them storm the capital and I just kind of….. started laughing like when someone gets hit with joker gas in dc. and that was basically because trump supports don’t have a leg to stand on anymore. They can’t claim to be a paitroit. I laughed because these were the people that called people snow flakes for saying that Donald trump wasn’t their president and that they just needed to except the results of the elections. Well these jackass just launched a terrorist attack because they can’t accept the outcome of an election.
I also started laughing because people were flying the “cop” American flag while they were disobeying the law and not listening to law enforcement so they just really showed to everyone that that flag wasn’t ever meant to be “pro police” it’s simply meant to be anti black.
I feel like I’ve been living in a country slowly on fire my whole life and it’s not surprising when it burns.
Eh… This talk of mothers and their views… I haven’t talked to mine about it, nor do I have any particular desire to do so, but I assume she will most likely dismiss it as the actions of a few bad apples but emphasize that the sentiment and anger behind it all is very real and not to be ignored.
My mother is not conservative (she proudly calls herself a moderate) and hates Trump, but since she needs to invalidate any feelings that I express, she has found a favorite response whenever I express upset with the utter awfulness of conservatives:
“These people are online because no one wants to listen to them in the real world. They don’t have any influence.”
She has continued to push this throughout the years of the Trump administration, as the very people she dismisses as no one listening to and not having any influence have steadily destroyed the country.
But heaven forfend that she agree that any of my feelings are valid. Then I might start thinking I mattered.
O/T, but it looks like Parler is going down. Tomorrow Amazon is kicking them off of the Amazon Web Services servers, and unless they can find a new host this is the end. Even if they do find a new host they’ll probably have to modify the system substantially. This is on the heels of how Google banned them from the Play Store yesterday and Apple removed them from the App Store today.
Just watched the video of that cop caught in the door and the handful up against the doors being told to basically get lost before they get mobbed and attacked.
Incidentally, those cops chose discretion over valor, but the cop behind the doors figured a gunshot might, well, in this case, kill that one woman. (Not to say it was right, but based on the later video showing oodles of cops there trying to give her first aid and blocking the doors, it apparently stopped the advance.)
Wonder if da fuzz might take a different view of alt right protesters in the future…
tim gueguen: sure Trump and friends can get media outlets again. The issue is disrupting a terrorist network for the next two weeks so they can’t as easily organize while their man is POTUS.
Discord. Odds are many of these guys will be moving to Discord servers to plan out (some of) their next moves. And since it’s very easy to set up private servers that won’t be found on a search there, it makes that platform ideal for this kind of mischief. Downside is that a would-be rabble rouser has to know someone already on one of those servers to send them an invite to join in.
@.45
That may be the case. I know that the alt right is definitely re-evaluating their view of the police. After all the Back the Blue/Blue Lives Matter stuff, now that the police have been against them in their attack on the capitol (and their attack on the Oregon state house a few weeks ago), the alt right seems to no longer like cops or even become convinced that cops are in league with Antifa.
Every time this week the right-wingers complain about private companies doing that corporate and capitalist thing, all I can think is: Boo fucking hoo.
Conservatives (surprise surprise) have got it so wrong. This mass banning on the part of social media/tech companies is not “wokeness” going out of control. It has nothing to do with leftism. Since the beginning of the internet, right wingers have been allowed, nearly unchecked to harass marginalized people, threaten violence, engage in hate speech. Nobody cared. But this time, the internet radicalized right wingers went after the wealthy and powerful. They were going to execute the Vice President, Speaker of the House, Senate leaders. That is why they finally took the threat of online fascism seriously.
Abusing the left, many of whom are marginalized, or if not, ally with those who are, doesn’t disrupt the social order. Committing an act of violence at the capitol, does. Not that I’m dismissing how serious what transpired was. It’s a huge escalation and anyone who thought that voting Trump out was enough on its own to get rid of our extremism problem was just proven dead ass wrong.
That said, it is pretty funny that this little social media purge has gotten conservatives to hate corporate power.
@Naglfar
I have seen some clips circling around of members of the Proud Boy’s even going so far as to say that because the cops, with the most mild of kid-gloves, calmly and nicely asked them to dispurse and go home: that the same cops that harshly and unjustly and extreamly cracked down on BLM, Antifa and Progressive Allies and advocates: are somehow “Communists” and “backing BLM/Antifa”.
Them and their ilk are litterally trying to deny reality and self radicalizing for the same of their self aggrandizing, self serving, self chauvinist narrative.
And, perhaps worse yet: they can’t seem to understand that everyone else—especially the people whom they’ve decided are evil—isn’t the same way.
Ugh; I sympathize.
@Surplus to Requirements, just in case if there’s a misunderstanding, I’m solely laughing about these chucklefucks getting banned AND whining like this is some sort of horrible crime and totally out of blue, not what led into it.
Leftists, sex workers, LGBT+ people, BLM, etc have been banned from these platforms for less, and those buttholios dared to call us snowflakes, after they had been flaming up an armed insurrection and some light treason.
If they want to complain about free speech, they’d better take it to places where the voices of the marginalized are deliberately suppressed, e.g. religious minorities and those who are irreligious, women, ethnic minorities, queer people, leftists and more. Fascists are not oppressed – on the contrary, their ideology has outlived WWII and arguably expanded beyond Europe and thrived online as well as offline (to note bans on sex workers and similar in various websites).
Slightly off topic, but I also recommend people watch this video about how companies became sympathetic to Nazis because of the promised (and sometimes actually fulfilled) profit margins and suppression of workers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c01NN9zvTe0
@Xennial Dot Warner
Exactly. And consequently they interpret everything else through the lens of their own projection and misinterpret it and/or tell us much more about themselves than they intended.
I want a Democrat to troll Trump by proposing a bill to void all copyrights and trademarks owned by Donald Trump and all his donors, and call is something like the “No Censorship of the President’s Speech Act.” After all, censorship is always bad in all cases, so it must be legal for me to post the full text of The Art of the Deal to my blog without paying Trump royalties or facing legal consequences. Legally preventing anyone from posting the full text of a particular book is censorship, which Trump now claims to be against (unlike when he wanted to “open up the libel laws,” or when he pressured Canada to increase the duration of copyright in Canada).
Or, if you’re willing to troll other Republicans, introduce a Free Speech Bill abolishing all copyrights owned by John Hawley’s donors, since Hawley takes bribes from the MPA and RIAA.
Speaking of social media, have you guys checked Biden’s latest tweet? Republicans are still making excuses and flat out lying about the terrorist attack on the Capitol, and even accusing the Left of infiltrating the protest.
And yet, Biden and the “back to brunch” liberals are already talking about “moving forward” and “rebuilding together”; which are a bunch of dog-whistles we are all acquainted with meaning that there will be no accountability whatsoever for Trump, his administration and his sycophants in the Republican party.
Liberal complacency is straight up going to cause the Republicans to win in 2022 and 2024 with even more radical options, and even an overt Nazi at top of the presidential ticket.
I’m disgusted (but not surprised) that the GOP Congresscritters are spending so much time anguishing over Trump’s social media access. Five people died. I won’t weep over all of them, but five human beings died. I never voted for Pence, but he was the target of Trumpsters who wanted to kill him. I have disagreements with Pelosi at times, but that mob was willing to livestream her murder.
Trump can’t tweet? Parler’s getting kicked off AWS? Cry me a river.
This was surprisingly moving.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-10/schwarzenegger-tells-trump-he-is-terminated-bams-reports
Just watched that.
Yes, it was.
Arnie for Prez! (A pity the attempt to modify the residency rules to allow naturalized citizens to run for President never went anywhere; he might not have been THAT bad at the job.)
Speaking of which…did anyone take Arnold up on his offer to pay the bills of any polling place that the Republicans tried to close during the last election? I never heard one way or the other about that, and was wondering.
I only heard about that today – on the Fark thread about the video – and apparently yes, he did. Paid out himself AND fundraised.
@ Redsilkphoenix
Apparently so. List of recipients here:
https://pollingaccessgrants.org
Seems Georgia got the most funding; so I bet that’s pissed certain people off.
“Arnie for Prez!”
*Demolition Man intensifies*
@Redsilkphoenix
Absolutely not. As elequent as Arnold is, he is still a Republican.
@Tovius
I agree. Arnold may be a cut more ethical than most of his Republican peers, but he is still a member of that party and shares many of their tenets.
Re: naturalized citizens running for president, I would support that (though not specifically for Schwarzenegger), but it would be very unlikely to change as it would require amending the constitution, which is a high bar to clear.
Arnold is overall more a neoliberal than a conservative. For him, killing poors with his policies isn’t important, while for Trump it’s one of the goal. Suck an equal amount when it happen to you.
He did keep his old ethic, unlike a lot of republican. That’s a point in his favor, but it’s not enough given what its ethic lead to.