“Twitter temporarily locked newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of her personal account on Sunday afternoon after the QAnon follower sent out a slew of tweets that pushed election disinformation and incited supporters of President Donald Trump,'” Huffington Post reported on Sunday, January 17, 2021. (Read story here.)
I have no illusions about democracy. Greene is a nutjob (details here), but the voters of Georgia’s 14th district, in the northwest corner of the state, are entitled to elect her to Congress and by gum they did. (You may not want to travel there, because there’s probably more like her there.)
Let’s face it, some congressmen aren’t paragons of civic responsibility (Preston Brooks immediately comes to mind; read about him here), but the voters have a right to elect them; and Greene, having been duly elected, has a right to serve. That’s not at issue here.
This is so, even though she refuses to acknowledge that Joe Biden, having been duly elected, has a right to serve as president. There’s no reciprocity required, and you’ll never get any from people like her. Respecting their political rights doesn’t mean they’ll respect yours.
She doesn’t, however, have a right to tweet.
Twitter is a private company. The First Amendment doesn’t apply to them. They can censor anybody they like, for any reason, or no reason at all. Twitter users have no rights, zero, nada, none. They’re gratuitous invitees, like the milkman dropping off bottles of milk on your front porch. Twitter doesn’t have to let them on its property. It can refuse the milk.
The company recently has been criticized for letting people use their platform to foment insurrection. They got rid of Trump, which helps. Greene is merely suspended for a measly 12 hours. This is what she was suspended for:
First of all, just to clarify, it’s 74.2 million, not 75 million. Second, their liberties aren’t being attacked. The liberties of the 81.2 million people who voted for President-Elect Biden are being attacked.
Now this tweet may not look like much, but you gotta put it in context, and also remember it’s not a standalone offense but the straw that broke the camel’s back. As
Huffington Post reported, “The Georgia Republican, who has a history of using her account to tweet incendiary rhetoric, ‘has been temporarily locked out for multiple violations of our
civic integrity policy,‘ a Twitter spokesperson told HuffPost.” (I left the link in so you can read their policy for yourself, if you have any questions about it.)
The context is that Trump and his allies told those 74.2 million people the election was stolen from them, when it wasn’t, which prompted 15,000 of them to attack the Capitol Building, trash the place, kill a cop and injure others, and go looking for some of our nation’s top leaders with zipties while a makeshift gallows waited outside. Not exactly civically responsible behavior. In fact, there’s no daylight between these people and Preston Brooks; their behavior isn’t better, and their cause isn’t better, either.
Reasonable people could conclude this tweet by Greene feeds those lies and stokes that rage, and encourages more violence, just as we’re about to inaugurate a new president who has to be guarded by 25,000 National Guard troops from people who think like her. Think that’s hyperbole? Twitter doesn’t. Before suspending her, they flagged some of her tweets “due to a risk of violence.”
Greene’s response? She “issued a statement … complaining about free speech.” She said, “Conservative Americans shouldn’t be afraid to speak their mind. They shouldn’t have to fear being cancelled by American corporations where they work, do business, and use services. They shouldn’t be scared into submission by Socialists who want to end their way of life.”
Melting snowflake.
The risk that this woman will be afraid to speak her mind or be scared into submission is non-existent. The risk that someone else will decline to give her a microphone or a drum to beat on is higher, but that’s their privilege.
We all share this country and democracy, and contrary to what some people think, it belongs to all of us, not just them. One of our civic responsibilities is to defend it. Another is to take good care of it. We have a good thing going in this country — peace, prosperity, and safety that millions of human beings can’t dream of — but it’s fragile and we could lose it. Its preservation depends a great deal on the social contract and consent of the governed that people like Greene want to tear up and burn because they lost an election.
Nobody’s coming for their guns, their property, or their free speech.
The 74.2 million (not 75 million) people who voted for Trump weren’t disenfranchised. They voted, didn’t they? No rights were taken from them. Nobody tried to prevent them from voting, or tried to throw out their votes. Their candidate lost, that’s all. Nobody is stopping them from whining about it. Twitter doesn’t have to broadcast and amplify it, that’s all. But she wasn’t suspended for whining, she was suspended for fomenting violence.
Their rights aren’t being disrespected. But given their disrespect for the rights of the 81.2 million voters who elected Biden, they’d be in no position to complain if they were. Greene’s complaints ring very hollow indeed.
Photo: Flashing a gun tells me she’s not listening, so why should I listen to her? Conversation is pointless anyway, because I’m not going to change her mind, and she won’t change mine. In this country, we settle disagreements at the ballot box. You win some, you lose some. It’s not “heads we win, tails you lose.” That’s dictatorship.
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“Twitter temporarily locked newly elected Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene out of her personal account on Sunday afternoon after the QAnon follower sent out a slew of tweets that pushed election disinformation and incited supporters of President Donald Trump,'” Huffington Post reported on Sunday, January 17, 2021. (Read story here.)
republican party by not standing up but allowing the evil to not only prevail, but to flourish, consume and take their party over the cliff is their own undoing 🙂 one gun toting rabble rouser at a time.