In the wake of the odious maggot Trump's Twitter fit on Sunday - against the progressive House Dem "Squad" - his Twitter account use has again come under scrutiny. But the Turd-in-Chief even doubled down with his verbal excrement in a Monday tweet, in which he dared Democrats “to unite around the foul language & racist hatred spewed from the mouths and actions of these very unpopular & unrepresentative Congresswomen.”
But every sentient citizen knows the only one spewing racial hatred is the pervert -loving, white nationalist - admiring, bipedal orange cockroach, Trump. Forget even for the moment that if Twitter had been doing its oversight due diligence Trump would have been cut off from his addiction long ago. This is given he's violated every large and fine print rule for use in the social media book. Of course, the Twitter medium itself is almost designed to incite reckless diatribes and outbursts - especially in the hands of a deranged man baby like Donnie Dotard.
Any medium which facilitates instantaneous reaction and aggression should be prohibited from being used by a mentally deficient and/or disturbed White House occupant to interject himself into everything - or to make racist attacks. The very nature of the medium is to cater to impatience and instant brain farts, baseless opinions- often from the minimally educated and weak minded. Why? Because it's simply too easy to spout off! Contrast that with preparing something like a blog post for which at least some semblance of work, effort must be invested.
Anyway, at least on one other front Trump's Twitter account has taken a hit. I refer here to the recent appellate court ruling (Second Circuit Court of Appeals) that has correctly deemed Trump's Twitter account a public (not private) forum. Despite that the usual Right reactionaries - embedded in The Wall Street Journal's editorial enclave - seem not to agree. In their latest misguided burp ('Trump, Twitter and the First Amendment', July 12, p. A13) these nabobs of nonsense fault the court for denying Dotard the claim to a private account, i.e.
"The decision has sowed confusion among lower courts and led to expansive interpretations,"
Then quoting the core of the ruling verbatim:
"Once the President has chosen a platform and opened up its interactive space to millions of users and participants, he may not selectively exclude those views he disagrees with."
This is given how several blocked users sued Dotard for restricting their speech rights, correctly contending that once he opted to use it to push policy it became a de facto public forum. To remind readers, Trump has done this on multiple occasions, when all he had to do is get off his fat, pompous ass and hold a proper news conference to announce policy decisions, i.e. to preserve his Twitter account from public forum conflation.
For example, he did this by announcing Christopher Wray as new FBI Director, as well as announcing a new military policy to prevent LGBT personnel from serving, as well as (early on in his term) propounding policy via tweet to do with U.S. nuclear capacity. Who can forget that infamous blurtation?
"We need to strengthen and expand nuclear capacity until the world comes to its sense regarding nukes."
At that point, indeed, Trump lost any claim to a private medium and the right to block critics with access to his Twitter account. Further, the national media - each time it puts up Trump's tweets on evening news screens - reinforces the concept that his Twitter account constitutes a public forum because the tweets are deemed "nationally newsworthy". (Not that I agree, of course.). Let's also bear in mind the White House itself has deemed Trump's policy tweets "official statements" and the National Archives treats these "statements" as "official records". So, case pretty much closed!
So, the claim by those blocked that what Trump does amounts to viewpoint discrimination prohibited by the First amendment, is spot on. It's a pity The Wall Street Journal which is endlessly obsessing over free speech rights doesn't see this, instead babbling:
"Twitter is a private platform. As the Supreme Court noted last month in the Halleck case, 'when a private entity provides a forum for speech, the private entity is not ordinarily constrained by the First Amendment because the private entity is not a state actor."
Ignoring the key word, "ordinarily". Hence, once Trump began spouting policy proposals over his Twitter account he became a state actor, and it ceased to be a private entity . So he could no longer justifiably "block users from accessing, replying to and retweeting his messages" for the offal they are. And further, it is irrelevant (as the WSJ editors claim) that (ibid.):
"Blocked users can access President Trump's account without signing in, or criticize him on their own Twitter pages."
Yes they could, but using only their own pages-accounts would have vastly diminished power, i.e. reaching perhaps only thousands instead of millions. It effectively skews speech in the direction of those with power (or money, as the Citizens' United case showed). Hence, in its way flouts First Amendment provisions. And again, Trump himself opened the door to public- private medium conflation by announcing policy decisions on his account. (Let's also bear in mind that by his unseemly and personal attacks on thousands of people he himself has violated Twitter's user rules to the point where technically he should be banned from further use.)
Thus the Journal's claim:
"This argument too easily elides the distinction between public and private spheres"
doesn't hold water given that Trump himself, by his misbegotten use of Twitter, destroyed any distinction. Again, if he acted like a real president as opposed to a 13 -year old dyspeptic brat, he'd announce policy decisions from the Oval Office on national TV, as opposed to via tweets. In so doing he'd preserve his account as a private entity. But the swine man baby is too damned lazy to do that and besides likes to keep his 14 million follower zombies charged up from tweet to tweet.
Still unable to grasp the court's decision or the plaintiffs' arguments, the clueless WSJ editors ask:
"Must all politicians agree to be Facebook friends with people who vilify or promote conspiracy theories about them?"
No, because not all politicians are the source of vile conspiracy theories themselves, like Trump claiming two years ago that Obama was bugging Trump Tower. Equally laughable is the following canard trotted out by the WSJ geniuses:
"Under the Second Circuit's ruling, politicians would have to choose between abandoning social media - which would limit their ability to communicate with voters - and tolerating harassment and lies."
Which is a total misreading of the decision. In fact, all that any politician - or more exactly a president -would have to do is to act like a president to keep private and public definitions, forums separate. As I noted above, that would mean reserving a proper national policy platform for policy announcements. You go in front of national TV at appointed times, to render your policy, you do not announce it on social media.
Of course, Trump will never learn that lesson because he is a 13 year old bully and buffoon at heart. Hence, he will keep on projecting policy into tweets, or as the WSJ puts it, "promoting his unique brand of politics" and ways of doing things.
Fine, then he can suck up the criticisms of other Twitter users when they go after him for his ill chosen, ill timed policy tweets as well as his racist dog whistles. If this fool had a scintilla of self-control, moral vision and message discipline there'd be no need for appellate (or other) court decisions to set him straight. Nor would there be any need for four black and brown women - members of the House - to school him on unacceptable racist venom embodied in telling them to "go back where you came from".
Nor should the WSJ look to the Supremes to "ultimately clear up the confusion" - because there isn't any. What we need clearing up is the mainstream media's perspective to see once and for all that the current occupant of the highest office is a vile, gaslighting imp with no moral compass and no sense of decorum or decency.
Or let me put it this way: There wouldn't be any problems if we had a real president who respects the office and the Constitution. That, instead of an illegitimate maggot who believes the presidency is running a reality TV show. One replete with racist rants, ugly, inhumane scenes (at the border), and treasonous acts. In the case of the latter, even admitting in a recent interview that he'd welcome information provided by foreign governments to get re-elected. Sadly, the only way to get rid of Trump's Twitter excesses and dog whistles may be to get him out of office once and for all next year. The alternative is too grim to contemplate.
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