“If Twitter were a city it would be the sort of city where the authorities allow people to defecate in public or shoot up outside a school, and then express surprise when middle-class families wish to leave […] “
The MSM city this writer inhabits is one much like the old Boston that had ‘No Dogs, No Irish’ signs posted at the park. He gratuitously throws out President Trump “Lying, inciting hatred, and worse” and says he should best have been banned a decade ago. He is the ‘All Views tolerated, except…’ school of thought, but gets away with it by his clever but snarky humour making him seem a pal and smart, and letting us in on the joke.
What he calls Trump inciting hatred is Trump endorsing the Broken Windows theory.
Annette Kralendijk
3 years ago
This article is a bit schizophrenic. First this…..
“America’s founding ideals ” and its subsequent success ” derived from this diversity of beliefs, and the fact that no sect could dominate the others.”
Followed by….” And yet, by any Wilsonian reading of social media, Donald Trump ought to have been banned ages ago.”
The author will have to make up his mind. It cannot be both. And therein lies the problem not only with this article but also with social media.
America’s founding ideals and the just extraordinary omission of any mention of the inarguably genocidal treatment of the natives while writing about religious persecution in the article just leave me stunned.
If the FF did think of Rome when formulating their ideals as well as the first US government, then certainly genocide would have been a component as it was known in Rome and throughout the European continent for centuries of course. It was after all, Europeans who settled the US so escaping a predilection like that would have been miraculous. The ECHR co-exists with the Bosnian genocide.
And then of course the US “natives” who also arrived from elsewhere, were known to partake in a bit of genocide amongst themselves. Slavery too. I find the whole Rome thing pretentious personally.
The FF were far more about getting rid of British or English oversight than anything. The FF no more created a perfect society than anything else ever has. Still ideals are not irrelevant even if you fail repeatedly to live up to them as we all do.
“genocidal treatment” suggests more history needs discovery. The settler tribe and the native tribe disagreed about property use, often violently. Not much different than disputes between farmers and cattle ranchers who were equally violent. The stronger tribe won, as has happened everywhere for all time. At least the stronger tribe didn’t fully destroy the opposition as history elsewhere reveals.
I doubt if you have been left stunned by “…the just extraordinary omission…” You are just taking this opportunity to bang on about one of your favourite topics.
Beware of reckless use of the word “inarguably” and when reading Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” don’t allow critical intelligence to be overwhelmed by sentiment.
Collective guilt is a moral sentiment best savoured in the peace and comfort of a world created by those who did “the heavy lifting” for you. I guess it puts a comforting moral shield around you while you continue to enjoy the benefits of advanced civilisation.
It also is a lesson for us with the diseases brought into the new world by the settlers causing the genocide, much like the China virus today, with the 3 deaths per million in China and the entire West Pacific Region, to the USA UK 1200 deaths per million.
It invalidates the simplistic argument that the US is “a nation based on genocide”, and doesn’t detract from the integrity of the person who wrote the article.
How can I put it – the US was founded without genocide, but in the “Indian wars” of the 19th century many acts of genocide were committed?
As so often happens with the principles of movements based on a sense of injustice, after the revolution had succeeded the U.S. lost sight of the fact that if such principles have any value they should guide actions once power has been obtained.
The way that this happens, over and over again, make me very suspicious of grievance-driven movements.
‘As so often happens with the principles of movements based on a sense of injustice, after the revolution had succeeded the U.S. lost sight of the fact that if such principles have any value they should guide actions once power has been obtained.’
I agree but I think the immigrant community in North America had abandoned those principles long before Independence. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ to us and our kind.
There were campaigns (Pequot War, King Philip’s War) prior to independence – where the locals were pretty much eliminated in order for the immigrants to prosper.
Hmm, a quick read of the wikipedia page on King Philip’s war shows it to be one in which atrocities were committed by both sides (initially by Indians), and with surprisingly similar casualties. I don’t get “locals were eliminated in order for immigrants to prosper” from that; the way the conflict started seems to be that the colonists wanted to restrict Indian possession of guns & Indians (rightly, IMO) saw this as a threat to their independence.
That said, I’m not familiar with US history but being very much into South African history I can imagine the attitude that colonists had towards the indigenous population.
As an American I can tell you that we did learn in school about slavery, Jim Crow, Indians and discrimination against Catholics, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Asians, etc. But most Americans (like me)…say let’s move on. Here is the dirty secret – the Germans and ONLY the Germans have come to reckon with their past. Japan hasn’t, Russia hasn’t, China hasn’t, Turkey hasn’t…the list goes on. So the American position is pretty much normal.
Absolutely – every country needs to reflect back on it’s foundation myths and bear them in mind, always. If the US really remembered, and acknowledged what took place in ‘taming the West’ would it still have been incarcerating children separately from their parents (who have committed no crime other than travelling) on it’s southern border in 2020?
Despite the track record of American those people (Central America!) came to USA. They didn’t stay in Mexico or go south to Venezuela or sail to China…see?
Yes, and if it were, the only likely difference is that Mexicans and Central Americans would then have a longer journey to find a border across which to immigrate illegally. Mexico isn’t that densely populated country, nor would the US be if we didn’t have our SW quadrant. Oh, and Canada might have more of a problem with illegal immigration than they do now, given how much closer Mexico would be.
Yes, those are two widely different things. In fact controlling their borders is what the native Americans were trying to do.
What America should learn from its past is not to keep invading the world, instead it lectures the rest of us about multiculturalism while invading half the world.
Pretty simplistic-” a nation based on genocide.”? There is a bit more to the nation than that, but woke, junior-college level debates need this tired trope to justify their anti-Americanisms.
Of course it’s simplistic – doesn’t necessarily make it a ‘tired trope’. All that means is that it’s been said before by people you disagree with and you’re tired of arguing with.
I’m not anti-American. I’m anti a national narrative that proclaims a foundation myth of freedom of belief and universality while ignoring the inconvenient fact that in order to establish the nation the immigrants found it necessary to eliminate the locals and then bring in a load of other people, initially indentured poor people from Europe, and later differently coloured people from Africa, to work ‘their’ land.
I don’t think anyone would take seriously a claim that China or Turkey were bastions of humanitarian free speech and religious and ethnic tolerance. That is what we are expected to believe of the USA.
It certainly is arguable there was no genocide. Jeff Fynn-Paul, associate professor in history at Leiden University, made just such an argument in the Spectator last September and it was a persuasive one. I would link it but that causes problems here with moderation.
You self diagnosis of being stunned seems to be supported by your left wing rhetoric . The contrived self conditioning state of theatrical excessive horror, rage ,hurt , disgust , stunned etc when encountering non compliance , dissent or opposition to dogma is the usual political theatre of the left, and the contrived extreme emotional states are likely making you emotionally ill…even stunned.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that the author suggests that Trump should have been banned from Twitter “a decade ago,” before he ventured into politics. He’s criticizing Trump based on a perceived lack of democratic “virtue,” such as moderation, tolerance, and civility. It’s more a stylistic matter than a substantive one premised on ideology or belief. The idea being that Trump and others like him contribute to the toxic climate on Twitter.
My understanding is that a decade ago everyone in the US loved Trump. He had a number one TV show and was featured in ‘songs’ by countless rappers, all of whom envied or respected his wealth and ‘style’. Hosts like Oprah repeatedly implored him to stand for office. It was only because he stood for the Reps and not the Dems that the media, as one, viciously turned on him. Of course, I don’t deny that his inability to express himself, or to act, in a ‘statesmanlike’ manner did not contribute to this.
On the other hand, I would prefer a Trump who gets things done and does not start war, to a ‘statesman’ like Obama who achieved next to nothing while being responsible for Libya, Yemen and, according to leftists like Jimmy Dore, various other conflicts.
Your understanding is wrong. in NYC Trump was always seen for what he was; a clown and an incompetent Real Estate “developer”. It was the rubes in the sticks that thought he was a genius developer and bought his crap for gold. The same ones that enrolled in his Trump University and conned people (working class) out of their money. Since you case so much about working class people!!! Obama saved the car industry (millions of blue collar workers that you care so much) and gave the country the first (almost) universal healthcare – the one that Trump was supposed to repeal and replace on day 1 with a better and cheaper system. Still waiting for it – fingers crossed he will deliver on his promise in the next 8 days.
I have seen numerous chat show appearances by Trump on YouTube. The audience seems to love him. Personally I have always considered Trump to be a vulgar real estate mogul who probably should have gone bankrupt years ago. However, I do, on the whole agree with his policies.
Youtube is deleting it all. He is going into the oubliette of cyberspace.
The one thing his enemies have never managed to do is construct a coherent argument against him. All they ever do is misrepresent him, traduce him, misreport him. After four years of inciting hatred against him and his supporters, they still haven’t managed to come up with a convincing denunciation based on truth.
Trump did A lot of good Lowering blue collar Taxes ,Bringing Troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, Brokering Peace between Middle East & Israel, trying to calm kim Ill sung in north Korea etc..Yes he is crass, but he followed his manifesto, he is despised by mainstream,as he didnt take a President Salary..he will have the last Laugh….I seem to remember Nixon saying in 1972 ”/no truth in Watergate allegations” senile Joe has his karma to come with his No Delegate VP
He also made the country a net exporter of energy, a peace enterprise in itself. He set up opportunity zones with business lured back from abroad. He instituted criminal justice reforms which helped African Americans. He tried to hold back illegal immigration to give poor workers a chance to progress. He lowered corporation tax which created jobs. People at the bottom said they didn’t mind about tax cuts for business so long as hey benefited from them which they did. Employment rates for African Americans, Latinos, and Women were at an historic high before the pandemic. He built up defence again, an essential component of peace. He got the Germans to stump up for NATO. He appointed record numbers of judges, including 3 for the Supreme Court.
How did he manage all this when he was being persecuted full time by the Democrats and their agents in government?
My goodness-I know that you cannot abide Trump, but putting forth Obama as an effective leader is too much-Health Care? once in America a person could simply go to the family physician, and pay for services without the government involved. Obamacare mandated enrollment in a wildly more expensive insurance scheme, or you paid (as I was forced to do) a fine. Everything in health care became more complicated and expensive. Oh, and yes, he saved the auto worker unions.
once in America a person could simply go to the family physician, and pay for services without the government involved. “
And Obamacare destroyed that? USA spends c.17% of GDP in healthcare – Germany spends c.11% and gets better results. Surely if it as bad as you say why didn’t Republicans and Trump “repeal and replace”?
NO ONE talks about how the Obama admin. taped the personal phone of Angela Merkel. It even got silenced in German media after a few days, but not before my attorney there had to calm himself down before getting back into professional mode with me, an American there. His DOJ and allied institutions were a piece of work.
Hillary lost for calling half the US population deplorable. Untrue and completely tone deaf. She suffered from isolation in the elite bubble. The same bubble that emits self serving nonsense about correcting income inequality and global warming from its private jets, limos and multiple mansions. Unlike Charlie Brown who kept being fooled by Lucy’s pulling the football away – those ‘clinging to guns and religion’ won’t be fooled again.
those ‘clinging to guns and religion’ won’t be fooled again.
I honestly hope they do not get fooled again. But let’s not ignore the fact that the rest of the country outvoted them 2x in presidential elections. Only the electoral college keeps them competitive – and that is fine.
The elite coast, flyover country divide will remain. Republicans challenge is suburban soccer moms; educated, high middle income women who were, for valid reasons, disgusted by Trump. They voted out the person, not the policy. Fundamentally they lean right center.
I was the other way around. I disliked him when he was a reality-TV star, but was pleasantly surprised by his presidency. Say all you want about Donald Trump, he did expose the swamp.
Jeremy, the parroting of primitive debunked leftist propaganda memes depicting your fellow Americans and political rivals as all gullible rubes sucked in by an incompetent con man and leftist reflexive modeling of hate and derision towards them and all your targets with Twitter being the medium for this has had its direct corrosive effect on the divisions and anger we now see.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean they were wise in doing so. Nor does it tell us what the results would have been with less biased media and university cultures.
Obama Care, as it was conceived by his administration, was/is a flop. Even Bill Clinton admitted that it was poorly executed and needs reform… Also wonder why Ford refused to take any money from the Obama government and is doing very well, because it can act more flexible without bending its knee to the unions. The unions were the problem in the first place, why the US car industry did so badly .
Trump brought reconciliation between Israel and much of the Middle East. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize as encouragement to do that but soon lost interest and did nothing.
Fraser, how could you leave Ukraine out of the list of countries that Obama wrecked? EU representatives had just finished brokering an agreement for early presidential elections in Ukraine that would almost certainly have seen the incumbent president Viktor Yanukovych removed from office, but Obama saw an opportunity to ensure a NATO-friendly government take power immediately and disgraced himself by endorsing the unconstitutional removal of Yanukovych from power and his replacement by an interim president who was pro-NATO. The Russian takeover of the Crimea and the horrors of the continuing civil war in Donbas might never have happened without the Obama-Biden regime. The ultimate obscenity of the 2020 presidential election is it brought to power an odious man whose family profited immensely from the misery inflicted on the Ukrainians. Joe Biden turned his son Hunter into a Ukrainian oligarch.
When we heard the stolen telephone call to Georgia it was noticeable that Trump was calm and polite, if rambling. He was being sorely provoked by obfuscation and hostility yet there was no foul language or temper such as you might frequently find in a politician behind the scenes.
Because if we don’t give every subhuman lunatic a platform to stir up hordes of mouth-breathing savages, we might as well be Communist Russia?
I frequently disagree with Ed West, but he’s an actual conservative rather than a Trumpist, which means that he believes in freedom under responsibility – and that if you show yourself incapable of responsibility, that you no longer deserve freedom. If you honestly think that we must never touch a hair on anyone’s head no matter what they do because otherwise we’re BULLIES, then congratulations, you’re a living liberal strawman.
Because we all agree on who exactly is a mouth breathing savage?
And yes I believe that we don’t touch a hair on someone’s head because someone else did something we don’t like. That’s the hallmark of an uncivilized society. Odd that you disagree.
Daniel, your typical leftist intolerant political bigotry and hate mongering is showing…and affects your credibility. The evil.populist meme you parrot to demonise and degrade your targets merely reveals your own intolerance and dysfunctional toxic groupthink mindset .
Woke cancel cult fanatic Peter, try truth…and provide some evidence ( if you can) of your public slanderous defamatory insult accusations .If you can not provide evidence,would it be fair to assume there is none , because it’s not true, and you are fabricating falsehoods to suppress and violate the human right of peoples free speech? ( Watch for woke troll Peter’s response, evasion…or disappearance when asked for evidence. )
Don, your rhetoric is so artificial, it just makes me laugh! Did you swallow a dictionary? But I suppose you are doing me a favour, by cheering me up during the restrictions imposed upon us – throughout this Covid-contagion crisis! You obviously know nothing about psychology – and the projection of your own shortcomings onto others! And, for your information, Daniel Bjorkman is perfectly entitled to hold a differing view to your own, without being pilloried for it! You might try making more constructive posts, perhaps with good alternative ideas – or is that asking too much of your psyche?
As now recognized throughout the all the free democracies of the west , the left woke censor trolls reflexively model hate and disdain with truthless juvenile level insults ( ie “subhuman”, contrived laugh mocking, etc,), and false fabricated subjective profoundly hypocritical slanderous accusations with out evidence, to “pillory” ,discredit ,intimidate , and silence dissenting opinions. Your accusation of pillorying is a truthless depiction of dissent, and while you pose as someone who champions the right of Bjorkman to his opinion, your faction is systemically violating that right in all the free democracies..woke left censor trolls are also doing it here and everywhere on the internet. As now seen everywhere, the left progressives are verifiably guilty of everything they falsely accuse.
I remember parts of the Cold War. If you called for insurrection then, or led an insurrectionary mob, or demanded communism, or marched with the communist party, or the socialist workers trotskyite party, nothing untoward happened: instead of being arrested you could get a well paying job as a journalist or academic.
This was the selling point of the West, we had freedom, which if it means anything means the freedom of speech. Of course actual incitement to violence was illegal, but Trump didn’t do that here.
The implication is that while the US’s initial success as a society was predicated on the inability of any individual sect to dominate, Trump and his ilk,aided and abetted by social media, have created an environment where in effect only two sects remain- right and left battling it out for dominance.
Sorry I don’t quite grasp your meaning. I am certainly not knowledgeable about American history. If say, there has always been a schism based on religious observance (such as exists to this day in Scotland and Ireland between Catholic and Protestant) then that would certainly detract from the author’s argument. I was not aware that such a marked divide between two distinct groups in the US had previously existed and so accepted the author’s implication that the present state of affairs under Trump is unprecedented.
It would be very hard to name country more diverse and divided than the US. And it’s far less homogenous than say Ireland or Scotland. Surely religious tension has existed in the US as elsewhere with anti-Catholicism prominent at some points. Today there are tensions between Islam and other religions although not to the extent you see in Europe. A significant proportion of the left is anti-Semitic even today. But it isn’t only religion that makes American culturally different from one another. And on the matter of religion, I’d say the US has done better than most getting various religions to live together peacefully.
You might recall that at one point our ancestors fought a civil war. The author is doing what a lot of people tend to do with Trump- this is the first time ever for anything. You’ll even hear such jarring idiocies such as “It’s the first time any losing presidential candidate refused to accept the results” – well except for the losing candidate in 2016. It’s just historical amnesia.
The first time US citizens have stormed and vandalised their Capitol ? Perhaps as an outsider I lack awareness and that ( horrifying) event was not a ‘first time’ occurrence. Has it ever happened before? The first time a departing president has accepted defeat so ungraciously and with such little regard for common courtesy? Not idiocies but certainly jarring. I will leave you with the thought that I who have been happily mesmerised by your popular culture through the medium of cinema and tv; read and enjoyed your literature, and your music in its many forms; appreciated the kindness, good manners and decency of those of your citizens that I have met down the years; and been a little overawed by such a mighty power as the US represents, now regard your country with the sort of pity tinged with sadness and contempt that one feels when discovering that one has been conned and betrayed by a very dear friend
We are so very sorry to have disappointed you with our jarring ways. Perhaps trading a US popular culture fixation for a better historical understanding of the US would not go amiss? Certainly there is room for both at the very least and lack of awareness is rarely a good justification for contempt.
There’s been plenty written about our history all the way from the Revolution through the civil war to the unrest of the 1960s, the tumult of two world wars, etc. through it all, Americans have remained gloriously divided in so many ways that our success as a country must seem baffling. At times it baffles me. It’s been said that the US is an experiment in democracy. I find that to be true in that accepting a diverse group of people with all their foibles is probably better accomplished in the US than anywhere else.
I’d say that we will try to do better to alleviate your sadness and contempt. But we likely won’t.
Although there was no bile, I surely missed the heartfelt nature of your comments about the contempt you feel for the US. Perhaps I’m just not used to contempt as a tool in formulating such heartfelt sentiments. It must be very helpful in personal and romantic relationships. Come whisper sweet contempt in my ear, Fiona.
And I meant no disrespect in suggesting that historical education could fill in the gaps in your knowledge that movies and music have failed to supply. Americans tend to over-estimate how much others know about our history. In fact, Americans tend to over-estimate how much Americans know about their own history. In any case, I did take your admission of lack of knowledge as an invitation to suggest ways to remedy that state. If I was mistaken in assuming your admission meant that you wanted it remedied, my deepest apologies.
Also, having been thrown out without being heard, all the way up to the Supreme Court, the cases were finally going to be heard in a different forum, the first and last chance to hear some of the evidence. Congress was to devote two hours to each one of the disputed States. As the first one was just about to be debated, Arizona, Nancy Pelosi came off the telephone and in came Antifa.
Now who do you think would have wanted that evidence heard, for two hours for each state, in front of the whole world? And who do you think would stop at nothing to make sure it was not heard?
Good question, Fiona. I found this reference… http://www.washingtonpost.com/hist... Looks like 1915, 1954, 1971, 1983 all saw bombings or shootings/attacks within the US Capital buildings.
The exaggerated demonization political narrative propaganda of the marxist left progressives who wildly truthlessly inflate and fabricate the singled out acts of their targets and scapegoats , every one from Trump ,conservatives, men, the free democracies of western civilisation, etc as ” unprecedented ” , to systemically persecute them , by a dogma driven faction globally in tyrannical control of public communication/ infosphere, is actually unprecedented.
The USA is not two sects battling it out – not at all. It is a divided society into tribes. The immigration policy from JFK onward has been to bring in huge numbers of people with a different culture from the Anglos and European one, to make many divisions, and to make wide differences between them in income and education to become client sub groups under the Democrat party.
These groups actually are who pick the President of USA! Divide and conquer, that is the Democrats, and they have taken the long view, and won. Much like the Frankfurt School has by making the self and nation and culture loathing Liberals.
The left progressive censor cancel cult systemically suppresing, cancelling and persecuting any and all.non compliant voices in every free democracy in western civilisation is aiming to be the one and only ruling sect.
It started long before Trump’s election as POTUS. His election was the effect, not the cause of the division. At most, he exacerbated the divisions – but I have my doubts about even that.
In 1999 our desk got a call from a broker. He wanted to do a deal for Trump. My boss (half a degenerate) said: “I want nothing to do with that charlatan.”
I find Trump abhorrent in so many ways, however G.W, Clinton, and many others are strong competition. Obama liked bombing people, what about Kissinger, Albright, Hillary? And will Biden now follow suit?
One needs to realise that about ½ of voters voted for Trump, in 2020 as well. The intelligentsia ought to ask themselves “why”.
Annette, the two statements seem perfectly aligned to me, and you are trying to pull them out of context to make them appear contradictory. Please follow the rationale: The founding ideals supported diversity of beliefs on the condition of civility. Wilson’s logic dictates that Trump should have been banned long ago because he clearly fails the condition (i.e. he declined to communicate as a civilized adult). There is no contradiction in the Author’s arguments.
Of course they are contradictory. If you can read English. Where are you getting the civility aspect of the Founding Fathers ideals? There’s no civility clause. Diversity of belief is protected by law, not by civility. The FF would not have thought they could legislate civility. Nor would the FF have even agreed on what constitutes civility just like we wouldn’t today.
Don’t like your tone. I can read English as much as you can, and also understand the concept of gracious debate. Will leave the field for you to enjoy with your peers, at the level of civility that you have chosen.
No intent to offend but you really should brush up on the Founding Fathers if you are going to discuss them. And you should be able to point to the civility clause in the FF ideals if you believe it to be there. No one had a better understanding of the foibles of humans than they did and no one would have been less likely to attempt to legislate civility. Inserting your political preferences on the Founding Fathers isn’t likely to work.
What has that to do with the law? Or the Founding Fathers for that matter? Civility is subjective, of course.
Alison Houston
3 years ago
I cannot access my Parler account this morning, through Google, Safari or Duck Duck Go.
Well done Big Tech, tolerant, inclusive, liberal. I can’t read the thoughts of all those tyrants like Kathy Gyngell and Laura Perrins, now. I’ve got nowhere to put the pictures of my Christmas hyacinths, nowhere to link my poems, or my violin videos.
It’s always good to assume your opponents are knuckle dragging morons, always good to make sure there can be no decent conversation between ordinary people. Let’s keep everything brutal and severe.
is that sort of starting your own bakery to make whatever cakes are demanded? And can I count on govt actors to help my operating system, perhaps collude with me in making sure that certain people are cut out.
Yes, certainly…and after the political purity test is applied to not only twitter, parler, reddit facebook, et al, we can move on to grocers and gas stations-they are private businesses, and have no obligation to sell to you should you not be approved-“start your own business”. Perhaps we could mandate that a special emblem be sewn onto your clothing indicating your unapproved status…
Oh, don’t worry; those purity tests are likely in the works. As it is, numerous people on the left are cobbling enemies lists so that the great purge can unfold. It’s not just trying to prevent anyone who worked for the administration from being hired, it’s attempting to do that to conservatives period.
So there really isn’t anywhere on the internet you can share your hyacinth snaps and violin videos except on a right-wing extremist site? Maybe you could ask other people how they manage to cope.
No, Nazis being Nazis. Parler is actually a right-wing extremist gathering place. The Nazis there are quite frank and proud about their embrace of Nazism, and the Parler admin are happy to have them aboard.
Apparently Parler also also has non-Nazi right wingers and people posting flower snaps, but if they choose to post in a Nazi gathering place, that’s their tough luck when the site is pulled. There really are plenty of non-Nazi sites on the internet they could use.
No, Nazis being right-wing extremists. Although the Unherd moderator apparently thinks I’m lying, Parler is actually a site popular with right-wing extremists, and the Parler admin are happy to have them aboard.
Apparently there are also some less extreme right-wingers and people posting flower snaps, but if they choose to post on a site that features a load of right-wing extremism, that’s their tough luck if the site is pulled.
There really are plenty of non-extremist sites they could frequent instead.
Antifa were a Marxist Fascist group in 1930s Germany who had a different horror in mind for the European people but the Nazis stood in their way, both groups having similar tactics, so they called themselves antifa because they opposed the party of ‘Fascists’ taking over, not the brutality, just that antifa want to be the brutal ones taking over. They are mirror images of the Nazi Fascists.
I’m not complaining though, they’re perfectly free to reject left-wing contributions in the interests of maintaining this place as a right wing ghetto.
When I was a boy you could spot the right-wing extremists – they wore black jack-boots, shaved their heads and sported N a z i memorabilia. Now it’s everyone who isn’t on board with academic critical theory dogma.
I had a Facebook account until the first of January 2016. I knew I would not be able to stand the endless bickering about the EU from old school ‘friends’ (in fact other females, who bullied or ignored me half the time at school, but whom I had convinced myself were alright now they were grown up) who knew nothing about politics, but liked to be fashionable in all their opinions who would suddenly become the EU’s biggest fans over night. Also I had a great many of the Spiked crowd as ‘friends’ because I agree with them about many things, and my sister knows many of them personally through the Battle of Ideas and running the Birmingham Salon. But some of them are really extremely loony about ignoring FGM in order to promote social cohesion and abortion to full term and certain other issues I find religiously abhorrent and really do not want to debate. Though Kevin Yuill was always excellent on the sanctity of life after birth.
I had a Twitter account for a short time between the start of the lockdown and the end of June this year. I was even more shocked by the behaviour of conservatives who seemed to be on my side about many things, but loved lock down and blocked me for calling out Cummings as a hypocrite. Then there was Peter Hitchens whom I admire and respect, but was very obviously fanatical and slightly deranged on Twitter, keeping up the same arguments day in, day out, engaging with nutters, all day long who loved to provoke him. I don’t like to pathologize but it drove me mad and I could see it was driving others mad, too.
I still use Youtube at the moment but one really does meet the most vile people there, if you follow interesting conservative thinkers on the one hand you get comments from severe anti Semites, and if you post content from conservative thinkers you get left wing anti Semitism and wild accusations of pederasty against our most famous conservative, British philosopher.
Parler was not a right wing organisation, its creators and directors simply believed in upholding America’s FIRST Amendment. They do not believe that people against whom there is no suspicion should have their thoughts and ideas subject to surveillance, but they worked with law enforcement to remove content which was criminal. On this basis they did not use AI as surveillance against their users, but monitored content personally where a genuine suspicion had been raised. They now no longer have the opportunity to work with law enforcement to do this, because the company itself cannot access its own site.
Since Google, has been the major purveyor of child and other forms of extreme and abusive pornography, terrorism and the promoter of suicide sites for adolescents around the world, since Twitter still carries accounts of they Ayatollah of Iran and the leaders of Communist China, since Facebook has groups for Hezbollah and various other extremist terrorist organisations, I am proud to have decided to try, like many other Parler users, to remove them from my life in 2020/21.
Well, there are the ubiquitous left-wing extremest sites like Instagram, YouTube, twitter, and Facebook, but I feel it is a pity if only they are allowed space on the internet.
G Harris
3 years ago
Who oversees the gatekeepers?
The problem is that the gatekeepers increasingly and disproportionately influence those in a unique position to oversee them and that, surely, is no accident.
It’s apparently been absolutely fine for these self styled platforms for social good wielding huge power and led by pretty much unaccountable oligarchs to host all manner of truly unpleasant, socially toxic, often illegal content on their pages for years largely unbothered by conscience, let alone regulation or any meaningful censure on the spurious grounds that the sheer volume of content precludes any chance of successful intervention, but as soon as the opportunity is ripe to purge those that deviate from their carefully propagated ‘do no evil’ artifice very little time is being wasted.
Perhaps something like a Supreme Court structure could be set up, with members made up from opposite viewpoints to take a view on what is or is not permissible. The fine detail obviously eludes me at the moment but perhaps folks with experience of international mediation could work up global and national responses? Getting the balance right between free speech and censorship is always going to be hard and contentious, but better to try and sometimes fail than fail to try…
What you propose is a Liberal/Left CPVPV, the KSA police Committee for ‘promotion of virtue and prevention of vice’.
I think I saw a picture of them in today’s Daily Mail, marching in black clad, milityesk phalanx with shields, helmets, and black balaclavas. Antifa they were called in the caption.
Oh no it isn’t! Your view appears to be firmly entrenched in a ‘left/right’ universe, and I feel sorry for you. The world from my perspective is not black and white but multiple shades of gray, and the best we can hope for is to have ideals but accept that they have to be modified in the light of reality. If you read both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ media you will see different facets of the same incidents; it’s then down to you/us to interpret the reality, reading between the lines (literally and figuratively) to understand the basis for the views and deduce your own views accordingly. I commend wider reading to you if you do not already partake. Regards
Aren’t Antifas already Fascists? Seems to me they are.
Jeff Carr
3 years ago
Let’s be realistic. The reason Trump was not delisted earlier was because Twitter was afraid that he would instigate an antitrust investigation in revenge. Now their pals are coming to power they can silence him.
Nah, the reason Trump was not delisted earlier was because Twitter were making a shedload of profit from his constant stream of attention-seeking dross and his many millions of followers. Eventually they had to give him the boot or be accused of helping to facilitate a fascist coup.
The ‘Fascist Coup’ has been perpetrated by the Democrat Party and ‘Peking Biden’ who have stolen the election in spectacular fashion. There will never be another free and fair election in the USA again, just as there wasn’t in Germany in the 30s.
Alex Lekas
3 years ago
A private company colluding with govt actors to silence opposition. Twitter has no desire to live in a democracy and worse, a lot of Americans appear to agree with that.
Nick Whitehouse
3 years ago
Much of the trouble stems from the MSM left wing view point being pushed all the time – like here. No mention of the democrats supporting rioting in Portland etc., in your article. No mention of some states changing the rules for postal voting, by going to the judges, but not going through legislation. No mention of the police man, who stood by in Bristol, whilst a mob tore down a statue and yet gets a New Years honour! No mention that the Chinese virus, cannot be called Chinese, but the new variety found in England can be called the Kent or English one. No mention that the US has vaccinated more people than the EU – where is the mention that the EU has fallen apart. No mention of the banning of talk radio.
Yet it is all the fault of a man, who is leaving his job in a few days!
The only miracle, so far, is that the right have not taken matters into their own hands in the same way that the left does.
Of course it does! Nothing new there. But the conservatives in USA do have Fox news, WSJ, (dominate) talk radio and plenty of website. As far as we can tell Trump voters that watch Fox News and listen to talk radio do not read NY Times. But MSM left wing biased is not responsible for Trump’s long track record of craziness. When the leftist (be sane or crazy) point out Trump’s conspiracies, incitement of violence, they are NOT making stuff up. They are pointing out the obvious truth.
I don’t think he should have been banned (or Parler for that matter) but here we are.
How about the new accord between Israel and the countries in the middle east, brokered by Trump? Not really news is it? Or the attempt by the democrats to besmirch Trump for Russian connections? Or the silence by the MSM on Biden’s son? Or the silence on Biden’s incipient senile dementia, on show when he introduced his granddaughter as his dead son?
The MSM is certainly responsible for these omissions and I believe that one sided reporting is a grave danger to our society.
People in Alabama that voted Trump don’t care at all about Israel/UAE relationships. You know about the “peace” in the ME because it is ALL OVER THE MSM. From the mouth of Trump “Russia if you are listening…” Biden dossier was first given (based on NY Times) to WSJ from Rudy and Bannon. WSJ couldn’t verity the source so it refused to publish it. Only after that did Bannon/Rudy go to NY Post. And WSJ 2x supported Trump for President. The NY Post journalist – Bruce Golding – that wrote the article refused to put his name because of credibility concerns.
You’re complaining here not about the suppression of facts, but the meaning and significance given to the facts that are reported. That’s a matter of opinion and preference. You’re essentially complaining that some media outlets don’t support your worldview.
For instance, the media did report the accords signed recently in the Middle East. Some may not have agreed with the vierw that they were momentous in securing peace in the region, or very important in the scheme of things. That is a matter of debate.
How about the new accord between Israel and the countries in the middle east, brokered by Trump? Not really news is it?
Not really. Corporations make deals. Makes very little practical difference to most poor in the Middle East. I don’t think Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Iraqis or Yemenis have looked to Israel, UAE or USA for meaningful help for a long time.
Joe Francis
3 years ago
It seems to be a compulsory feature of journalism that one must make a point of telling everyone how much they despise that awful Donald Trump fellow before pretty much explaining why they agree with everything he stands for. As here.
Ed, allow me to direct you to a pithy but Earth shattering piece of gutter poetry from history’s second greatest monster, Dinesh D’sousa (as advertized on Twitter, Facebook and all good wokeist outposts) “Trump didn’t create the problem, the problem created Trump” Once you have got this through your head, a lot of things make a lot of sense, but in a cold and terrifying way. Like when Bruce Willis pieces it all together in The Sixth Sense
Trump is a crass, coarse, loud-mouthed, hectoring vulgarian. And he’s still the good guy. That’s shocking, because what does it say about everything you thought you knew about the American republic in particular and the west in general? The somewhat schizophrenic nature of this piece indicates to me that you’re sensing this, but for (I assume) the same reasons I was so resistant at first, you’re reluctant to go the whole hog and embrace the paradox. It’s an appalling vista, isn’t it?
Yes, he did. And he’s still morally superior to Biden, Harris, every journalist in mainstream media, the entire Democratic Party (although admittedly, that’s not a high bar to clear) and most of the Republicans. Do you start to see the problem? Are you getting my point, now?
An eloquent, persuasive (and somewhat revealing) rejoinder. I’m glad we’re having this guy time, but if we do it again, maybe you can bring some arguments? I’ll bring the beer.
He’s making a lot of sense. The DC establishment, my preferred term, has unhinged itself form moral governing. They serve themselves and their financial supporters. They pay billions to campaign consultants and managers that keep them in office until once out, they get their consulting gig, elite university professorship see Biden at Penn), speaking fees (Clinton’s everywhere), book contracts and/or Netflix deals (Obama’s). They move to Martha’s vineyard to lament with their privileged mates global warming and income inequality. Step back and look where the worst environments and income inequality exist – the liberal governed urban centers. The policies they tout produce the mis-education, crime and poverty they claim to correct.
All true – but what is new? What working class American (the true people) will oppose his son/daughter going to Harvard? Those people – as you say – keep getting elected. In case of congress every 2 years. I don’t see why the rubes in the stick are true Americans but the failed writer that works as barista in a hip LA bar is a fake American.
I’m sorry – I don’t see anything in Trump’s past or in his term of office as President that suggests he’s morally superior to anyone. And I do see plenty to suggest the opposite. And to your point about bringing some arguments, I’d happy engage in a debate with you if you cite some examples and instances of Trump’s moral superiority.
None of which should suggest that I’m pro-Biden, Harris or any of Trump’s opponents. It’s simply my view of the moral standing of Donald Trump.
– Didn’t start any wars that killed masses of innocents – Implemented a practical solution to the Israel problem which might actually bring peace – Rapid economic growth, especially among blacks – Combined with prison reform law which would benefit blacks (the opposite of Biden / Commala btw) – Tried to curb the awful, destructive CRT philosophy – Aimed (albeit failed) to cut down illegal immigration, which (excluding Hispanics) majority of Americans want – Cut back in business red tape
– He bombed syria and abandoned the Kurds. – No it will not. He simply rolled over for Israel. – economic growth (we can measure it) was as fast as Obama and he blew the budget with his tax cut. -true -true -failed -assaulted pretty much every single rule about environmental protection -failed to Repeal and Replace Obamacare – failed to publish his taxes – failed to balance the budget -failed to curb the trade deficit -spread endless conspiracy theories
You’re flogging a dead horse mate. Trump is what you say he is, and that’s not a politician but a Queen’s businessman – I know, I’ve met lots of them very much like him. But what people like Ed never seem to ask themselves is why so many people voted for him in 2016 and again in 2020. They leap over themselves to say ‘oh people were lied to’ etc, etc, etc, just like they try to explain away Brexit. What they don’t seem to grasp is that people voted for him and for Brexit because they are p*ssed off with the way things have been done for 30 years. Ed can sniff his smelling salts and clutch his pearls all he wants, but he is part of the problem.
That’s really it. The pearl clutching has never allowed for the simple question of, how did someone like Trump become possible? Some of it that these people live in a bubble that is populated by professional politicians who have been responsible for everything that has gone wrong with govt. But in their world view, somehow the outsider is the issue. No, the outsider is a symptom of the larger problem.
I had this conversation with a ‘liberal’ American friend in a square in Athens in October. The pearls were clutched and the venom spat, but when he said ‘who created Trump’ and I replied ‘YOU DID’ I thought he was about to have a stroke. Globalisation has made him a fortune, but he couldn’t understand that an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia might not have made a bean and might be p*ssed at what had become a life of grinding poverty. Voting for Trump was small beer, but if they now see that their votes count as naught and, following the example of Antifa and BLM, that violence pays, the pearls might be clutched even tighter. There will be no self reflection of that you can be sure.
Hardee Hodges
3 years ago
It’s quite odd that in a society that purports tolerance and liberty desperately wants to remove any public disagreement with their faction. Of course many in the public are clueless about the political debate avoiding much of the story. But those who use social media for opinion among their group are worried that their public square is controlled by private companies who have no public responsibility for fairness. The private companies product, eyeballs for adverts, is dependent on people using their platform. Perhaps they have become so large that they fear no competition and better yet, can actively eliminate competition. Eventually rules will be needed to regulate the marketplace but the public must demand those rules.
zsretic1701
3 years ago
It is a well written article with which I disagree, almost thoroughly. Namely, the argument hinges on a premise that you can compare a sociology of a city crime and a solution to it to the area free speech, and get away with it. That is to say, that Trump is a epitome of a drug pusher, only in the area of bad thoughts, so if he was to be purged from the beginning all the current conflicts in society would somewhat vanish. One can easily forget weaponizing of the post-truth as a newfound concept just 5 years ago, somewhat, applicable only in case a statement conflicting with facts comes from an “ideology-compromised” person (famous our facts can be different from yours). Now compare the famous fuss about a post-truth made in the passing by Gingrich about the number of people attending the Trump’s inauguration speech compared to Obama’s with the “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” with burning property in the background. If you believe that these two post-truths belong to the same category think again. Condoning to the violence as it happens may not be easily offset with a false statement made in the passing on the number of attendees to the inauguration speech. That said, the biggest post-truth of our times is that Trump was a problem. Having that in mind I do not think that free speech should have been sacrificed to such a post-truth in any times and on any media. Why? Because Trump is not a drug-pusher.
I think you’re confusing argument with whether analogies or metaphors work in the article. It’s an opinion piece in that respect not an objective study.
Parler is gone. Gab is probably next. It’s so predatorial, but with a ‘tolerant’ SJW face.
vince porter
3 years ago
Thought provoking. If, however, twitter is public enemy #1, other media are thoroughly complicit. Most of us would never hear of Trump’s tweets if TV, radio, facebook, newspapers, etc. were not so eager to capitalize by piling on the garbage. “Trump tweeted…” has created more headlines than World War II.
Mike Perkin
3 years ago
The one factor you omit that drives Twitter not to rein in abusive or dangerous comments is advertising dollars, directly proportional to clicks and follower count. Their stock has soared in 2020 and they’ve taken the view now that revenue from Trump directly will be more than covered by his supporters worldwide continuing the discussion. Always follow the money.
Yes, and Parler is now competition-cutting into their profits. These monopolies are attempting to crush competing business models-now that they are becoming a threat-through moral posturing and outrage signaling.
Martin Woodford
3 years ago
Maybe the question is wrong? Should it be more like ‘can democracy exist in a world of Twitter’? Where social media sites can censor the posts of people or ideas it does not like, then what of free speach and democracy? There has to be a right to offend and to challenge. Free speach is a lot more than the ability to parrot required narratives. Of course the obligation of free speach is responsibility, not to abuse that freedom in order to incite, but if the social media providers are to police speach, then it must be balanced, fair and consistent.
As an aside – I wonder why when the left wishes to illustrate totalitarianism, it chooses Hitler – but never Stalin or Mao?
The social sites are doing the censoring with the full knowledge and approval of one of the major political parties. You’ve not heard a single Dem suggest that this is an assault on basic freedom. Not one. And you likely won’t.
I would say all the mainstream parties in all democracies at least tacitly permit the censoring or at least fail to address the bias and imbalance, probably for much the same reason they don’t address the clear and acknowledged bias of mainstream TV media. What puzzles me is if the media sites can censor political views they don’t like how do they legitimately claim to be unable to censor material that supports terrorism and various forms of sex abuse?
Sorry Ed, I’ve liked stuff you’ve written in the past but if you start by agreeing Donald Trump should not be allowed a voice and accepting the far left concept of “inciting hate”, a completely nebulous term intended to censor anything they don’t like, you’ve come down firmly on the side of “free speech is bad, we must protect people from it”.
If The Media want to contribute to creating a responsible democracies, stop reinforcing the importance of Twitter reactions.
Terence Fitch
3 years ago
Reading the points being made here emphasises the problem. This is an ersatz community-we don’t know each other in any nuanced way and we’re not having a ‘conversation’ face to face where we are likely to be more polite and use body language and facial expression to pick up more subtle interaction. We primates still need to communicate in real groups and haven’t adapted to social media communication which is all of 20ish years’ old. One point: Twitter and Facebook are de facto admitting they are publishers. The pretence that they’re not is Emperor’s clothes.
Terry Maxwell
3 years ago
You do a good job laying out the problem of social media and democratic discourse, but I don’t see any clarity regarding what you consider to be a solution. The fundamental problem, as you note, is the question of who gets to decide, and while you take a couple of sideways swipes at liberals, we can’t trust conservatives to take on this role, since if anything they are even more imbedded in the systems of privilege that have failed to provide equal opportunity and justice. So what do you suggest?
No one has yet come up with a better solution than Madison, who argued that the only possible solution was to allow the opposing sides to balance out each other in the marketplace of ideas. But without a capacity to develop rational, fact-based arguments and debate in a moderated forum, all we are left with is a very noisy marketplace where noise and novelty overwhelm discourse.
Michael North
3 years ago
The only good thing about Twitter is that the walls of public toilets are cleaner than they used to be.
Mark Gilbert
3 years ago
Censorship almost always leads to reaction, if not violent reaction, in a democracy, especially if there are large numbers of those voices who feel alienated and marginalised.
It is nothing less than astounding that any member of the intelligentsia would countenance the banning from Twitter, or any other social media platform, whole groups of people and organisations, let alone a President…. unless they want to be party to the likely ultimate incendiary unintended consequences.
Sure, liars and conspiracy theorists might be peeved, but look at what just happened. Trump, spewing lies, incited a mob to storm the Capitol and five people died.
Citation missing. Trump gave some excuses for people to be mad. It was clear from long before his speech that the Proud Boys and other a-holes would be creating trouble. Read his speech. Nothing incites to violence.
Can you post the exact words he used to incite violence please ?
john dann
3 years ago
Reading all these comment it is clear that the battle lines are as clearly drawn here as they are in any other milieu, showing a troubling divide in the USA which will not soon dissipate. If one looks objectively at the septua/octogenarians like Pelosi, Shummer, macConnell, etc. who rule the land and are ruled by corporate interests, it seems clear to me that what ails America is the intransigence of a fossilised political structure. No one is happy in the USA, not the people on the left or on the right. But people the world over want the same things: peace, shelter, nutrition of body and mind as basic fundaments to growth. You as a nation do not have these things and you seem to have a deep phycological inability to grant them to each other. The calcified minds and bodies of your leaders are your true representatives. Trump, the bomb that landed on this bedrock of fetid malignancy disturbed it but did not penetrate or dislodge it.
Too early to say if he did not penetrate or dislodge. The washout from the election has to happen first. Most know something happened, but what. Already the Data Miners are demonstrating fertile areas for research. A friend of mine from the US recently wrote to me saying that Trump had acheived more than most Presidents do in their first term. He then added but that will never be acknowledged by US based historians or commentators as the environment for doing so is too toxic. It will come from researchers beyond the borders. Will that toxicity last. If so, we have to see if the pent up anger shown on 6 Jan at the Capitol, can be sustained. What is obvious from this article and the illustrations with it, is its anti Trump Bias. That is despite the good points that it makes in places.
Aaron Kevali
3 years ago
Trump gave as good as he got. His behaviour was no worse than what he had to put up with on a daily basis from every mainstream news outlets, even before he was elected. He drove leftists mad nbecause he was effective, and could use rhetoric even better than they could.
Jaunty Alooetta
3 years ago
Nowhere is free speech an absolute value. Every country sets limits on what can be said in public. Legally, it is peculiar that social media are not treated in law as publishers. Instead they are treated as neutral platfroms. It means that people can get away with using untruth to incite criminality and defame others with impunity. Facebook, Twitter and whatnot should be treated as publishers, which would make them liable for content that incites criminality or defames someone.
Newspapers already are liable for content that incites criminality and defames people.
Ray Thomson
3 years ago
The now unfashionable Marxist theoretician, Nicos Poulantzas, foresaw a time when capitalism would fall out of love with its cod version of democracy. Trump’s GOP, like Johnson’s constitution-overriding, internatioal law-breaking Tory Party, are the most symptoms of the fact that, for a small number of extremely wealthy, extremely powerful, extremely well-connected people in the US and UK, oldfangled ‘bourgeios’ democracy has become an impediment to the further enrichment and empowerment of the 1% at the expense of the 99% also-rans. Of course, Twitter too is symptom but can hardly be held accountable for late capitalism continuing to write cheques it is no longer fit to honour.
I rather suspect that the majority of British voters support the threat to ‘break international law’. They understand that’s what sovereignty means. They’re prepared to face the consequences. Which are ‘I see your point’ in the normal course of international affairs. That’s what happened this time.
Another Remain idiot..It is EU breaking International law un 2625 on Sovereign States and threaten to blockade independent states…..Go and eat your ‘Percy pigs’ imported from Germany & rexported with higher EU tax…
Chauncey Gardiner
3 years ago
Blaming Donald Trump is facile and lazy. And boring. For God’s sake, don’t be boring.
And what are going to blame him for? For not being a honey-tongued serpent?
Meanwhile, if folks think Twitter and other such fora are corrosive, then get off Twitter and leave these other such fora. Easy.
Take responsibility and stop preaching lazy nonsense to the rest of us. Go read a book.
Meanwhile, do we really think American cities in, say, 1912 were more accommodating than they are now? Sacco, Vanzetti or, say, William Jennings Bryan might disagree, but they’re not available for comment.
tiaanjfourie
3 years ago
The article required delving into free speech. I kind of understood what Ed West was saying about Donald Trump, but the 2 tweets quoted for his removal off of Twitter seems like a stretch. The gem of this article was the privilege of progressives on social media. Although, I would have called it the woke. Many conservatives have progressive viewpoints.
rosie mackenzie
3 years ago
“And following a year in which China has successfully dealt with an external threat “
This is a very worrying rewriting of history, culminating in a fashionable admiration for the CCP’s form of control.
And what a strange idea the author has of aristocracy.
Tim Stewart
3 years ago
I agree with the concern that social media feeds and feeds upon negative emotions towards the perceived other tribe. But I do wonder whether the comments section of Unherd gets a free pass from the same criticism?
Philip Burrell
3 years ago
I cannot understand why anyone thinks that social media and search engine companies care about freedom of speech. Their income comes from advertising and that dictates their policies. If they break the discrimination or incitement to violence laws in a country then they should be prosecuted but if they decide to ban Trump, so what?
If the Guardian decides not to print an article by Peter Hitchens or The Telegraph one by Owen Jones, so what? .
Censorship is what governments do, private companies can do what the hell they like as long as it is within the law.
As i always point out if people stopped using their service they would go bust – and further their’s is no monopoly. They will be “ubered” or “amazoned” in their turn by the next offering. Granted they may get a lifeline from governents due to their role as leftist censors, same way Microsoft was needed to destroy the threat of open systems like Xenix and Unix. But even these crony lifelines are not for ever: Microsoft sale have generally risen but not as fast as device users have. Ergo the users are on other platforms, notably Mac, Android and like us at home, Lynux.
Depends how you measure left-v-right. They seek to regulate every minute detail of our lives – diet, issues of conscience, design of houses etc etc. Not even red china makes you have a licence to watch their TV, which like ours is mostly crappy state propaganda with the odd interesting bit thrown in.
Mark Gilbert
3 years ago
I notice there is no mention, here, of any other examples of who else – beside Trump – “should have been banned years ago”. I find that curious and unfortunate.
I realise Trump is a hot topic right now, but I think an attempt to draw up even a short list of obvious candidates for “banning” might help clarify the writer’s thesis. It would also, I imagine, underscore the endemic, arrant hypocrisy of entities like Twitter.
Finally, a brief analysis of this hypocrisy into other areas of modern US life – perhaps in so-called legacy media – might also be informative.
Ah yes but Trump is evil incarnate, whereas those nice folk at Antifa and BLM only want to do a bit of murder and looting. Nothing to see, move along.
Had the Capitol been burnt to the ground last week, that would have been ok for CNN and our own dear, dear BBC – ‘a largely peaceful protest’. Wasn’t that the description of Portland or some such with the background of a building well ablaze. So what’s the difference ? Oh yes the wrong lot starting the blaze.
David Waring
3 years ago
“If Twitter were a city it would be the sort of city where the authorities allow people to defecate in public or shoot up outside a school, and then express surprise when middle-class families wish to leave because of “the better quality of life” found in a four-hour commute away exurb. Ah, so just like California and Portland then, and many other Democratic run cities?
Mark Gilbert
3 years ago
Clearly the comments policy, here, seems to have taken on board the Broken Windows theory when deciding which comments not to publish.
The left has taken over so many institutions now that clearly they don’t think anyone is in a position to argue with them, let alone judge them. Disagreeing with them would be “hate” and “violence” and “terrorism”.
Dewi Owen
3 years ago
A good balanced article. Illustrating the dangers from the middle-class mob in Universities screaming at lecturers as well as people like Trump who does not curb his Twitter tongue. The Founding Fathers of the great nation of America thought through the potential threats to freedom, democracy and the common good very, very carefully. A new need for wise objective thinkers to address modern expressions of opinion are needed now.
Jasmine Birtles
3 years ago
I absolutely agree and I feel now, as I have always felt, that the world would be a better place without social media https://www.telegraph.co.uk…. However, we have it, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. What we may need now is far more platforms so that the few we have now don’t have all the power.
Andy Duncan
3 years ago
I can’t help feeling that you missed the most obvious point about Twitter. Trump was simply the exemplar of this. Every political leader or aspirant uses Twitter to express opinions in one of two ways: to bypass old fashioned political processes and press briefings; or to test the water.
David Foot
3 years ago
What you find in USA you find in most of the rest of the Anglosphere while it manages to stay in place under what is mostly a Marxist and in second instance Islamic attack seasoned with African and Latin American Nationalism. The Anglosphere values are the ones under attack in all our nations, the values of the Crown and the ones which built parliaments and legal systems and freed them from religious limitations, the ones of hard work and discovery and applied knowledge which squashed the tyrannies of religion and of nepotism turning in to meritocracies to a great degree, much more than with any other ideology. That is what is being attacked today with lies and by using events of the past and judging them out of context or by straight lying about everything. Today there are three tyrannies who are after us using the false narratives and taking events out of context: Marxism, Islam and African Nationalism all of which have built hell holes from which people are prepared to die in order to get out of them. We should fight them and ignore them. We want to watch our freedom of speech and what we wish for. Because they are what our enemies use in a devious way to try and destroy all the places which the Anglosphere ideology has built in the world and to which people are ready to die with their children in order to get in to. We can improve on what we got but hey! Most of the world would kill for what we are undermining.
No Marxist, African Nationalist, Latin American Nationalist, Islamist can explain the border with Mexico, the water, the air, the land is just as fertile in the centre, the South and the North of America. So why does that border exist? If we let USA and Canada fall it won’t exist for all the wrong reasons!
It is true that the British had an Empire and that USA is the Renegade British Empire and that we populated all those lands people desire to go to. But ALL other doctrines tried to do the same and couldn’t, other Empires tried to match us but couldn’t. No other doctrine can match this what we achieved, no other Empire can match the British Empire sadly disunited but the Anglosphere still exists. Those chanting death to the Empire are our enemies and if USA doesn’t put them down they will turn our world in to a hell hole as all African Nationalist and Marxist systems will always only deliver. We must stand our ground and say we are here and we are going to stay. We need to be much more careful with immigration, it has gone too far, let us protect what no other ideology has achieved and we should repatriate if necessary, if people consider us to be “racist” then is anybody holding them back? Let us take them to a land of their dreams, take them to decolonized Zimbabwe, take them to Saudi, take them to Moscow or Beijing, take them to wherever their poison is being manufactured but let us protect what is good, what works like no other, we are being attacked by envy and by greed. Save England and the United Kingdom, save the United States of America, save New Zealand, save Canada, save Australia! USA is not alone we are all suffering because we can’t see what is happening to us, we have been too good, now we must think of saving ourselves first in order to keep something unique and really good in the world. The Anglosphere must concentrate on itself and the Anglosphere must unite and stand together or we will all be hung separately. No other ideology can be compared to ours and give this message to the young who are falling to the Marxists who have only made hell holes of lies.
Twitter is very very soon to be history. If allowed to continue at all it will be under different leadership and control. Keep your eyes open and look further than mainstream to see what’s going on. I would say Parler, but Google and I believe Apple have both taken it from their App stores this weekend. But I think you can still get on by going direct to Parler website. Follow Team Trump, Lin Wood, General Flynn to learn what’s really going on, right now at this minute. And it is this which will lead to demise of Twitter, and others.
Parler as of this morning is now toast. Amazon have booted them off their web servers and they struggling to find anyone who will take them. Even the firms who handled their emails and texts have discoed them too. Scary times me thinks.
vtaproot
3 years ago
The best way to strike a blow at these technocrats is to stop using their products. That includes getting rid of your cellphones and going back to using landlines. None of this crap is needed.
Terry Maxwell
3 years ago
One potential solution is to remove the liability shield from the Twitters and Facebooks of the world. (This is what Trump is proposing, but he doesn’t realise he’d be the first one kicked off under such a scenario!). The shield was established on the false premise that online content facilitators were similar to the telephone company, and as such shouldn’t be held liable for something some homicidal maniac says over the line. But we know that what is of greatest value is not the infrastructure but the content, which is where the Facebooks make their money. The result of removing liability protection would require the content facilitators to police their space, which is what traditional media organisations were required to do. This is not an attack on free speech, since you could have a multiplicity of content facilitators of various ideological stripes, depending on the editorial choices of the facilitators.
Michael Upton
3 years ago
Mr West’s analysis is persuasive. Let’s start by not posting or reading things on Twitter. There are a lot of highly engaged and valuable members of the public for whom this works just fine. Pass the word.
It’s the millions of gullible idiots who are the concern.
tommymack1981
3 years ago
“The platform has a consistent policy of allowing high-follower accounts to get away with extreme incivility, incitement to violence and even racial hatred. It lets them do so for the same reason that bad behaviour is often indulged ““ because the people doing it are seen as having the right politics, in this case of the progressive variety.”
Ed West makes a lot of good points in this article but this is utter nonsense. High-follower accounts of all political stripes and with no politics get away with bad behaviour because they bring traffic to Twitter which is how it makes its money.
Just as in broader society, people get away with bad behaviour because they have high status, regardless of their politics.
You have a point, but I’d say that there are really three tiers. Using someone like Milo Yiannopoulos as an example, I’d classify that as:
(1) Someone with low follower count (and/or low profile outside Twitter) would have their account permanently removed by Twitter sooner than happened to Milo. At a minimum, they would have simply been booted from the platform – at least if anyone reported the behavior – on the various occasions that he was instead temporarily suspended and then reinstated.
(2) Someone like Milo did get more rope, but eventually booted.
(3) The progressive version of Milo would get still more leniency, and possibly never get booted.
Is there evidence of that? Which progressives have engaged in the same sort of harassment as Milo and been tolerated? Genuinely curious as I’m not aware of any specific cases?
Someone like Kathy Griffin could be an overall example.
Steve Gwynne
3 years ago
Whilst I agree with what you say, in my opinion, there is also deeper considerations than virtue (cardinal virtues).
What is the motivational basis for the trolling and flaming if not competition over finite resources which leads to what is known as realistic conflict theory whereby groupings form when faced with economic insecurity. In this respect, if Twitter actually had a much more substantial superordinate mission than,
The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve ““ and do not detract from ““ a free and global conversation. https://investor.twitterinc….
such as seeking to help foster a sharing and caring global community then that might thwart the competitive hierarchy that is implicit in their doublespeak mission of improving a free (progressive) and global conversation (global alliance).
ccauwood
3 years ago
Did anyone below answer the question? Can Twitter exist in a democracy? I’d say no, if it is indeed the case Twitter is gaslighting, cancelling.half of the voting population, assured that the other half will support it. Short answer, no, democracy must go.
Terry M
3 years ago
The more relevant question is why anyone thought being on Twitter was a good idea in the first place? Do I really need to know that my neighbor is sitting on the crapper? That the kid down the street pulled his sister’s hair? It was obvious from the beginning that it would only be a sewer of uninformed, petty bitching. Just quit the twit.
Martin Adams
3 years ago
Several commenters here are right in saying that Mr West offers no enduring solutions. But I see his “failure” as intellectually and morally honest ” as were Fisher Ames in 1805, and Alexis de Tocqueville in his magisterial Democracy in America of 1835″“40. All three authors identify weaknesses that arise because the democratic system, more than any other, attempts to grant liberty to each citizen, despite the dangers inherent in human nature.
In all these respects, the American democratic system is profoundly indebted to Christian foundations ” the Deist or other non-orthodox inclinations of the Founding Fathers notwithstanding. Just two of many examples: 1) Liberty, despite the near-certainty of its being misused, is what God granted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; 2) Opposition to the concept of hyphenated Americanism (Italian-American, African-American etc.), expressed forcefully by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Regan, is based on the uniquely American idea that the immigrant who chooses to live in America becomes American via that choice. It is a secular equivalent of the well-known Pauline declaration that Christian identity supersedes all other identities ” “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” [Galatians 3:28].
When Mr West points out that the Founding Fathers understood the importance of personal virtue in sustaining their new kind of democracy, he is also underlining the vulnerability of democracy when Christian and classical concepts of virtue decline within the population at large. I and several others here have argued that social media in general appeals to the worst aspects of human nature. Of course, virtue is by no means confined to Christians and Christianity. But I do wonder whether there are links between the decline of widespread Christian observance, the growth of relativism, the increase in individualism, and the potent conclusions that end Mr West’s article:
the real problem is the medium itself, a system which mixes aristocratic arrogance with populist anarchy, a toxic combination almost perfectly designed to erode democracy.
So, when the nature of the medium is added to the decline of democracy, to the realities of human nature, and to the a-moral power of the international corporations that control the media, there is no acceptable, imposable, universal solution. We therefore have to depend on the oldest things ” on individual character, on wisdom and virtue, and on the rise of such individuals to positions of power and influence. I’m not hopeful; but that will not stop me arguing for such thing.
Patrick Fox
3 years ago
I fully endorse the last sentence of this paper.
Social media are a danger to both democracy and individual freedom of thought. The benefits brought by social medias to the individual are today by far outweighed by the toxic divisions social media firebrand “lynching mobsters” instil in civil society, mainstream medias acting as unfiltered echo chambers just in case they could miss the buzz. So what do we really want to protect the social media companies or the sanity of our society?
Robin P
3 years ago
This article is fundamentally misconceived. Not least in this false metaphor: Note that this will take more than one sentence to explain.
As in real life, where you only need to lock away a few people to turn a city around, social media platforms can make a huge difference by removing a small number of individuals.
Having a handful of violent thugs in your city is VERY different from having a handful of posters who post words you don’t like or consider untrue. Words are NOT violence, in numerous ways.. If they are just cheap insults then they can be ignored (indeed filtered out by algorithm). If a poster insists on constantly posting trash, then there can be an option of voluntary collapsing by the reader (again with optional help of an algorithm). If libellous then the poster can get sued or exposed as the lyre. If the comment is anonymous then anyone with a brain should have the sense to recognise it as a mere allegation without verification.. But it might be a very valuable whistleblowing.
The supreme consideration is that trying to police the obnoxious words causes far more harm than the words themselves.
Oh, but “incitement to violence”. There is no document in history more bursting with incitements to hate than the Qur’*n. Not only its many “glorious” commands such as “fight the disbelievers until religion is all for All*h”. But also that in practice it clearly incites endless acts of violence (usually including the words “All** a***”).
So if you want to criminalise “incitement to violence” you have to ban the Qur’an and ban me from reading the Qur’*n. And anyway what business is it of yours to dictate what words I read or write. Please pass off until you can admit that that equals outright fascism wherein your “superior” people have the entitlement to dictate down to us inferiors and meanwhile us subhum*ns lack even the right to say what we think let alone what others can.
The only free speech is absolute free speech. Those who say otherwise do so only because they want to defend the indefensible, such as the whopping lie of “the huge benefits of immigration”. .
Chris Hudson
3 years ago
Ok, I’m a Brit watching all this from across the pond with great fascination… Some of you love Trump, some of you hate him, I get that. What I’d like to know is this: how do Trump lovers justify the way he stoked up that riot? Even if you like his policies, that behaviour was deeply dangerous, wasn’t it?
Not a Trump lover, but I can read English well enough to know that he did no such thing. Nothing he said called for any violence. Unlike several Democrats who openly used ACTUAL words to provoke rioting last Summer.
Jennifer Britton
3 years ago
Twitter’s biggest problem is, as others have pointed out, that it treats all twitterers as equals …. all are welcome! While we are all equal before the law (or should be equal), we are not all equal in civic virtue nor in our reasoning.
Hence, platforms such as Twitter allow lies to pass for truth. And these lies achieve the status of truth simply because they are echoed millions of times, not because they are factually correct. As the siege of the capitol on January 6th shows, people steeped in these echoed lies create slogans (“stop the steal,” “take back our country”) that abort real thinking.
Twitter and other such platforms in their present forms cannot be controlled and will always become places for the disaffected and the manipulative to lie and to be believed and then to be echoed (retweeted) and finally to achieve some sort of power. Labeling such folks’ posts names, for example “deplorables” or “not true” won’t do as such labels will become badges of honor among them.
One solution might be simply begin a campaign to increase civic virtue and recognize/reward it. How that recognition/reward occurs I have no idea. But the number of capitol invaders taking selfies demonstrates the desire/need for attention. If Twitter and its ilk could harness the need for attention and direct it toward more virtuous behavior (telling the truth, rational thought, bringing important issues to public attention, pointing out historical examples, motivating the common good, for example) we might see some improvement in our democratic experience.
Andrew Baldwin
3 years ago
Ed writes: “following a year in which China has successfully dealt with an external threat”. Does he care to expand on this? Surely he is not endorsing the Communist Chinese canard that the US Army brought COVID-19 to Wuhan at the Military World Games in October 2019? And if that’s not what he’s talking about, just what is he talking about? “Following a deadly pandemic brought on by a virus that started in the People’s Republic of China and may have come from a government lab” would have been a better opening.
shineajitkumar
3 years ago
The author is more confused than people he is accusing of being confused
F Wallace
3 years ago
The complete refusal of anyone on Trump’s side to accept he is in the wrong at all is a serious issue. Having concerns about social media removing accounts is fine. But he’s not just some bloke, he’s the damn PRESIDENT. He HAS to be held to intensely stricter standards than other people. He HAS spewed racist rhetoric whether his cultists want to believe it or not. Shockingly, you don’t need to put on a white hood and scream actual slurs to be racist, guys. He has whipped up hysteria over this election to the point where they simply won’t accept they are in the wrong. Because he has the power to do so.
You talk of a ‘cult’ and the ‘spewing of racist rhetoric’, but how do you square that with the fact that Trump secured more electoral votes from his ‘cult’, 74m, than any other presidential candidate ever bar the obvious one, and actually managed to increase his vote amongst Black and Hispanic voters completely against the prevailing media narrative?
G Harris
3 years ago
This is quite a confusing piece, but I love that contentious ‘keeper’ Fisher Ames quote, ‘few can reason, all can feel” as it encapsulates the problem we all have with democracy or, more precisely, our increasingly warped perception of it.
It’s not just censorship that is fine for some just so long as it’s imposed on others, worryingly democracy seems to be becoming an increasingly moveable, subjective feast too.
Once that goes, then it’s well on its way to being a gonna.
In terms of America, the vital principle of losers’ consent was abandoned in 2016 by the Democrats and their supporters when Trump apparently ‘unexpectedly’ won against Obama’s heir apparent Clinton.
The next four years were characterized by endless, increasingly desperate ‘trumped up’, if you’ll pardon the pun, ultimately fruitless Democrat-led attempts to delegitimise the encumbent democratically elected president thereby giving the proverbial finger to those who voted for him and effectively delegitimising the whole system in the process by default if not by intent.
So, as I said, here we are four years on and this time the losers’ consent is now required (and expected) in order to legitimise the vote for the ‘other side’s’ guy and there seems to be a problem with that and yet we’re all supposed to be mystified and/or outraged by this unreasonable, undemocratic reaction from ‘the others’.
American democracy is indeed under siege, but let’s not forget that it wasn’t Trump, whatever your personal opinion of this hard to like man is, who fired the first shot.
Charles Rense
3 years ago
The internet should have remained the quirky hobby of nerds and shut-ins. It was never meant to be mainstream.
Ah yes! The early days of the personal computer when quasi-sophisticated creative types (the sort of people who infest MSM like rats in a sewer) were keen to display their sophisticated, fully-rounded personalities by dismissing the new technology as only interesting to boring, socially inadequate little men (dahling!).
The internet is a lot more than just social media though. I think it would not be a bad thing if people didn’t get their news and information from social media though.
LOL Yes, amazing investigate journalism on Twitter. And yet you kept insisting (here) that NY Times should investigate Hunter Biden!
ditizm
3 years ago
I am sure it works. If it is taken care that people pass the street only when is green light as the rules are, when drivers respect the speed limits, the rest takes care of itself. If the small misdemeanors will be eliminated than those few criminals will be exposed. Those who do the bog crime of course do many small crimes.
The problem is always the medium. We are all obliged to change our behaviour to accommodate technological change, there’s nothing else we can do. People will always abuse the medium to gain advantage.
Jaden Johnson
3 years ago
To paraphrase Baudelaire (or Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects – take your pick) – The greatest trick that Twitter ever pulled was to convince people that its existence was necessary…
ken.kaplan.esq
3 years ago
Before commenting, consider reading: 1. Plato, The Republic, (circa 375 BC) 2. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd… (1895) 3. Hamilton, et al., The Federalist Papers (1787-1788) 4. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776) 5. Marx, Das Kapital (1867)
Comment:
The U.S. Senate was created by the founders to try to mitigate the trend of democracy towards tyranny. Without an educated deliberative body primarily concerned with representing the needs, rather than the demands of the People, our nation is doomed.
Unfortunately the 17th amendment made the Senate just a smaller, more ossified, version of the House. Repeal that POS! Make the USA the United STATES again.
Censorship of opinion is a bad idea. By all means let’s censor obscenity and incitement to violence, real incitement, not a political opponent talking to his peaceful rally.
Mike Hursthouse
3 years ago
I’m not entirely sure the broken windows example is correct. The authors of Freakonomics suggest that crime was already in steep decline in New York before the mayor and his police chief applied the approach to policing and that the true cause of the improvement can be laid at the door of Roe v Wade, which significantly reduced the birth rate of unwanted babies to mainly poor, single girls and young women – it is the male children of such mothers who commit the vast majority of crime, they say. Their evidence seems impressive.
The problem with the “broken window” theory is that it, once again, uses the police and punishment, rather than education, security and opportunity to eliminate poverty, ignorance and despair.
The clearest measure of crime, homicides, was NOT in steep decline in NYC. It peaked at near 2,250 in 1990 and was just below 2,000 in 1993 the year before the new policing policy. This 4%/yr drop is dwarfed by the subsequent drop to 600 homicides /yr in the first 5 years of Giuliana. Broken Windows policy effect was immediate and dramatic according to homicide data -view murder by year on wikipedia for yourself and you can confirm. Classic leftist hand waving is that US rates dropped also but that ignores multiple facts: NYC effects were so dramatic they were copied elsewhere; US overall decrease much less and lagged NYC drop
Derek M
3 years ago
Ed West apparently claims to be a conservative, he clearly isn’t but is just another establishment shill and now his cheerleading seems to extend to dictatorships
Clach Viaggi
3 years ago
The question to ask should be the opposite: can a democracy exists with tech giant monopolies that have censored political speech and journalism to the point to shut uo completley in a day alternative platforms like Parler?
Robin P
3 years ago
see other one that bypassed mod.
Maria Bogris
3 years ago
China IS the external threat, and you believing their numbers makes me wonder if you are interested in purchasing this nice bridge I have…
kudos for at least calling out the screeching woke mob on Twitter and elsewhere though
“If Twitter were a city it would be the sort of city where the authorities allow people to defecate in public or shoot up outside a school, and then express surprise when middle-class families wish to leave […] “
so, San Francisco, then ?
The MSM city this writer inhabits is one much like the old Boston that had ‘No Dogs, No Irish’ signs posted at the park. He gratuitously throws out President Trump “Lying, inciting hatred, and worse” and says he should best have been banned a decade ago. He is the ‘All Views tolerated, except…’ school of thought, but gets away with it by his clever but snarky humour making him seem a pal and smart, and letting us in on the joke.
What he calls Trump inciting hatred is Trump endorsing the Broken Windows theory.
This article is a bit schizophrenic. First this…..
“America’s founding ideals ” and its subsequent success ” derived from this diversity of beliefs, and the fact that no sect could dominate the others.”
Followed by….” And yet, by any Wilsonian reading of social media, Donald Trump ought to have been banned ages ago.”
The author will have to make up his mind. It cannot be both. And therein lies the problem not only with this article but also with social media.
America’s founding ideals and the just extraordinary omission of any mention of the inarguably genocidal treatment of the natives while writing about religious persecution in the article just leave me stunned.
If the FF did think of Rome when formulating their ideals as well as the first US government, then certainly genocide would have been a component as it was known in Rome and throughout the European continent for centuries of course. It was after all, Europeans who settled the US so escaping a predilection like that would have been miraculous. The ECHR co-exists with the Bosnian genocide.
And then of course the US “natives” who also arrived from elsewhere, were known to partake in a bit of genocide amongst themselves. Slavery too. I find the whole Rome thing pretentious personally.
The FF were far more about getting rid of British or English oversight than anything. The FF no more created a perfect society than anything else ever has. Still ideals are not irrelevant even if you fail repeatedly to live up to them as we all do.
“genocidal treatment” suggests more history needs discovery. The settler tribe and the native tribe disagreed about property use, often violently. Not much different than disputes between farmers and cattle ranchers who were equally violent. The stronger tribe won, as has happened everywhere for all time. At least the stronger tribe didn’t fully destroy the opposition as history elsewhere reveals.
In Newfoundland they did.
I doubt if you have been left stunned by “…the just extraordinary omission…” You are just taking this opportunity to bang on about one of your favourite topics.
Beware of reckless use of the word “inarguably” and when reading Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” don’t allow critical intelligence to be overwhelmed by sentiment.
Collective guilt is a moral sentiment best savoured in the peace and comfort of a world created by those who did “the heavy lifting” for you. I guess it puts a comforting moral shield around you while you continue to enjoy the benefits of advanced civilisation.
Go away
Why should I go away? I’m not stopping you from banging on.
Surely you don’t expect everyone to nod along in agreement with your bit of moral grandstanding.
Hark! an aristocrat dismisses the unwashed and “unenlightened”.
As Adolf tediously explained to Eva, repeatedly.
Never mind what Adolf said ““ what do you have to say for yourself?
It also is a lesson for us with the diseases brought into the new world by the settlers causing the genocide, much like the China virus today, with the 3 deaths per million in China and the entire West Pacific Region, to the USA UK 1200 deaths per million.
Westward expansion & thus subjugation of native Americans occurred after the founding of the United States.
Is that a plus or a minus?
It invalidates the simplistic argument that the US is “a nation based on genocide”, and doesn’t detract from the integrity of the person who wrote the article.
How can I put it – the US was founded without genocide, but in the “Indian wars” of the 19th century many acts of genocide were committed?
As so often happens with the principles of movements based on a sense of injustice, after the revolution had succeeded the U.S. lost sight of the fact that if such principles have any value they should guide actions once power has been obtained.
The way that this happens, over and over again, make me very suspicious of grievance-driven movements.
‘As so often happens with the principles of movements based on a sense of injustice, after the revolution had succeeded the U.S. lost sight of the fact that if such principles have any value they should guide actions once power has been obtained.’
I agree but I think the immigrant community in North America had abandoned those principles long before Independence. ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ to us and our kind.
There were campaigns (Pequot War, King Philip’s War) prior to independence – where the locals were pretty much eliminated in order for the immigrants to prosper.
Hmm, a quick read of the wikipedia page on King Philip’s war shows it to be one in which atrocities were committed by both sides (initially by Indians), and with surprisingly similar casualties. I don’t get “locals were eliminated in order for immigrants to prosper” from that; the way the conflict started seems to be that the colonists wanted to restrict Indian possession of guns & Indians (rightly, IMO) saw this as a threat to their independence.
That said, I’m not familiar with US history but being very much into South African history I can imagine the attitude that colonists had towards the indigenous population.
One tribe conquered another – such is history.
Agree. A nation based on genocide. Not that unusual, of course. But it needs to be acknowledged and understood before moving on.
As an American I can tell you that we did learn in school about slavery, Jim Crow, Indians and discrimination against Catholics, Jews, Eastern Europeans, Germans, Asians, etc. But most Americans (like me)…say let’s move on.
Here is the dirty secret – the Germans and ONLY the Germans have come to reckon with their past. Japan hasn’t, Russia hasn’t, China hasn’t, Turkey hasn’t…the list goes on.
So the American position is pretty much normal.
Absolutely – every country needs to reflect back on it’s foundation myths and bear them in mind, always. If the US really remembered, and acknowledged what took place in ‘taming the West’ would it still have been incarcerating children separately from their parents (who have committed no crime other than travelling) on it’s southern border in 2020?
Despite the track record of American those people (Central America!) came to USA. They didn’t stay in Mexico or go south to Venezuela or sail to China…see?
Well, might still have been Mexico if not for 1846 and all that….
Nice try.
Yes, and if it were, the only likely difference is that Mexicans and Central Americans would then have a longer journey to find a border across which to immigrate illegally. Mexico isn’t that densely populated country, nor would the US be if we didn’t have our SW quadrant. Oh, and Canada might have more of a problem with illegal immigration than they do now, given how much closer Mexico would be.
Yes, those are two widely different things. In fact controlling their borders is what the native Americans were trying to do.
What America should learn from its past is not to keep invading the world, instead it lectures the rest of us about multiculturalism while invading half the world.
Apart from trying to enter the US illegally ?
Only the Anglosphere wallows in self loathing guilt. If only it would move on.
Pretty simplistic-” a nation based on genocide.”? There is a bit more to the nation than that, but woke, junior-college level debates need this tired trope to justify their anti-Americanisms.
Of course it’s simplistic – doesn’t necessarily make it a ‘tired trope’. All that means is that it’s been said before by people you disagree with and you’re tired of arguing with.
I’m not anti-American. I’m anti a national narrative that proclaims a foundation myth of freedom of belief and universality while ignoring the inconvenient fact that in order to establish the nation the immigrants found it necessary to eliminate the locals and then bring in a load of other people, initially indentured poor people from Europe, and later differently coloured people from Africa, to work ‘their’ land.
Do we level this against Turkey or China ?
I don’t think anyone would take seriously a claim that China or Turkey were bastions of humanitarian free speech and religious and ethnic tolerance. That is what we are expected to believe of the USA.
It’s not really relevant to the Twitter conundrum, though, is it?
delete
It certainly is arguable there was no genocide. Jeff Fynn-Paul, associate professor in history at Leiden University, made just such an argument in the Spectator last September and it was a persuasive one. I would link it but that causes problems here with moderation.
You self diagnosis of being stunned seems to be supported by your left wing rhetoric . The contrived self conditioning state of theatrical excessive horror, rage ,hurt , disgust , stunned etc when encountering non compliance , dissent or opposition to dogma is the usual political theatre of the left, and the contrived extreme emotional states are likely making you emotionally ill…even stunned.
I think the confusion stems from the fact that the author suggests that Trump should have been banned from Twitter “a decade ago,” before he ventured into politics. He’s criticizing Trump based on a perceived lack of democratic “virtue,” such as moderation, tolerance, and civility. It’s more a stylistic matter than a substantive one premised on ideology or belief. The idea being that Trump and others like him contribute to the toxic climate on Twitter.
My understanding is that a decade ago everyone in the US loved Trump. He had a number one TV show and was featured in ‘songs’ by countless rappers, all of whom envied or respected his wealth and ‘style’. Hosts like Oprah repeatedly implored him to stand for office. It was only because he stood for the Reps and not the Dems that the media, as one, viciously turned on him. Of course, I don’t deny that his inability to express himself, or to act, in a ‘statesmanlike’ manner did not contribute to this.
On the other hand, I would prefer a Trump who gets things done and does not start war, to a ‘statesman’ like Obama who achieved next to nothing while being responsible for Libya, Yemen and, according to leftists like Jimmy Dore, various other conflicts.
Your understanding is wrong.
in NYC Trump was always seen for what he was; a clown and an incompetent Real Estate “developer”. It was the rubes in the sticks that thought he was a genius developer and bought his crap for gold. The same ones that enrolled in his Trump University and conned people (working class) out of their money. Since you case so much about working class people!!!
Obama saved the car industry (millions of blue collar workers that you care so much) and gave the country the first (almost) universal healthcare – the one that Trump was supposed to repeal and replace on day 1 with a better and cheaper system. Still waiting for it – fingers crossed he will deliver on his promise in the next 8 days.
I have seen numerous chat show appearances by Trump on YouTube. The audience seems to love him. Personally I have always considered Trump to be a vulgar real estate mogul who probably should have gone bankrupt years ago. However, I do, on the whole agree with his policies.
People also “love” Kim Kardashian.
Do you agree with his policy to slowly defund Obamacare and not replace it with anything?
To be fair, US talk show audiences seem to love absolutely everyone.
“To be fair”?
Whatever…
Bad spelers unight!!
If you’re basing your perceptions on the reactions of studio chat show audiences I don’t think you understand chat shows very well.
Youtube is deleting it all. He is going into the oubliette of cyberspace.
The one thing his enemies have never managed to do is construct a coherent argument against him. All they ever do is misrepresent him, traduce him, misreport him. After four years of inciting hatred against him and his supporters, they still haven’t managed to come up with a convincing denunciation based on truth.
Trump did A lot of good Lowering blue collar Taxes ,Bringing Troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan, Brokering Peace between Middle East & Israel, trying to calm kim Ill sung in north Korea etc..Yes he is crass, but he followed his manifesto, he is despised by mainstream,as he didnt take a President Salary..he will have the last Laugh….I seem to remember Nixon saying in 1972 ”/no truth in Watergate allegations” senile Joe has his karma to come with his No Delegate VP
He also made the country a net exporter of energy, a peace enterprise in itself. He set up opportunity zones with business lured back from abroad. He instituted criminal justice reforms which helped African Americans. He tried to hold back illegal immigration to give poor workers a chance to progress. He lowered corporation tax which created jobs. People at the bottom said they didn’t mind about tax cuts for business so long as hey benefited from them which they did. Employment rates for African Americans, Latinos, and Women were at an historic high before the pandemic. He built up defence again, an essential component of peace. He got the Germans to stump up for NATO. He appointed record numbers of judges, including 3 for the Supreme Court.
How did he manage all this when he was being persecuted full time by the Democrats and their agents in government?
Please explain how “People at the bottom” benefited from Trump’s tax cut in the upper band.
My goodness-I know that you cannot abide Trump, but putting forth Obama as an effective leader is too much-Health Care? once in America a person could simply go to the family physician, and pay for services without the government involved. Obamacare mandated enrollment in a wildly more expensive insurance scheme, or you paid (as I was forced to do) a fine. Everything in health care became more complicated and expensive. Oh, and yes, he saved the auto worker unions.
“
And Obamacare destroyed that?
USA spends c.17% of GDP in healthcare – Germany spends c.11% and gets better results.
Surely if it as bad as you say why didn’t Republicans and Trump “repeal and replace”?
And he let the Russians into the Mediterranean and paid the Iranians to terrorise their neighbours.
NO ONE talks about how the Obama admin. taped the personal phone of Angela Merkel. It even got silenced in German media after a few days, but not before my attorney there had to calm himself down before getting back into professional mode with me, an American there. His DOJ and allied institutions were a piece of work.
Hillary lost for calling half the US population deplorable. Untrue and completely tone deaf. She suffered from isolation in the elite bubble. The same bubble that emits self serving nonsense about correcting income inequality and global warming from its private jets, limos and multiple mansions. Unlike Charlie Brown who kept being fooled by Lucy’s pulling the football away – those ‘clinging to guns and religion’ won’t be fooled again.
I honestly hope they do not get fooled again. But let’s not ignore the fact that the rest of the country outvoted them 2x in presidential elections. Only the electoral college keeps them competitive – and that is fine.
California and New York have teaming barrels of fish to shoot/educate to their agenda in their public schools.
The elite coast, flyover country divide will remain. Republicans challenge is suburban soccer moms; educated, high middle income women who were, for valid reasons, disgusted by Trump. They voted out the person, not the policy. Fundamentally they lean right center.
Choate and Harvard educated Black elites want their cut of the pie. Hillary spent her time campaigning at dinners with Beyoncé and Katy Perry rather than with the people. And I still want to know why Haiti got devastated in the hurricanes a few years back when the Clinton Haiti funds were sloshing in cash. Dem. Or Rep., they have their hands in the cookie jars. I hear the same thing from left and right intellectuals, that the press is stifling their side. Varoufakis, for one. But that is because Big Business works for their own interests, and will work with any pay to play politician. This is prob. my last post!
What car industry? It’s been decimated (except Tesla)
I was the other way around. I disliked him when he was a reality-TV star, but was pleasantly surprised by his presidency. Say all you want about Donald Trump, he did expose the swamp.
Jeremy, the parroting of primitive debunked leftist propaganda memes depicting your fellow Americans and political rivals as all gullible rubes sucked in by an incompetent con man and leftist reflexive modeling of hate and derision towards them and all your targets with Twitter being the medium for this has had its direct corrosive effect on the divisions and anger we now see.
Most Americans voted against Trump in 2016, 2018 and 2020.
Yes, but that doesn’t mean they were wise in doing so. Nor does it tell us what the results would have been with less biased media and university cultures.
The unproven and assumed variation of the leftist meme that those who are not for us are against us.
Good grammar enables comprehension..
Peter, you appear to comprehend it enough to recognize a dissenting post that activates your leftist Pavlovian programmed response to muzzle .
Obama Care, as it was conceived by his administration, was/is a flop. Even Bill Clinton admitted that it was poorly executed and needs reform…
Also wonder why Ford refused to take any money from the Obama government and is doing very well, because it can act more flexible without bending its knee to the unions. The unions were the problem in the first place, why the US car industry did so badly .
Trump brought reconciliation between Israel and much of the Middle East. Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize as encouragement to do that but soon lost interest and did nothing.
Fraser, how could you leave Ukraine out of the list of countries that Obama wrecked? EU representatives had just finished brokering an agreement for early presidential elections in Ukraine that would almost certainly have seen the incumbent president Viktor Yanukovych removed from office, but Obama saw an opportunity to ensure a NATO-friendly government take power immediately and disgraced himself by endorsing the unconstitutional removal of Yanukovych from power and his replacement by an interim president who was pro-NATO. The Russian takeover of the Crimea and the horrors of the continuing civil war in Donbas might never have happened without the Obama-Biden regime. The ultimate obscenity of the 2020 presidential election is it brought to power an odious man whose family profited immensely from the misery inflicted on the Ukrainians. Joe Biden turned his son Hunter into a Ukrainian oligarch.
When we heard the stolen telephone call to Georgia it was noticeable that Trump was calm and polite, if rambling. He was being sorely provoked by obfuscation and hostility yet there was no foul language or temper such as you might frequently find in a politician behind the scenes.
Because if we don’t give every subhuman lunatic a platform to stir up hordes of mouth-breathing savages, we might as well be Communist Russia?
I frequently disagree with Ed West, but he’s an actual conservative rather than a Trumpist, which means that he believes in freedom under responsibility – and that if you show yourself incapable of responsibility, that you no longer deserve freedom. If you honestly think that we must never touch a hair on anyone’s head no matter what they do because otherwise we’re BULLIES, then congratulations, you’re a living liberal strawman.
Because we all agree on who exactly is a mouth breathing savage?
And yes I believe that we don’t touch a hair on someone’s head because someone else did something we don’t like. That’s the hallmark of an uncivilized society. Odd that you disagree.
Daniel, your typical leftist intolerant political bigotry and hate mongering is showing…and affects your credibility.
The evil.populist meme you parrot to demonise and degrade your targets merely reveals your own intolerance and dysfunctional toxic groupthink mindset .
On the other hand; you sound like a brainwashed, overflowing -at-the-mouth member of a weird and nasty cult.
Try punctuation.
Love it!
Woke cancel cult fanatic Peter, try truth…and provide some evidence ( if you can) of your public slanderous defamatory insult accusations .If you can not provide evidence,would it be fair to assume there is none , because it’s not true, and you are fabricating falsehoods to suppress and violate the human right of peoples free speech?
( Watch for woke troll Peter’s response, evasion…or disappearance when asked for evidence. )
Don, your rhetoric is so artificial, it just makes me laugh!
Did you swallow a dictionary?
But I suppose you are doing me a favour, by cheering me up during the restrictions imposed upon us – throughout this Covid-contagion crisis!
You obviously know nothing about psychology – and the projection of your own shortcomings onto others!
And, for your information, Daniel Bjorkman is perfectly entitled to hold a differing view to your own, without being pilloried for it!
You might try making more constructive posts, perhaps with good alternative ideas – or is that asking too much of your psyche?
As now recognized throughout the all the free democracies of the west , the left woke censor trolls reflexively model hate and disdain with truthless juvenile level insults ( ie “subhuman”, contrived laugh mocking, etc,), and false fabricated subjective profoundly hypocritical slanderous accusations with out evidence, to “pillory” ,discredit ,intimidate , and silence dissenting opinions.
Your accusation of pillorying is a truthless depiction of dissent, and while you pose as someone who champions the right of Bjorkman to his opinion, your faction is systemically violating that right in all the free democracies..woke left censor trolls are also doing it here and everywhere on the internet.
As now seen everywhere, the left progressives are verifiably guilty of everything they falsely accuse.
I remember parts of the Cold War. If you called for insurrection then, or led an insurrectionary mob, or demanded communism, or marched with the communist party, or the socialist workers trotskyite party, nothing untoward happened: instead of being arrested you could get a well paying job as a journalist or academic.
This was the selling point of the West, we had freedom, which if it means anything means the freedom of speech. Of course actual incitement to violence was illegal, but Trump didn’t do that here.
I think the problem is more of who decides to delete somebody’s accounts? Some lefty Twitter, Facebook or Google mogul?
It’s entirely possible that it’s paradoxical. Politics often is.
Or it simply doesn’t make sense which is the case far more often.
The implication is that while the US’s initial success as a society was predicated on the inability of any individual sect to dominate, Trump and his ilk,aided and abetted by social media, have created an environment where in effect only two sects remain- right and left battling it out for dominance.
A very odd implication if you know anything about US history, wouldn’t you say?
Sorry I don’t quite grasp your meaning. I am certainly not knowledgeable about American history. If say, there has always been a schism based on religious observance (such as exists to this day in Scotland and Ireland between Catholic and Protestant) then that would certainly detract from the author’s argument. I was not aware that such a marked divide between two distinct groups in the US had previously existed and so accepted the author’s implication that the present state of affairs under Trump is unprecedented.
It would be very hard to name country more diverse and divided than the US. And it’s far less homogenous than say Ireland or Scotland. Surely religious tension has existed in the US as elsewhere with anti-Catholicism prominent at some points. Today there are tensions between Islam and other religions although not to the extent you see in Europe. A significant proportion of the left is anti-Semitic even today. But it isn’t only religion that makes American culturally different from one another. And on the matter of religion, I’d say the US has done better than most getting various religions to live together peacefully.
You might recall that at one point our ancestors fought a civil war. The author is doing what a lot of people tend to do with Trump- this is the first time ever for anything. You’ll even hear such jarring idiocies such as “It’s the first time any losing presidential candidate refused to accept the results” – well except for the losing candidate in 2016. It’s just historical amnesia.
The first time US citizens have stormed and vandalised their Capitol ? Perhaps as an outsider I lack awareness and that ( horrifying) event was not a ‘first time’ occurrence. Has it ever happened before? The first time a departing president has accepted defeat so ungraciously and with such little regard for common courtesy? Not idiocies but certainly jarring. I will leave you with the thought that I who have been happily mesmerised by your popular culture through the medium of cinema and tv; read and enjoyed your literature, and your music in its many forms; appreciated the kindness, good manners and decency of those of your citizens that I have met down the years; and been a little overawed by such a mighty power as the US represents, now regard your country with the sort of pity tinged with sadness and contempt that one feels when discovering that one has been conned and betrayed by a very dear friend
We are so very sorry to have disappointed you with our jarring ways. Perhaps trading a US popular culture fixation for a better historical understanding of the US would not go amiss? Certainly there is room for both at the very least and lack of awareness is rarely a good justification for contempt.
There’s been plenty written about our history all the way from the Revolution through the civil war to the unrest of the 1960s, the tumult of two world wars, etc. through it all, Americans have remained gloriously divided in so many ways that our success as a country must seem baffling. At times it baffles me. It’s been said that the US is an experiment in democracy. I find that to be true in that accepting a diverse group of people with all their foibles is probably better accomplished in the US than anywhere else.
I’d say that we will try to do better to alleviate your sadness and contempt. But we likely won’t.
I spoke from the heart you replied with bile. Sums up the state of affairs nicely
Although there was no bile, I surely missed the heartfelt nature of your comments about the contempt you feel for the US. Perhaps I’m just not used to contempt as a tool in formulating such heartfelt sentiments. It must be very helpful in personal and romantic relationships. Come whisper sweet contempt in my ear, Fiona.
And I meant no disrespect in suggesting that historical education could fill in the gaps in your knowledge that movies and music have failed to supply. Americans tend to over-estimate how much others know about our history. In fact, Americans tend to over-estimate how much Americans know about their own history. In any case, I did take your admission of lack of knowledge as an invitation to suggest ways to remedy that state. If I was mistaken in assuming your admission meant that you wanted it remedied, my deepest apologies.
That’s told her! Nothing.
Then it matches her comment.
First time good reason exists about vote harvesting taking the Presidency, and the MSM and Liberal infested ‘Justice’ system refuse to investigate.
Also, having been thrown out without being heard, all the way up to the Supreme Court, the cases were finally going to be heard in a different forum, the first and last chance to hear some of the evidence. Congress was to devote two hours to each one of the disputed States. As the first one was just about to be debated, Arizona, Nancy Pelosi came off the telephone and in came Antifa.
Now who do you think would have wanted that evidence heard, for two hours for each state, in front of the whole world? And who do you think would stop at nothing to make sure it was not heard?
Good question, Fiona. I found this reference… http://www.washingtonpost.com/hist... Looks like 1915, 1954, 1971, 1983 all saw bombings or shootings/attacks within the US Capital buildings.
Ireland is doing its best to change the face of Ireland. It is going to be so boring when every country loses its identity.
I adore Ireland. Beautiful country, had a wonderful month there a few years ago.
The exaggerated demonization political narrative propaganda of the marxist left progressives who wildly truthlessly inflate and fabricate the singled out acts of their targets and scapegoats , every one from Trump ,conservatives, men, the free democracies of western civilisation, etc as ” unprecedented ” , to systemically persecute them , by a dogma driven faction globally in tyrannical control of public communication/ infosphere, is actually unprecedented.
The USA is not two sects battling it out – not at all. It is a divided society into tribes. The immigration policy from JFK onward has been to bring in huge numbers of people with a different culture from the Anglos and European one, to make many divisions, and to make wide differences between them in income and education to become client sub groups under the Democrat party.
These groups actually are who pick the President of USA! Divide and conquer, that is the Democrats, and they have taken the long view, and won. Much like the Frankfurt School has by making the self and nation and culture loathing Liberals.
The left progressive censor cancel cult systemically suppresing, cancelling and persecuting any and all.non compliant voices in every free democracy in western civilisation is aiming to be the one and only ruling sect.
It started long before Trump’s election as POTUS. His election was the effect, not the cause of the division. At most, he exacerbated the divisions – but I have my doubts about even that.
Being anti-Trump is de rigeur for our intelligentsia.
In 1999 our desk got a call from a broker. He wanted to do a deal for Trump.
My boss (half a degenerate) said: “I want nothing to do with that charlatan.”
The charlatan being the broker, or Trump?
I find Trump abhorrent in so many ways, however G.W, Clinton, and many others are strong competition. Obama liked bombing people, what about Kissinger, Albright, Hillary? And will Biden now follow suit?
One needs to realise that about ½ of voters voted for Trump, in 2020 as well. The intelligentsia ought to ask themselves “why”.
Biden really is too close to China, but no one really cares, do they? It is all careerism and one’s own share of the pie.
Annette, the two statements seem perfectly aligned to me, and you are trying to pull them out of context to make them appear contradictory. Please follow the rationale: The founding ideals supported diversity of beliefs on the condition of civility. Wilson’s logic dictates that Trump should have been banned long ago because he clearly fails the condition (i.e. he declined to communicate as a civilized adult). There is no contradiction in the Author’s arguments.
Of course they are contradictory. If you can read English. Where are you getting the civility aspect of the Founding Fathers ideals? There’s no civility clause. Diversity of belief is protected by law, not by civility. The FF would not have thought they could legislate civility. Nor would the FF have even agreed on what constitutes civility just like we wouldn’t today.
Bravo, Annette!
Don’t like your tone. I can read English as much as you can, and also understand the concept of gracious debate. Will leave the field for you to enjoy with your peers, at the level of civility that you have chosen.
No intent to offend but you really should brush up on the Founding Fathers if you are going to discuss them. And you should be able to point to the civility clause in the FF ideals if you believe it to be there. No one had a better understanding of the foibles of humans than they did and no one would have been less likely to attempt to legislate civility. Inserting your political preferences on the Founding Fathers isn’t likely to work.
If you&any neighbour can’t decipher what civility is,how can you even live?
What has that to do with the law? Or the Founding Fathers for that matter? Civility is subjective, of course.
I cannot access my Parler account this morning, through Google, Safari or Duck Duck Go.
Well done Big Tech, tolerant, inclusive, liberal. I can’t read the thoughts of all those tyrants like Kathy Gyngell and Laura Perrins, now. I’ve got nowhere to put the pictures of my Christmas hyacinths, nowhere to link my poems, or my violin videos.
It’s always good to assume your opponents are knuckle dragging morons, always good to make sure there can be no decent conversation between ordinary people. Let’s keep everything brutal and severe.
Start your own Operating System
is that sort of starting your own bakery to make whatever cakes are demanded? And can I count on govt actors to help my operating system, perhaps collude with me in making sure that certain people are cut out.
Not gay cakes , of course.
Yes, certainly…and after the political purity test is applied to not only twitter, parler, reddit facebook, et al, we can move on to grocers and gas stations-they are private businesses, and have no obligation to sell to you should you not be approved-“start your own business”. Perhaps we could mandate that a special emblem be sewn onto your clothing indicating your unapproved status…
Oh, don’t worry; those purity tests are likely in the works. As it is, numerous people on the left are cobbling enemies lists so that the great purge can unfold. It’s not just trying to prevent anyone who worked for the administration from being hired, it’s attempting to do that to conservatives period.
Sort of McCarthyism, then?
They’re already there. Yelp has a button for customers to report racist businesses.
So there really isn’t anywhere on the internet you can share your hyacinth snaps and violin videos except on a right-wing extremist site? Maybe you could ask other people how they manage to cope.
How long have you been in favor of businesses colluding with govt to silence people?
I’m all in favour of silencing Nazis, and would encourage businesses and governments to collude as much as they like to achieve that noble aim.
When you are colluding with govt to silence anyone, YOU are the nazi. It’s straight out of the text book.
Nazis presumably being anyone not on board with your ‘woke’ groupthink? That’s how it starts, you know.
No, Nazis being Nazis. Parler is actually a right-wing extremist gathering place. The Nazis there are quite frank and proud about their embrace of Nazism, and the Parler admin are happy to have them aboard.
Apparently Parler also also has non-Nazi right wingers and people posting flower snaps, but if they choose to post in a Nazi gathering place, that’s their tough luck when the site is pulled. There really are plenty of non-Nazi sites on the internet they could use.
No, Nazis being right-wing extremists. Although the Unherd moderator apparently thinks I’m lying, Parler is actually a site popular with right-wing extremists, and the Parler admin are happy to have them aboard.
Apparently there are also some less extreme right-wingers and people posting flower snaps, but if they choose to post on a site that features a load of right-wing extremism, that’s their tough luck if the site is pulled.
There really are plenty of non-extremist sites they could frequent instead.
Always interesting how anti-facists closely resemble fascists.
Antifa were a Marxist Fascist group in 1930s Germany who had a different horror in mind for the European people but the Nazis stood in their way, both groups having similar tactics, so they called themselves antifa because they opposed the party of ‘Fascists’ taking over, not the brutality, just that antifa want to be the brutal ones taking over. They are mirror images of the Nazi Fascists.
As with the pigs and humans in Animal Farm.
But Banned User, I feel your ilk are the actual Nazis, so how can we proceed?
You are the Nazi nut Globalist village idiot…
You’re aware that the collusion of business and government is the textbook definition of Nazism? No, probably not. You’ll have been to university.
“I cannot access my Parler account this morning”
Ha, I can’t access my Unherd account 🙂
Whatever I post is now trashed by the moderator.
I’m not complaining though, they’re perfectly free to reject left-wing contributions in the interests of maintaining this place as a right wing ghetto.
When I was a boy you could spot the right-wing extremists – they wore black jack-boots, shaved their heads and sported N a z i memorabilia. Now it’s everyone who isn’t on board with academic critical theory dogma.
I had a Facebook account until the first of January 2016. I knew I would not be able to stand the endless bickering about the EU from old school ‘friends’ (in fact other females, who bullied or ignored me half the time at school, but whom I had convinced myself were alright now they were grown up) who knew nothing about politics, but liked to be fashionable in all their opinions who would suddenly become the EU’s biggest fans over night. Also I had a great many of the Spiked crowd as ‘friends’ because I agree with them about many things, and my sister knows many of them personally through the Battle of Ideas and running the Birmingham Salon. But some of them are really extremely loony about ignoring FGM in order to promote social cohesion and abortion to full term and certain other issues I find religiously abhorrent and really do not want to debate. Though Kevin Yuill was always excellent on the sanctity of life after birth.
I had a Twitter account for a short time between the start of the lockdown and the end of June this year. I was even more shocked by the behaviour of conservatives who seemed to be on my side about many things, but loved lock down and blocked me for calling out Cummings as a hypocrite. Then there was Peter Hitchens whom I admire and respect, but was very obviously fanatical and slightly deranged on Twitter, keeping up the same arguments day in, day out, engaging with nutters, all day long who loved to provoke him. I don’t like to pathologize but it drove me mad and I could see it was driving others mad, too.
I still use Youtube at the moment but one really does meet the most vile people there, if you follow interesting conservative thinkers on the one hand you get comments from severe anti Semites, and if you post content from conservative thinkers you get left wing anti Semitism and wild accusations of pederasty against our most famous conservative, British philosopher.
Parler was not a right wing organisation, its creators and directors simply believed in upholding America’s FIRST Amendment. They do not believe that people against whom there is no suspicion should have their thoughts and ideas subject to surveillance, but they worked with law enforcement to remove content which was criminal. On this basis they did not use AI as surveillance against their users, but monitored content personally where a genuine suspicion had been raised. They now no longer have the opportunity to work with law enforcement to do this, because the company itself cannot access its own site.
Since Google, has been the major purveyor of child and other forms of extreme and abusive pornography, terrorism and the promoter of suicide sites for adolescents around the world, since Twitter still carries accounts of they Ayatollah of Iran and the leaders of Communist China, since Facebook has groups for Hezbollah and various other extremist terrorist organisations, I am proud to have decided to try, like many other Parler users, to remove them from my life in 2020/21.
Well, there are the ubiquitous left-wing extremest sites like Instagram, YouTube, twitter, and Facebook, but I feel it is a pity if only they are allowed space on the internet.
Who oversees the gatekeepers?
The problem is that the gatekeepers increasingly and disproportionately influence those in a unique position to oversee them and that, surely, is no accident.
It’s apparently been absolutely fine for these self styled platforms for social good wielding huge power and led by pretty much unaccountable oligarchs to host all manner of truly unpleasant, socially toxic, often illegal content on their pages for years largely unbothered by conscience, let alone regulation or any meaningful censure on the spurious grounds that the sheer volume of content precludes any chance of successful intervention, but as soon as the opportunity is ripe to purge those that deviate from their carefully propagated ‘do no evil’ artifice very little time is being wasted.
Perhaps something like a Supreme Court structure could be set up, with members made up from opposite viewpoints to take a view on what is or is not permissible. The fine detail obviously eludes me at the moment but perhaps folks with experience of international mediation could work up global and national responses? Getting the balance right between free speech and censorship is always going to be hard and contentious, but better to try and sometimes fail than fail to try…
What you propose is a Liberal/Left CPVPV, the KSA police Committee for ‘promotion of virtue and prevention of vice’.
I think I saw a picture of them in today’s Daily Mail, marching in black clad, milityesk phalanx with shields, helmets, and black balaclavas. Antifa they were called in the caption.
Oh no it isn’t! Your view appears to be firmly entrenched in a ‘left/right’ universe, and I feel sorry for you. The world from my perspective is not black and white but multiple shades of gray, and the best we can hope for is to have ideals but accept that they have to be modified in the light of reality. If you read both the ‘left’ and ‘right’ media you will see different facets of the same incidents; it’s then down to you/us to interpret the reality, reading between the lines (literally and figuratively) to understand the basis for the views and deduce your own views accordingly. I commend wider reading to you if you do not already partake. Regards
I DONT approve of Politicization of Police,Judiciary,BBC or Supreme court ALL accelerated under UK PM’s Blair,Brown,Cameron,May..
Well put.
Todays ”Anti-fascists” WILL be tomorrows Fascists = george Orwell after his spanish civil War duties..
Aren’t Antifas already Fascists? Seems to me they are.
Let’s be realistic. The reason Trump was not delisted earlier was because Twitter was afraid that he would instigate an antitrust investigation in revenge.
Now their pals are coming to power they can silence him.
Nah, the reason Trump was not delisted earlier was because Twitter were making a shedload of profit from his constant stream of attention-seeking dross and his many millions of followers. Eventually they had to give him the boot or be accused of helping to facilitate a fascist coup.
Please show where his words called for a coup or whatever other word you’ve told to say.
The ‘Fascist Coup’ has been perpetrated by the Democrat Party and ‘Peking Biden’ who have stolen the election in spectacular fashion. There will never be another free and fair election in the USA again, just as there wasn’t in Germany in the 30s.
A private company colluding with govt actors to silence opposition. Twitter has no desire to live in a democracy and worse, a lot of Americans appear to agree with that.
Much of the trouble stems from the MSM left wing view point being pushed all the time – like here.
No mention of the democrats supporting rioting in Portland etc., in your article.
No mention of some states changing the rules for postal voting, by going to the judges, but not going through legislation.
No mention of the police man, who stood by in Bristol, whilst a mob tore down a statue and yet gets a New Years honour!
No mention that the Chinese virus, cannot be called Chinese, but the new variety found in England can be called the Kent or English one.
No mention that the US has vaccinated more people than the EU – where is the mention that the EU has fallen apart.
No mention of the banning of talk radio.
Yet it is all the fault of a man, who is leaving his job in a few days!
The only miracle, so far, is that the right have not taken matters into their own hands in the same way that the left does.
How about no mention that pigs don’t fly
No need Jeremy, all sane people know that.
All I am saying is that the MSM has a left wing bias.
Of course it does! Nothing new there.
But the conservatives in USA do have Fox news, WSJ, (dominate) talk radio and plenty of website. As far as we can tell Trump voters that watch Fox News and listen to talk radio do not read NY Times.
But MSM left wing biased is not responsible for Trump’s long track record of craziness. When the leftist (be sane or crazy) point out Trump’s conspiracies, incitement of violence, they are NOT making stuff up. They are pointing out the obvious truth.
I don’t think he should have been banned (or Parler for that matter) but here we are.
How about the new accord between Israel and the countries in the middle east, brokered by Trump? Not really news is it?
Or the attempt by the democrats to besmirch Trump for Russian connections?
Or the silence by the MSM on Biden’s son?
Or the silence on Biden’s incipient senile dementia, on show when he introduced his granddaughter as his dead son?
The MSM is certainly responsible for these omissions and I believe that one sided reporting is a grave danger to our society.
People in Alabama that voted Trump don’t care at all about Israel/UAE relationships. You know about the “peace” in the ME because it is ALL OVER THE MSM.
From the mouth of Trump “Russia if you are listening…”
Biden dossier was first given (based on NY Times) to WSJ from Rudy and Bannon. WSJ couldn’t verity the source so it refused to publish it. Only after that did Bannon/Rudy go to NY Post.
And WSJ 2x supported Trump for President.
The NY Post journalist – Bruce Golding – that wrote the article refused to put his name because of credibility concerns.
You’re complaining here not about the suppression of facts, but the meaning and significance given to the facts that are reported. That’s a matter of opinion and preference. You’re essentially complaining that some media outlets don’t support your worldview.
For instance, the media did report the accords signed recently in the Middle East. Some may not have agreed with the vierw that they were momentous in securing peace in the region, or very important in the scheme of things. That is a matter of debate.
How about the new accord between Israel and the countries in the middle east, brokered by Trump? Not really news is it?
Not really. Corporations make deals. Makes very little practical difference to most poor in the Middle East. I don’t think Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians, Iraqis or Yemenis have looked to Israel, UAE or USA for meaningful help for a long time.
It seems to be a compulsory feature of journalism that one must make a point of telling everyone how much they despise that awful Donald Trump fellow before pretty much explaining why they agree with everything he stands for. As here.
Ed, allow me to direct you to a pithy but Earth shattering piece of gutter poetry from history’s second greatest monster, Dinesh D’sousa (as advertized on Twitter, Facebook and all good wokeist outposts) “Trump didn’t create the problem, the problem created Trump” Once you have got this through your head, a lot of things make a lot of sense, but in a cold and terrifying way. Like when Bruce Willis pieces it all together in The Sixth Sense
Trump is a crass, coarse, loud-mouthed, hectoring vulgarian. And he’s still the good guy. That’s shocking, because what does it say about everything you thought you knew about the American republic in particular and the west in general? The somewhat schizophrenic nature of this piece indicates to me that you’re sensing this, but for (I assume) the same reasons I was so resistant at first, you’re reluctant to go the whole hog and embrace the paradox. It’s an appalling vista, isn’t it?
He conned poor people out of their money with his Trump University. Need I say more?
Yes, he did. And he’s still morally superior to Biden, Harris, every journalist in mainstream media, the entire Democratic Party (although admittedly, that’s not a high bar to clear) and most of the Republicans. Do you start to see the problem? Are you getting my point, now?
Yes I get you point. You are nuts or completely lack perspective.
An eloquent, persuasive (and somewhat revealing) rejoinder. I’m glad we’re having this guy time, but if we do it again, maybe you can bring some arguments? I’ll bring the beer.
Your comments are full of facts (alternative facts?)!
I so wish I had said that.
He’s making a lot of sense. The DC establishment, my preferred term, has unhinged itself form moral governing. They serve themselves and their financial supporters. They pay billions to campaign consultants and managers that keep them in office until once out, they get their consulting gig, elite university professorship see Biden at Penn), speaking fees (Clinton’s everywhere), book contracts and/or Netflix deals (Obama’s). They move to Martha’s vineyard to lament with their privileged mates global warming and income inequality. Step back and look where the worst environments and income inequality exist – the liberal governed urban centers. The policies they tout produce the mis-education, crime and poverty they claim to correct.
All true – but what is new?
What working class American (the true people) will oppose his son/daughter going to Harvard?
Those people – as you say – keep getting elected. In case of congress every 2 years. I don’t see why the rubes in the stick are true Americans but the failed writer that works as barista in a hip LA bar is a fake American.
I’m sorry – I don’t see anything in Trump’s past or in his term of office as President that suggests he’s morally superior to anyone. And I do see plenty to suggest the opposite. And to your point about bringing some arguments, I’d happy engage in a debate with you if you cite some examples and instances of Trump’s moral superiority.
None of which should suggest that I’m pro-Biden, Harris or any of Trump’s opponents. It’s simply my view of the moral standing of Donald Trump.
No new wars, thousands of troops brought home. Discuss.
True. So how did Hillary manage to be an even worse choice?
– Didn’t start any wars that killed masses of innocents
– Implemented a practical solution to the Israel problem which might actually bring peace
– Rapid economic growth, especially among blacks
– Combined with prison reform law
which would benefit blacks (the opposite of Biden / Commala btw)
– Tried to curb the awful, destructive CRT philosophy
– Aimed (albeit failed) to cut down illegal immigration, which (excluding Hispanics) majority of Americans want
– Cut back in business red tape
– He bombed syria and abandoned the Kurds.
– No it will not. He simply rolled over for Israel.
– economic growth (we can measure it) was as fast as Obama and he blew the budget with his tax cut.
-true
-true
-failed
-assaulted pretty much every single rule about environmental protection
-failed to Repeal and Replace Obamacare
– failed to publish his taxes
– failed to balance the budget
-failed to curb the trade deficit
-spread endless conspiracy theories
You’re flogging a dead horse mate. Trump is what you say he is, and that’s not a politician but a Queen’s businessman – I know, I’ve met lots of them very much like him. But what people like Ed never seem to ask themselves is why so many people voted for him in 2016 and again in 2020. They leap over themselves to say ‘oh people were lied to’ etc, etc, etc, just like they try to explain away Brexit. What they don’t seem to grasp is that people voted for him and for Brexit because they are p*ssed off with the way things have been done for 30 years. Ed can sniff his smelling salts and clutch his pearls all he wants, but he is part of the problem.
That’s really it. The pearl clutching has never allowed for the simple question of, how did someone like Trump become possible? Some of it that these people live in a bubble that is populated by professional politicians who have been responsible for everything that has gone wrong with govt. But in their world view, somehow the outsider is the issue. No, the outsider is a symptom of the larger problem.
I had this conversation with a ‘liberal’ American friend in a square in Athens in October. The pearls were clutched and the venom spat, but when he said ‘who created Trump’ and I replied ‘YOU DID’ I thought he was about to have a stroke. Globalisation has made him a fortune, but he couldn’t understand that an unemployed coal miner in West Virginia might not have made a bean and might be p*ssed at what had become a life of grinding poverty. Voting for Trump was small beer, but if they now see that their votes count as naught and, following the example of Antifa and BLM, that violence pays, the pearls might be clutched even tighter. There will be no self reflection of that you can be sure.
It’s quite odd that in a society that purports tolerance and liberty desperately wants to remove any public disagreement with their faction. Of course many in the public are clueless about the political debate avoiding much of the story. But those who use social media for opinion among their group are worried that their public square is controlled by private companies who have no public responsibility for fairness. The private companies product, eyeballs for adverts, is dependent on people using their platform. Perhaps they have become so large that they fear no competition and better yet, can actively eliminate competition. Eventually rules will be needed to regulate the marketplace but the public must demand those rules.
It is a well written article with which I disagree, almost thoroughly. Namely, the argument hinges on a premise that you can compare a sociology of a city crime and a solution to it to the area free speech, and get away with it. That is to say, that Trump is a epitome of a drug pusher, only in the area of bad thoughts, so if he was to be purged from the beginning all the current conflicts in society would somewhat vanish. One can easily forget weaponizing of the post-truth as a newfound concept just 5 years ago, somewhat, applicable only in case a statement conflicting with facts comes from an “ideology-compromised” person (famous our facts can be different from yours). Now compare the famous fuss about a post-truth made in the passing by Gingrich about the number of people attending the Trump’s inauguration speech compared to Obama’s with the “fiery but mostly peaceful protest” with burning property in the background. If you believe that these two post-truths belong to the same category think again. Condoning to the violence as it happens may not be easily offset with a false statement made in the passing on the number of attendees to the inauguration speech. That said, the biggest post-truth of our times is that Trump was a problem. Having that in mind I do not think that free speech should have been sacrificed to such a post-truth in any times and on any media. Why? Because Trump is not a drug-pusher.
I think you’re confusing argument with whether analogies or metaphors work in the article. It’s an opinion piece in that respect not an objective study.
Analogies were made by author to support the argument. Hence, I argue with what appears the strongest point supporting the author’s reasoning.
Ban twitter. I’ve never seen any merit to the site.
Just don’t use it-it has metastasized into a leftist echo chamber, hence the migration to other platforms.
Hence Parler – and thus it must be banned. Can’t have debate, too risky.
Parler is gone. Gab is probably next. It’s so predatorial, but with a ‘tolerant’ SJW face.
Thought provoking. If, however, twitter is public enemy #1, other media are thoroughly complicit. Most of us would never hear of Trump’s tweets if TV, radio, facebook, newspapers, etc. were not so eager to capitalize by piling on the garbage. “Trump tweeted…” has created more headlines than World War II.
The one factor you omit that drives Twitter not to rein in abusive or dangerous comments is advertising dollars, directly proportional to clicks and follower count. Their stock has soared in 2020 and they’ve taken the view now that revenue from Trump directly will be more than covered by his supporters worldwide continuing the discussion. Always follow the money.
Yes, and Parler is now competition-cutting into their profits. These monopolies are attempting to crush competing business models-now that they are becoming a threat-through moral posturing and outrage signaling.
Maybe the question is wrong? Should it be more like ‘can democracy exist in a world of Twitter’? Where social media sites can censor the posts of people or ideas it does not like, then what of free speach and democracy? There has to be a right to offend and to challenge. Free speach is a lot more than the ability to parrot required narratives. Of course the obligation of free speach is responsibility, not to abuse that freedom in order to incite, but if the social media providers are to police speach, then it must be balanced, fair and consistent.
As an aside – I wonder why when the left wishes to illustrate totalitarianism, it chooses Hitler – but never Stalin or Mao?
The social sites are doing the censoring with the full knowledge and approval of one of the major political parties. You’ve not heard a single Dem suggest that this is an assault on basic freedom. Not one. And you likely won’t.
I would say all the mainstream parties in all democracies at least tacitly permit the censoring or at least fail to address the bias and imbalance, probably for much the same reason they don’t address the clear and acknowledged bias of mainstream TV media. What puzzles me is if the media sites can censor political views they don’t like how do they legitimately claim to be unable to censor material that supports terrorism and various forms of sex abuse?
Ah, the Democratic Party returning to its Slave Master roots?
Twitter is a digital sewer. Facebook is just a different flavour of sewer. They all deserve to implode.
Nah get a JCB Back Hoe and spill the contents.
Sorry Ed, I’ve liked stuff you’ve written in the past but if you start by agreeing Donald Trump should not be allowed a voice and accepting the far left concept of “inciting hate”, a completely nebulous term intended to censor anything they don’t like, you’ve come down firmly on the side of “free speech is bad, we must protect people from it”.
There was nothing “nebulous” about the violent siege of the Capitol, in which five people died.
Including one shot by police.
Not casually, idly, on a whim, but in the midst of a terrifying onslaught with the nation’s elected representatives vulnerable inside.
Hmmm, I guess it’s okay then. Seems like shooting unarmed people might have been a bad thing prior to this. Was she the wrong race?
No it’s not, but that’s what happens when a foolish president incites an angry mob.
Sort of like that’s what happens when you resist arrest then?
Irrelevant tangent …
Dug that hole yourself.
On many points, truly spot on.
If The Media want to contribute to creating a responsible democracies, stop reinforcing the importance of Twitter reactions.
Reading the points being made here emphasises the problem. This is an ersatz community-we don’t know each other in any nuanced way and we’re not having a ‘conversation’ face to face where we are likely to be more polite and use body language and facial expression to pick up more subtle interaction. We primates still need to communicate in real groups and haven’t adapted to social media communication which is all of 20ish years’ old. One point: Twitter and Facebook are de facto admitting they are publishers. The pretence that they’re not is Emperor’s clothes.
You do a good job laying out the problem of social media and democratic discourse, but I don’t see any clarity regarding what you consider to be a solution. The fundamental problem, as you note, is the question of who gets to decide, and while you take a couple of sideways swipes at liberals, we can’t trust conservatives to take on this role, since if anything they are even more imbedded in the systems of privilege that have failed to provide equal opportunity and justice. So what do you suggest?
No one has yet come up with a better solution than Madison, who argued that the only possible solution was to allow the opposing sides to balance out each other in the marketplace of ideas. But without a capacity to develop rational, fact-based arguments and debate in a moderated forum, all we are left with is a very noisy marketplace where noise and novelty overwhelm discourse.
The only good thing about Twitter is that the walls of public toilets are cleaner than they used to be.
Censorship almost always leads to reaction, if not violent reaction, in a democracy, especially if there are large numbers of those voices who feel alienated and marginalised.
It is nothing less than astounding that any member of the intelligentsia would countenance the banning from Twitter, or any other social media platform, whole groups of people and organisations, let alone a President…. unless they want to be party to the likely ultimate incendiary unintended consequences.
Sure, liars and conspiracy theorists might be peeved, but look at what just happened. Trump, spewing lies, incited a mob to storm the Capitol and five people died.
Citation missing. Trump gave some excuses for people to be mad. It was clear from long before his speech that the Proud Boys and other a-holes would be creating trouble. Read his speech. Nothing incites to violence.
Can you post the exact words he used to incite violence please ?
Reading all these comment it is clear that the battle lines are as clearly drawn here as they are in any other milieu, showing a troubling divide in the USA which will not soon dissipate. If one looks objectively at the septua/octogenarians like Pelosi, Shummer, macConnell, etc. who rule the land and are ruled by corporate interests, it seems clear to me that what ails America is the intransigence of a fossilised political structure. No one is happy in the USA, not the people on the left or on the right. But people the world over want the same things: peace, shelter, nutrition of body and mind as basic fundaments to growth. You as a nation do not have these things and you seem to have a deep phycological inability to grant them to each other. The calcified minds and bodies of your leaders are your true representatives. Trump, the bomb that landed on this bedrock of fetid malignancy disturbed it but did not penetrate or dislodge it.
Too early to say if he did not penetrate or dislodge. The washout from the election has to happen first. Most know something happened, but what. Already the Data Miners are demonstrating fertile areas for research. A friend of mine from the US recently wrote to me saying that Trump had acheived more than most Presidents do in their first term. He then added but that will never be acknowledged by US based historians or commentators as the environment for doing so is too toxic. It will come from researchers beyond the borders. Will that toxicity last. If so, we have to see if the pent up anger shown on 6 Jan at the Capitol, can be sustained. What is obvious from this article and the illustrations with it, is its anti Trump Bias. That is despite the good points that it makes in places.
Trump gave as good as he got. His behaviour was no worse than what he had to put up with on a daily basis from every mainstream news outlets, even before he was elected. He drove leftists mad nbecause he was effective, and could use rhetoric even better than they could.
Nowhere is free speech an absolute value. Every country sets limits on what can be said in public. Legally, it is peculiar that social media are not treated in law as publishers. Instead they are treated as neutral platfroms. It means that people can get away with using untruth to incite criminality and defame others with impunity. Facebook, Twitter and whatnot should be treated as publishers, which would make them liable for content that incites criminality or defames someone.
Should a newspaper that publishes the opinion of a nutjob be legally liable?
Newspapers already are liable for content that incites criminality and defames people.
The now unfashionable Marxist theoretician, Nicos Poulantzas, foresaw a time when capitalism would fall out of love with its cod version of democracy. Trump’s GOP, like Johnson’s constitution-overriding, internatioal law-breaking Tory Party, are the most symptoms of the fact that, for a small number of extremely wealthy, extremely powerful, extremely well-connected people in the US and UK, oldfangled ‘bourgeios’ democracy has become an impediment to the further enrichment and empowerment of the 1% at the expense of the 99% also-rans. Of course, Twitter too is symptom but can hardly be held accountable for late capitalism continuing to write cheques it is no longer fit to honour.
I rather suspect that the majority of British voters support the threat to ‘break international law’. They understand that’s what sovereignty means. They’re prepared to face the consequences. Which are ‘I see your point’ in the normal course of international affairs. That’s what happened this time.
Another Remain idiot..It is EU breaking International law un 2625 on Sovereign States and threaten to blockade independent states…..Go and eat your ‘Percy pigs’ imported from Germany & rexported with higher EU tax…
Blaming Donald Trump is facile and lazy. And boring. For God’s sake, don’t be boring.
And what are going to blame him for? For not being a honey-tongued serpent?
Meanwhile, if folks think Twitter and other such fora are corrosive, then get off Twitter and leave these other such fora. Easy.
Take responsibility and stop preaching lazy nonsense to the rest of us. Go read a book.
Meanwhile, do we really think American cities in, say, 1912 were more accommodating than they are now? Sacco, Vanzetti or, say, William Jennings Bryan might disagree, but they’re not available for comment.
The article required delving into free speech. I kind of understood what Ed West was saying about Donald Trump, but the 2 tweets quoted for his removal off of Twitter seems like a stretch.
The gem of this article was the privilege of progressives on social media. Although, I would have called it the woke. Many conservatives have progressive viewpoints.
“And following a year in which China has successfully dealt with an external threat “
This is a very worrying rewriting of history, culminating in a fashionable admiration for the CCP’s form of control.
And what a strange idea the author has of aristocracy.
I agree with the concern that social media feeds and feeds upon negative emotions towards the perceived other tribe. But I do wonder whether the comments section of Unherd gets a free pass from the same criticism?
I cannot understand why anyone thinks that social media and search engine companies care about freedom of speech. Their income comes from advertising and that dictates their policies. If they break the discrimination or incitement to violence laws in a country then they should be prosecuted but if they decide to ban Trump, so what?
If the Guardian decides not to print an article by Peter Hitchens or The Telegraph one by Owen Jones, so what? .
Censorship is what governments do, private companies can do what the hell they like as long as it is within the law.
As i always point out if people stopped using their service they would go bust – and further their’s is no monopoly. They will be “ubered” or “amazoned” in their turn by the next offering. Granted they may get a lifeline from governents due to their role as leftist censors, same way Microsoft was needed to destroy the threat of open systems like Xenix and Unix. But even these crony lifelines are not for ever: Microsoft sale have generally risen but not as fast as device users have. Ergo the users are on other platforms, notably Mac, Android and like us at home, Lynux.
Why would governments favour leftist censors as most governments in the US and UK are of the opposite persuasion.
Depends how you measure left-v-right. They seek to regulate every minute detail of our lives – diet, issues of conscience, design of houses etc etc. Not even red china makes you have a licence to watch their TV, which like ours is mostly crappy state propaganda with the odd interesting bit thrown in.
I notice there is no mention, here, of any other examples of who else – beside Trump – “should have been banned years ago”. I find that curious and unfortunate.
I realise Trump is a hot topic right now, but I think an attempt to draw up even a short list of obvious candidates for “banning” might help clarify the writer’s thesis. It would also, I imagine, underscore the endemic, arrant hypocrisy of entities like Twitter.
Finally, a brief analysis of this hypocrisy into other areas of modern US life – perhaps in so-called legacy media – might also be informative.
Ah yes but Trump is evil incarnate, whereas those nice folk at Antifa and BLM only want to do a bit of murder and looting. Nothing to see, move along.
Had the Capitol been burnt to the ground last week, that would have been ok for CNN and our own dear, dear BBC – ‘a largely peaceful protest’. Wasn’t that the description of Portland or some such with the background of a building well ablaze. So what’s the difference ? Oh yes the wrong lot starting the blaze.
“If Twitter were a city it would be the sort of city where the
authorities allow people to defecate in public or shoot up outside a
school, and then express surprise when middle-class families wish to leave because of “the better quality of life” found in a four-hour
commute away exurb. Ah, so just like California and Portland then, and many other Democratic run cities?
Clearly the comments policy, here, seems to have taken on board the Broken Windows theory when deciding which comments not to publish.
The big challenge is who is to judge the judges?
Dangerous times.
The left has taken over so many institutions now that clearly they don’t think anyone is in a position to argue with them, let alone judge them. Disagreeing with them would be “hate” and “violence” and “terrorism”.
A good balanced article. Illustrating the dangers from the middle-class mob in Universities screaming at lecturers as well as people like Trump who does not curb his Twitter tongue.
The Founding Fathers of the great nation of America thought through the potential threats to freedom, democracy and the common good very, very carefully. A new need for wise objective thinkers to address modern expressions of opinion are needed now.
I absolutely agree and I feel now, as I have always felt, that the world would be a better place without social media https://www.telegraph.co.uk…. However, we have it, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. What we may need now is far more platforms so that the few we have now don’t have all the power.
I can’t help feeling that you missed the most obvious point about Twitter. Trump was simply the exemplar of this. Every political leader or aspirant uses Twitter to express opinions in one of two ways: to bypass old fashioned political processes and press briefings; or to test the water.
What you find in USA you find in most of the rest of the Anglosphere while it manages to stay in place under what is mostly a Marxist and in second instance Islamic attack seasoned with African and Latin American Nationalism.
The Anglosphere values are the ones under attack in all our nations, the values of the Crown and the ones which built parliaments and legal systems and freed them from religious limitations, the ones of hard work and discovery and applied knowledge which squashed the tyrannies of religion and of nepotism turning in to meritocracies to a great degree, much more than with any other ideology.
That is what is being attacked today with lies and by using events of the past and judging them out of context or by straight lying about everything. Today there are three tyrannies who are after us using the false narratives and taking events out of context: Marxism, Islam and African Nationalism all of which have built hell holes from which people are prepared to die in order to get out of them. We should fight them and ignore them.
We want to watch our freedom of speech and what we wish for. Because they are what our enemies use in a devious way to try and destroy all the places which the Anglosphere ideology has built in the world and to which people are ready to die with their children in order to get in to. We can improve on what we got but hey! Most of the world would kill for what we are undermining.
No Marxist, African Nationalist, Latin American Nationalist, Islamist can explain the border with Mexico, the water, the air, the land is just as fertile in the centre, the South and the North of America. So why does that border exist? If we let USA and Canada fall it won’t exist for all the wrong reasons!
It is true that the British had an Empire and that USA is the Renegade British Empire and that we populated all those lands people desire to go to. But ALL other doctrines tried to do the same and couldn’t, other Empires tried to match us but couldn’t. No other doctrine can match this what we achieved, no other Empire can match the British Empire sadly disunited but the Anglosphere still exists.
Those chanting death to the Empire are our enemies and if USA doesn’t put them down they will turn our world in to a hell hole as all African Nationalist and Marxist systems will always only deliver.
We must stand our ground and say we are here and we are going to stay. We need to be much more careful with immigration, it has gone too far, let us protect what no other ideology has achieved and we should repatriate if necessary, if people consider us to be “racist” then is anybody holding them back? Let us take them to a land of their dreams, take them to decolonized Zimbabwe, take them to Saudi, take them to Moscow or Beijing, take them to wherever their poison is being manufactured but let us protect what is good, what works like no other, we are being attacked by envy and by greed.
Save England and the United Kingdom, save the United States of America, save New Zealand, save Canada, save Australia! USA is not alone we are all suffering because we can’t see what is happening to us, we have been too good, now we must think of saving ourselves first in order to keep something unique and really good in the world.
The Anglosphere must concentrate on itself and the Anglosphere must unite and stand together or we will all be hung separately. No other ideology can be compared to ours and give this message to the young who are falling to the Marxists who have only made hell holes of lies.
As my avatar says – Aw c’mon.
Twitter is very very soon to be history. If allowed to continue at all it will be under different leadership and control. Keep your eyes open and look further than mainstream to see what’s going on. I would say Parler, but Google and I believe Apple have both taken it from their App stores this weekend. But I think you can still get on by going direct to Parler website. Follow Team Trump, Lin Wood, General Flynn to learn what’s really going on, right now at this minute. And it is this which will lead to demise of Twitter, and others.
Parler as of this morning is now toast. Amazon have booted them off their web servers and they struggling to find anyone who will take them. Even the firms who handled their emails and texts have discoed them too. Scary times me thinks.
The best way to strike a blow at these technocrats is to stop using their products. That includes getting rid of your cellphones and going back to using landlines. None of this crap is needed.
One potential solution is to remove the liability shield from the Twitters and Facebooks of the world. (This is what Trump is proposing, but he doesn’t realise he’d be the first one kicked off under such a scenario!). The shield was established on the false premise that online content facilitators were similar to the telephone company, and as such shouldn’t be held liable for something some homicidal maniac says over the line. But we know that what is of greatest value is not the infrastructure but the content, which is where the Facebooks make their money. The result of removing liability protection would require the content facilitators to police their space, which is what traditional media organisations were required to do. This is not an attack on free speech, since you could have a multiplicity of content facilitators of various ideological stripes, depending on the editorial choices of the facilitators.
Mr West’s analysis is persuasive. Let’s start by not posting or reading things on Twitter. There are a lot of highly engaged and valuable members of the public for whom this works just fine. Pass the word.
It’s the millions of gullible idiots who are the concern.
“The platform has a consistent policy of allowing high-follower accounts to get away with extreme incivility, incitement to violence and even racial hatred. It lets them do so for the same reason that bad behaviour is often indulged ““ because the people doing it are seen as having the right politics, in this case of the progressive variety.”
Ed West makes a lot of good points in this article but this is utter nonsense. High-follower accounts of all political stripes and with no politics get away with bad behaviour because they bring traffic to Twitter which is how it makes its money.
Just as in broader society, people get away with bad behaviour because they have high status, regardless of their politics.
You have a point, but I’d say that there are really three tiers. Using someone like Milo Yiannopoulos as an example, I’d classify that as:
(1) Someone with low follower count (and/or low profile outside Twitter) would have their account permanently removed by Twitter sooner than happened to Milo. At a minimum, they would have simply been booted from the platform – at least if anyone reported the behavior – on the various occasions that he was instead temporarily suspended and then reinstated.
(2) Someone like Milo did get more rope, but eventually booted.
(3) The progressive version of Milo would get still more leniency, and possibly never get booted.
Is there evidence of that? Which progressives have engaged in the same sort of harassment as Milo and been tolerated? Genuinely curious as I’m not aware of any specific cases?
Someone like Kathy Griffin could be an overall example.
Whilst I agree with what you say, in my opinion, there is also deeper considerations than virtue (cardinal virtues).
What is the motivational basis for the trolling and flaming if not competition over finite resources which leads to what is known as realistic conflict theory whereby groupings form when faced with economic insecurity. In this respect, if Twitter actually had a much more substantial superordinate mission than,
The mission we serve as Twitter, Inc. is to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Our business and revenue will always follow that mission in ways that improve ““ and do not detract from ““ a free and global conversation.
https://investor.twitterinc….
such as seeking to help foster a sharing and caring global community then that might thwart the competitive hierarchy that is implicit in their doublespeak mission of improving a free (progressive) and global conversation (global alliance).
Did anyone below answer the question? Can Twitter exist in a democracy? I’d say no, if it is indeed the case Twitter is gaslighting, cancelling.half of the voting population, assured that the other half will support it. Short answer, no, democracy must go.
The more relevant question is why anyone thought being on Twitter was a good idea in the first place? Do I really need to know that my neighbor is sitting on the crapper? That the kid down the street pulled his sister’s hair? It was obvious from the beginning that it would only be a sewer of uninformed, petty bitching. Just quit the twit.
Several commenters here are right in saying that Mr West offers no enduring solutions. But I see his “failure” as intellectually and morally honest ” as were Fisher Ames in 1805, and Alexis de Tocqueville in his magisterial Democracy in America of 1835″“40. All three authors identify weaknesses that arise because the democratic system, more than any other, attempts to grant liberty to each citizen, despite the dangers inherent in human nature.
In all these respects, the American democratic system is profoundly indebted to Christian foundations ” the Deist or other non-orthodox inclinations of the Founding Fathers notwithstanding. Just two of many examples:
1) Liberty, despite the near-certainty of its being misused, is what God granted Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden;
2) Opposition to the concept of hyphenated Americanism (Italian-American, African-American etc.), expressed forcefully by Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Ronald Regan, is based on the uniquely American idea that the immigrant who chooses to live in America becomes American via that choice. It is a secular equivalent of the well-known Pauline declaration that Christian identity supersedes all other identities ” “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” [Galatians 3:28].
When Mr West points out that the Founding Fathers understood the importance of personal virtue in sustaining their new kind of democracy, he is also underlining the vulnerability of democracy when Christian and classical concepts of virtue decline within the population at large. I and several others here have argued that social media in general appeals to the worst aspects of human nature. Of course, virtue is by no means confined to Christians and Christianity. But I do wonder whether there are links between the decline of widespread Christian observance, the growth of relativism, the increase in individualism, and the potent conclusions that end Mr West’s article:
So, when the nature of the medium is added to the decline of democracy, to the realities of human nature, and to the a-moral power of the international corporations that control the media, there is no acceptable, imposable, universal solution. We therefore have to depend on the oldest things ” on individual character, on wisdom and virtue, and on the rise of such individuals to positions of power and influence. I’m not hopeful; but that will not stop me arguing for such thing.
I fully endorse the last sentence of this paper.
Social media are a danger to both democracy and individual freedom of thought.
The benefits brought by social medias to the individual are today by far outweighed by the toxic divisions social media firebrand “lynching mobsters” instil in civil society, mainstream medias acting as unfiltered echo chambers just in case they could miss the buzz.
So what do we really want to protect the social media companies or the sanity of our society?
This article is fundamentally misconceived. Not least in this false metaphor: Note that this will take more than one sentence to explain.
Having a handful of violent thugs in your city is VERY different from having a handful of posters who post words you don’t like or consider untrue. Words are NOT violence, in numerous ways.. If they are just cheap insults then they can be ignored (indeed filtered out by algorithm). If a poster insists on constantly posting trash, then there can be an option of voluntary collapsing by the reader (again with optional help of an algorithm). If libellous then the poster can get sued or exposed as the lyre. If the comment is anonymous then anyone with a brain should have the sense to recognise it as a mere allegation without verification.. But it might be a very valuable whistleblowing.
The supreme consideration is that trying to police the obnoxious words causes far more harm than the words themselves.
Oh, but “incitement to violence”. There is no document in history more bursting with incitements to hate than the Qur’*n. Not only its many “glorious” commands such as “fight the disbelievers until religion is all for All*h”. But also that in practice it clearly incites endless acts of violence (usually including the words “All** a***”).
So if you want to criminalise “incitement to violence” you have to ban the Qur’an and ban me from reading the Qur’*n. And anyway what business is it of yours to dictate what words I read or write. Please pass off until you can admit that that equals outright fascism wherein your “superior” people have the entitlement to dictate down to us inferiors and meanwhile us subhum*ns lack even the right to say what we think let alone what others can.
The only free speech is absolute free speech. Those who say otherwise do so only because they want to defend the indefensible, such as the whopping lie of “the huge benefits of immigration”. .
Ok, I’m a Brit watching all this from across the pond with great fascination… Some of you love Trump, some of you hate him, I get that. What I’d like to know is this: how do Trump lovers justify the way he stoked up that riot? Even if you like his policies, that behaviour was deeply dangerous, wasn’t it?
Not a Trump lover, but I can read English well enough to know that he did no such thing. Nothing he said called for any violence. Unlike several Democrats who openly used ACTUAL words to provoke rioting last Summer.
Twitter’s biggest problem is, as others have pointed out, that it treats all twitterers as equals …. all are welcome! While we are all equal before the law (or should be equal), we are not all equal in civic virtue nor in our reasoning.
Hence, platforms such as Twitter allow lies to pass for truth. And these lies achieve the status of truth simply because they are echoed millions of times, not because they are factually correct. As the siege of the capitol on January 6th shows, people steeped in these echoed lies create slogans (“stop the steal,” “take back our country”) that abort real thinking.
Twitter and other such platforms in their present forms cannot be controlled and will always become places for the disaffected and the manipulative to lie and to be believed and then to be echoed (retweeted) and finally to achieve some sort of power. Labeling such folks’ posts names, for example “deplorables” or “not true” won’t do as such labels will become badges of honor among them.
One solution might be simply begin a campaign to increase civic virtue and recognize/reward it. How that recognition/reward occurs I have no idea. But the number of capitol invaders taking selfies demonstrates the desire/need for attention. If Twitter and its ilk could harness the need for attention and direct it toward more virtuous behavior (telling the truth, rational thought, bringing important issues to public attention, pointing out historical examples, motivating the common good, for example) we might see some improvement in our democratic experience.
Ed writes: “following a year in which China has successfully dealt with an external threat”. Does he care to expand on this? Surely he is not endorsing the Communist Chinese canard that the US Army brought COVID-19 to Wuhan at the Military World Games in October 2019? And if that’s not what he’s talking about, just what is he talking about? “Following a deadly pandemic brought on by a virus that started in the People’s Republic of China and may have come from a government lab” would have been a better opening.
The author is more confused than people he is accusing of being confused
The complete refusal of anyone on Trump’s side to accept he is in the wrong at all is a serious issue. Having concerns about social media removing accounts is fine. But he’s not just some bloke, he’s the damn PRESIDENT. He HAS to be held to intensely stricter standards than other people. He HAS spewed racist rhetoric whether his cultists want to believe it or not. Shockingly, you don’t need to put on a white hood and scream actual slurs to be racist, guys. He has whipped up hysteria over this election to the point where they simply won’t accept they are in the wrong. Because he has the power to do so.
You talk of a ‘cult’ and the ‘spewing of racist rhetoric’, but how do you square that with the fact that Trump secured more electoral votes from his ‘cult’, 74m, than any other presidential candidate ever bar the obvious one, and
actually managed to increase his vote amongst Black and Hispanic voters completely against the prevailing media narrative?
This is quite a confusing piece, but I love that contentious ‘keeper’ Fisher Ames quote, ‘few can reason, all can feel” as it encapsulates the problem we all have with democracy or, more precisely, our increasingly warped perception of it.
It’s not just censorship that is fine for some just so long as it’s imposed on others, worryingly democracy seems to be becoming an increasingly moveable, subjective feast too.
Democracy, to fall back on the well worn clichés, is still the worst form of governance except for all the others and it lives and dies by losers’ consent not just by virtue of the winner’s victory alone.
Once that goes, then it’s well on its way to being a gonna.
In terms of America, the vital principle of losers’ consent was abandoned in 2016 by the Democrats and their supporters when Trump apparently ‘unexpectedly’ won against Obama’s heir apparent Clinton.
The next four years were characterized by endless, increasingly desperate ‘trumped up’, if you’ll pardon the pun, ultimately fruitless Democrat-led attempts to delegitimise the encumbent democratically elected president thereby giving the proverbial finger to those who voted for him and effectively delegitimising the whole system in the process by default if not by intent.
So, as I said, here we are four years on and this time the losers’ consent is now required (and expected) in order to legitimise the vote for the ‘other side’s’ guy and there seems to be a problem with that and yet we’re all supposed to be mystified and/or outraged by this unreasonable, undemocratic reaction from ‘the others’.
American democracy is indeed under siege, but let’s not forget that it wasn’t Trump, whatever your personal opinion of this hard to like man is, who fired the first shot.
The internet should have remained the quirky hobby of nerds and shut-ins. It was never meant to be mainstream.
Ah yes! The early days of the personal computer when quasi-sophisticated creative types (the sort of people who infest MSM like rats in a sewer) were keen to display their sophisticated, fully-rounded personalities by dismissing the new technology as only interesting to boring, socially inadequate little men (dahling!).
The internet is a lot more than just social media though. I think it would not be a bad thing if people didn’t get their news and information from social media though.
But we have to go to social media to get any form of intelligent or balanced comment given the bias and dismally low standards of the MSM.
LOL
Yes, amazing investigate journalism on Twitter.
And yet you kept insisting (here) that NY Times should investigate Hunter Biden!
I am sure it works. If it is taken care that people pass the street only when is green light as the rules are, when drivers respect the speed limits, the rest takes care of itself. If the small misdemeanors will be eliminated than those few criminals will be exposed. Those who do the bog crime of course do many small crimes.
No. The problem is not ‘the medium itself’.
It’s how it is used.
The problem is always the medium. We are all obliged to change our behaviour to accommodate technological change, there’s nothing else we can do. People will always abuse the medium to gain advantage.
To paraphrase Baudelaire (or Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects – take your pick) – The greatest trick that Twitter ever pulled was to convince people that its existence was necessary…
Before commenting, consider reading:
1. Plato, The Republic, (circa 375 BC)
2. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd… (1895)
3. Hamilton, et al., The Federalist Papers (1787-1788)
4. Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776)
5. Marx, Das Kapital (1867)
Comment:
The U.S. Senate was created by the founders to try to mitigate the trend of democracy towards tyranny. Without an educated deliberative body primarily concerned with representing the needs, rather than the demands of the People, our nation is doomed.
Unfortunately the 17th amendment made the Senate just a smaller, more ossified, version of the House. Repeal that POS! Make the USA the United STATES again.
Censorship is a BAD idea. Period.
I actually liked the censoring of obscenity in the old days when there was a belief in good and bad, healthy and prurient.
Censorship of opinion is a bad idea. By all means let’s censor obscenity and incitement to violence, real incitement, not a political opponent talking to his peaceful rally.
I’m not entirely sure the broken windows example is correct. The authors of Freakonomics suggest that crime was already in steep decline in New York before the mayor and his police chief applied the approach to policing and that the true cause of the improvement can be laid at the door of Roe v Wade, which significantly reduced the birth rate of unwanted babies to mainly poor, single girls and young women – it is the male children of such mothers who commit the vast majority of crime, they say. Their evidence seems impressive.
The problem with the “broken window” theory is that it, once again, uses the police and punishment, rather than education, security and opportunity to eliminate poverty, ignorance and despair.
What a crock. There’s nothing about being poor that leads one to break windows or urinate in public or graffiti buildings. It’s anti-social behavior,
The clearest measure of crime, homicides, was NOT in steep decline in NYC. It peaked at near 2,250 in 1990 and was just below 2,000 in 1993 the year before the new policing policy. This 4%/yr drop is dwarfed by the subsequent drop to 600 homicides /yr in the first 5 years of Giuliana. Broken Windows policy effect was immediate and dramatic according to homicide data -view murder by year on wikipedia for yourself and you can confirm. Classic leftist hand waving is that US rates dropped also but that ignores multiple facts: NYC effects were so dramatic they were copied elsewhere; US overall decrease much less and lagged NYC drop
Ed West apparently claims to be a conservative, he clearly isn’t but is just another establishment shill and now his cheerleading seems to extend to dictatorships
The question to ask should be the opposite: can a democracy exists with tech giant monopolies that have censored political speech and journalism to the point to shut uo completley in a day alternative platforms like Parler?
see other one that bypassed mod.
China IS the external threat, and you believing their numbers makes me wonder if you are interested in purchasing this nice bridge I have…
kudos for at least calling out the screeching woke mob on Twitter and elsewhere though