Pun Salad

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell, an ardent supporter of former President Donald Trump who wrongly believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen, appeared on Newsmax Wednesday to discuss his suspension from Twitter.

The topic of the segment was supposed to be Big Tech's censorious efforts to silence Lindell. But the businessman immediately veered off-topic and into conspiracy theory territory, forcing producers to abruptly cancel the interview—and inadvertently making an important point about Section 230, the federal law that protects social media companies from liability and has undeservedly become an object of conservative ire.

One would think that Lenin’s superstition — that the ready-made solutions are all there waiting to be implemented, requiring only pure hearts and some political will — would have been dispelled in both parties by their experiences in power. Barack Obama came into office with his party controlling both houses of Congress, but his promise to fundamentally transform the United States came to very little — and exactly the same thing was true of Donald Trump. But, of course, the partisans have an answer for that: “The traitors have infiltrated our operations! Saboteurs and wreckers!”

Thus the We the People vs. the Establishment rhetoric that so completely dominates our politics on both sides of the aisle.

I do not expect the American Left to question the premise that “human action no longer encounters obstacles or limits, only adversaries,” because the American Left is, always has been, and always will be both utopian and juvenile. But an American Right that consistently fails to grapple with reality, as in the case of so many contemporary Republican elected officials and prominent right-wing media voices, is incoherent. It is no longer conservative in any meaningful sense, but, as expressed in the rhetoric of so much of the Right today, self-consciously revolutionary.

Utopianism-in-arms does not have an especially admirable historical record.

According to the Associated Press, “nearly 5,000 Arizona voters dropped their GOP voter registration in nine days after the Capitol attack.” And in the days following January 6, 4,600 voters dropped off the Republican rolls in Colorado, 6,000 in North Carolina, and 10,000 in Pennsylvania. NPR, who reported the data, noted that this was specific to the GOP: “there was no comparable effect with any other party.” This isn’t just bad news for Republicans on the ballot in 2022—it’s bad news for the future of the party, because it may signal that more moderate Republican voters have simply given up on fighting against the fringes over the direction of the party. 

The explanation is one man’s hatred and fear—one man hiding in a bunker. I mortally offended him by surviving. I survived thanks to good people, thanks to pilots and doctors. And then I committed an even more serious offense: I didn’t run and hide. Then something truly terrifying happened: I participated in the investigation of my own poisoning, and we proved, in fact, that Putin, using Russia’s Federal Security Service, was responsible for this attempted murder. And that’s driving this thieving little man in his bunker out of his mind. He’s simply going insane as a result….

It turns out that dealing with a political opponent who has no access to television and no political party merely requires trying to kill him with a chemical weapon. So, of course, he’s losing his mind over this. Because everyone was convinced that he’s just a bureaucrat who was accidentally appointed to his position. He’s never participated in any debates or campaigned in an election. Murder is the only way he knows how to fight. He’ll go down in history as nothing but a poisoner. We all remember Alexander the Liberator [Alexander II] and Yaroslav the Wise [Yaroslav I]. Well, now we’ll have Vladimir the Underpants Poisoner…

Earlier this month, in the wake of the fatal incursion of an angry, mostly white and male mob into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, Facebook and Twitter blocked Donald Trump’s accounts. YouTube followed with a temporary ban, which it has continued to extend in the weeks since. According to these platforms, Trump’s dangerous pattern of behavior violated their content management rules. Shortly after, Amazon Web Services ended its hosting support for the neo-Nazi online haven Parler. Parler countered with a lawsuit alleging that Amazon’s decision was an antitrust violation motivated by political animus, which the courts readily rejected. In the coming days, Facebook’s Oversight Board is expected to issue a final decision on whether to allow the former president back on its platform. 

The collective sigh of relief that rippled through the digital spaces occupied by Black, indigenous and other people of color following the wave of deplatformings was visceral, and the impact was almost immediate. A study conducted by research firm Zignal Labs found that online disinformation, particularly about election fraud, fell by an incredible 73 percent in the week after Twitter’s suspension of Trump’s social media account. Online forums for Trump supporters are now fractured and weakened.