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Follow Jonah Goldberg on Twitter February 22, 2011 7:00 PM. Share on Facebook; Share on Twitter. Jonah Goldberg is a National Review contributing editor. @JonahDispatch More in Politics.

Jonah Goldberg calls Twitter-troll Kayleigh McEnany’s behavior ‘indefensible and grotesque’; Mollie Hemingway schools Posted at 5:23 pm on May 25, 2020 by Brett T. The Arizona GOP’s Twitter account, borrowing a line from “Rambo,” asked whether people would be willing to die for Trump. Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch. (Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.).

Twitter makes a lot of people stupid and angry, so it’s fitting that the current debate about Twitter should be so full of stupidity and anger.

First, some context. President Trump frequently tweets or retweets things that are untrue. He also tweets things that are true. One thing that makes all of this so unpleasant is that a great many of the president’s foes feel compelled to claim that the true things are false, and his fans are compelled to argue that the false stuff is, at least in some sense, true. (Another factor that makes things even more unpleasant: The president often tweets offensive things, and the same dynamic of “No it’s not!” vs. “Yes it is!” plays out.)

More broadly, many on the right have convinced themselves that Twitter “censors” conservatives on the platform, which they think is not only wrong but some sort of violation of the First Amendment. It’s not. Many on the left think Twitter doesn’t censor enough, specifically in the case of the president himself.

It was against this backdrop that Trump tweeted (again) that governors must not use mail-in ballots during the pandemic. The two-part tweet began, “There is NO WAY (ZERO!) that Mail-In Ballots will be anything less than substantially fraudulent. Mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.” He concluded by declaring, “This will be a Rigged Election. No way!”

The widespread concern is that Trump was setting the stage for claiming if he loses in November that the result would be illegitimate. Twitter tagged the two Trump tweets with a notice, “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” that linked to some fact-checking articles. Some of those articles made it sound as if ballot fraud doesn’t exist, which is untrue, but mail-in balloting is not rife with fraud the way Trump insists.

The president got very angry and started yammering about how Twitter was trying to interfere with the election, censor him, etc. “Republicans feel that Social Media Platforms totally silence conservatives voices,” he (awkwardly) tweeted. “We will strongly regulate, or close them down, before we can ever allow this to happen.”

On Thursday, the president signed an executive order that could punish social media platforms by removing the legal protections that spare them from being responsible for what users say on them. In other words, if you defame someone on Twitter, Twitter could be sued, too.

Again, this is all so stupid.

The president is using his free speech on Twitter to claim that Twitter is denying him free speech. Trump claims that adding that link to his tweet is a form of censorship, which it isn’t, given that the tweet still stands and a link providing more information isn’t in the same zip code as censorship.

Moreover, Twitter isn’t a government entity, so in a legal sense it can’t commit censorship. The First Amendment binds what the government can do, not private companies. Trump’s executive order comes far closer to censorship because it would effectively kill platforms dedicated (albeit imperfectly) to free expression.

Meanwhile, Twitter has created a huge problem for itself, because now, whenever it doesn’t fact-check a statement, it leaves the impression that Twitter is vouching for the content.

David French, my colleague at The Dispatch and a veteran First Amendment lawyer, argues that Twitter should simply treat Trump like any other citizen. I agree, but given that Trump is incapable of moderating his behavior, we’d still end up in the same place, because treating Trump like any other user would eventually result in some of Trump’s tweets being deleted or his account being suspended or banned, and that would make him even angrier.

Since Twitter has already taken the plunge, I think a better response is to turn its “get the facts” thing into a policy for all government officials — at home and abroad. (I’m looking at you, China.) Trump’s statements are, by law, official statements of the president. That means they aren’t like a normal citizen’s tweets. Under the First Amendment, Twitter has every right to comment on government statements, including on its own platform. If it editorializes in a biased or misleading way, that its right. But if it did, everyone would be free to disregard its statements as they see fit.

(Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.)

Last week, a mob of white protesters swarmed a white woman eating dinner in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Video of the bullies demanding that patrons raise their fists in solidarity with the movement went viral.

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Many pro-Trump and right-wing media personalities were quick to insist this verbal assault was emblematic of the entire Democratic Party and the broader “American left.” Never mind that the victim, Lauren B. Victor, was a fellow progressive who told a Washington Post reporter, “I’m very much with them. I’ve been marching with them for weeks and weeks and weeks.”

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Among the funny things about this decidedly unfunny event is that it would have been almost impossible for this roving rhetorical goon squad to find the kind of victims they surely wanted. Adams Morgan is an especially liberal neighborhood in a very liberal city. Sure, there are some conservatives there — I lived in Adams Morgan for over a decade — but picking on random white people in Adams Morgan in the hope of finding MAGA types is like scouring Manhattan’s Upper West Side for taxidermists. It’s theoretically possible to find one, but you’ll have your work cut out for you.

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Regardless, Democrats would be well-advised to draw inspiration from Victor’s refusal to be bullied by a mob, even one she sympathizes with, because she is surely more representative of voters than the mob accosting her was.

American liberalism’s Achilles’ heel has long been a reluctance, sometimes a flat-out inability, to criticize radicals to their left. In the 1960s, leading Democrats kowtowed to extremists out of what historian Fred Siegel called a “riot ideology,” and it cost the party dearly.

There have been exceptions. Americans for Democratic Action arguably saved the Democratic Party from its leftmost wing led by the “useful idiot” Henry Wallace, FDR’s former vice president. Bill Clinton broke the GOP’s monopoly on the presidency by deliberately picking fights with the left in order to attract more moderate voters. Clinton’s tactics were arguably more cynical than idealistic — he took time off from the campaign trail to oversee the execution of a severely brain-damaged Black man. But say what you will about his “triangulation,” it worked.

American politics has become a contest between two competing caricatures of reality. The primary driver of this dynamic has been the media’s — particularly cable news’ — addiction to narrative journalism combined with the pernicious influence of social media. Twitter and Facebook make it all too easy to shine a spotlight on outlier events and present them as central to our lives. The focus on the ludicrous “autonomous zone” in Seattle earlier this summer let the right claim the whole city was like a “Mad Max” movie.

Similarly, the statistically rare (I’m sorry, but it’s true) examples of outrageously bad behavior by some cops captured on video give many on the left permission to push a narrative of wholesale racial oppression by police.

Social media is like the wall on Plato’s Cave. Selective facts cast shadows we mistake for reality. If you take all your cues about what’s happening in America from partisan Twitter, as so many journalists do, you’d be a fool not to buy a gun and prepare for the coming apocalyptic helter-skelter.

The problem is intensified by the tendency of the hyper-politically engaged left and right to listen only to people in their own echo chamber and to mistake Twitter outrage for sentiment on the ground. So despite the fact that a majority of Black and Latino people want the same amount or more police in their communities, we spent weeks listening to “experts” claim that “abolish the police” is a reasonable, mainstream position. (Here’s an illustrative heuristic: If you hear politicians or journalists using the label “Latinx” to describe Latinos, you’re listening to someone in a bubble. According to recent Pew Research Center polling, only about 25 percent of Latinos know the term and only about 3 percent actually use it.

Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination largely because most of his competitors talked as if primary voters were indistinguishable from the very online left-wing activists and journalists who dominate MSNBC and CNN.

To his credit, Biden has unequivocally condemned rioting, vigilantism and street violence. But he took too much time to do it, not because he doesn’t believe what he said, but because the campaign let the fringe define the center of the party. Condemning violence — by rioters and vigilantes alike — is a no-brainer; it’s a pre-partisan patriotic requirement of political leadership.

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Hesitation to do so is not merely shameful, it’s political malpractice, because most voters expect it and even the appearance of reluctance feeds precisely the narrative that could cost Biden the election.

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(Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.)