Scrolling Facebook yesterday, I noticed a little item in Facebook Trending. You know – the little sidebar full of amusing tidbits, all carefully hand-picked for your lawful entertainment by the great man, Zuckerberg, himself.
(He takes such care, that man. I feel as if I had a special relationship with him, almost as if he was my own big brother.)
Today, his little offering included this morsel:
And here I must confess my dreadful sins.
As a good citizen of the People’s Republic of Facebookistan, I should have thought no more than “Haha, what a joke. Trump is stupid, I hate him so much. This will show him!”
However, with a moment’s thought, several irregular ideas sprang to mind, unblessed by the gods.
The judge in question, Naomi Reice Buchwald (a Clinton appointee), ruled that Trump may not block users from his own feed for their political views. In other words, the trolls can stay. They have a First Amendment right to free speech, which was violated when Trump blocked them.
In Buchwald’s words:
This case requires us to consider whether a public official may, consistent with the First Amendment, ‘block’ a person from his Twitter account in response to the political views that person has expressed, and whether the analysis differs because that public official is the President of the United States. The answer to both questions is no.
How very, very interesting.
In the same article, the Justice Department said, in its defence, that “blocking the individuals on Twitter did not prevent them from reading the President’s feed, and thus did not violate their free speech rights. The Knight First Amendment Institute [who brought the suit] countered by arguing that blocked users could not readily engage in the discussion threads stemming from individual feeds.”
Laughable? Yes! Since when does your freedom of speech mean that you can force someone else to listen to you – on their own platform? But let’s not go down that path. It’s too sane, too reasonable. Instead, just for a moment, let’s summon Alinsky, like the Dark One to whom he dedicated his famous book Rules for Radicals. Draw the magic circle, recite the incantations, pull down the cursed book from the shelf, and flip to Rule 10: If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.
The negative of this situation is that it is unconstitutional for any public official to block dissenters from their Twitter pages.
The positive of this situation is that it is unconstitutional for any public official to block dissenters from their Twitter pages.
Do you see the possibility? Innocent little children who like to play with fire may find, much to their surprise, that they’re playing with fire.
They do say that the Left can’t meme.
It’s your XYZ.