Matt Taibbi has the goods on Twitter's Trump ban
(twitter.com)
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Conservatives should be careful about playing the censorship game. They need to have the balls to fight fire with fire but also be aware that a huge part of their base cares about free speech and moral consistency. When the dust settles we need to be able to build something good and free.
OTOH, I'm fully in favor of 'enemies of free speech don't get free speech'. Yeah, yeah, free speech is only free speech when everyone has it, but one of the best ways to stop an enemy without principles is to show that you're willing to use the same weapons and tactics. Give them a reason to deescalate and care about the precedent their setting. The punishment fits the crime.
Principles are what you use to keep enemies in line after you've defeated them. They're worse than useless if you adhere to them for the sake of losing with dignity, the way Bush-style compassionate conservatives desperately want to.
I agree in general but there are still some lines we need to be careful about crossing. It's not always easy to walk things back once you've started them. These things have inertia.
At the very least I don't think conservatives should secretly collude to censor, because that's not colluding against the enemy it's colluding against the people.
And being shown to not do that when democrats are doing it freely could gain us a lot of support. We're starting to win the battle for hearts and minds and we shouldn't underestimate the importance of that, we need to be really careful about anything that could ruin it.
Fight back, and fight back using their weapons, but if possible, fight back with a rallying cry from the people you're fighting for, not a chorus of boos.
Conservatives aren't winning shit. AIDS medicine is marketable enough they buy spots for it on Fox News. There are open, publicly advertised child molestation parties in every major city in America with the explicit support of the local police, who would happily kill anybody who threatened the shows. It cost $44 billion dollars to free one website from the direct control of a guy who wrote his doctoral thesis about his experience with a gay dating app. You literally can't hold a pro-Trump/pro-any-right-wing issue rally in any major city except maybe Miami without being attacked by violent masked communists who fear absolutely no consequences whatsoever.
Yes, they have the institutions and the influence. There's no denying that. But we are starting to win the people. Or rather, they're losing them. It's hard to say yet, there's decades of propaganda to be undone. But truth is on our side and they can only suppress that so much.