Parler – Memphis Flyer

On Sunday, former President Donald Trump attacked American Jews on his Truth Social platform. His message: Jews in the United States need to “get their act together” and show more appreciation for the state of Israel and Donald Trump “before it is too late.”

That concluding sentence caused a lot of blowback from Jewish groups, who saw Trump’s post as a veiled threat and a thinly disguised message to his MAGA and white supremacist base that Jews were a problem. It was remarks like these that got Trump banned from Twitter and led to his forming Truth Social, where his audience is relatively minuscule but where he can post whatever lies and racist tropes that arise in his addled brain without constraint.

Speaking of addled brains: Earlier in the week, wealthy rapper and confirmed lunatic, Kanye West, offered his own anti-Semitic post on Twitter, stating he was going to “go death con 3 [sic] on JEWISH PEOPLE.” He later posted that George Floyd was not murdered but died of a Fentanyl overdose (a racist trope that was disproved at trial). West was banned from Twitter and restricted on Instagram for his remarks, but he immediately announced that he was going to buy the troubled wanna-be-Twitter social medium, Parler.

Meanwhile, the world’s richest man, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, was nearing a final deal to take over Twitter, the most influential social medium for news and opinion in the world. Musk’s recent remarks on the war in Ukraine make it clear he is a Putin enabler, which could be a problem. Musk has also stated that when he takes over Twitter he will “reduce content moderation” and will allow “all speech that stops short of violating the law,” meaning Trump, Kanye, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and other racists currently banned from Twitter would be reinstated and allowed to spew whatever garbage they want, as long as it’s “legal.” And meaning that Truth Social, Parler, and Twitter would all be owned by egocentric billionaires. Good times.

This is nothing new, of course. American mass media has long been dominated by wealthy men who used their influential mass-media platforms to further their own ambitions and political views. In the early 20th century, William Randolph Hearst owned 30 influential newspapers that featured lurid stories on crime, corruption, politics, and sex. Hearst controlled the editorial positions and political news in his papers and is considered to have almost single-handedly influenced the United States to declare war on Spain and invade Cuba in 1898.

Little has changed. Consider Rupert Murdoch (Fox News, Wall Street Journal), Michael Bloomberg (Forbes, Business Week), Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, Amazon), and Mark Zuckerberg (Meta, Facebook, Instagram). Throw in Musk and Twitter, and that’s a lot of influence and power in the hands of five* self-interested billionaires.

Republicans, the majority of whom are now election deniers and Trump enablers, are naturally quite happy about the possibility of these three social mediums being owned by their kind of people. The official GOP House Judiciary Committee tweeted last week: “Kanye. Elon. Trump.” Not subtle, and even more disturbing when you consider that the anti-Semitic garbage Trump and Kanye posted garnered no criticism from any Republican of note.

We are three weeks out from a midterm election that no one seems to have a handle on. The polls are all over the place, with most indicating the Democrats will hold the Senate and lose the House. Still, no one knows, and accurate polling has never been more difficult. When was the last time you answered a call from an unknown number to take a poll? Democrats can take hope from this summer’s landslide pro-choice vote in deep-red Kansas, which the polls missed by double-digit percentage points. Republicans can take hope from the fact that a hypocritical, prevaricating moron like Herschel Walker is polling competitively in the Georgia Senate race, a staggering indictment of the electorate.

In addition to the election drama, Trump is facing multiple indictments in state and federal courts, with the DOJ hovering, waiting for the election to be over before making any moves in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. What we’ve learned after six years of Trump-induced chaos is that democracy is a fragile thing, and that rough water is likely still ahead. Buckle up.

*Editor’s note: In an earlier version of this story, Warren Buffett was listed as one of the billionaire newspaper owners. Buffett divested his newspaper holdings in 2020.

It’s so nice when we finally get a slow news week.

I mean, except for the whole “Let’s instigate a mob attack on the nation’s Capitol to go after Congress members and senators and get five people killed and build a gallows so we can hang Vice President Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi” thing. Which was almost a week ago. So.

I want to talk about social media. It’s hard to imagine the Trump presidency playing out as it did (or even happening) without Twitter. No one has ever used a social medium more effectively than Donald Trump. Twitter was his hammer and everything was a nail. He utilized it to communicate directly with his base, to tap into and spur their anger, their frustrations, and the racism that still infects so many of them. Via his tweets, Trump demonized Muslims, Mexicans, and Blacks. He tweeted warnings of “caravans.” He tweeted no-fly bans. He tweeted outsized fears of immigrant gangs. He tweet-fired cabinet members. He amplified white supremacists and QAnon conspiracists by retweeting them. He tweeted about his wall, about being cheated out of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Trump also used Twitter for “diplomacy,” tweeting derisively about “Little Rocket Man” and leaders of Canada, France, Iran, and Germany. He tweeted threats of war. And Trump used Twitter to offer helpful criticism about television shows and networks; from SNL to OANN to Fox to CBS to CNN, Trump had an opinion to tweet. And, of course, Trump used Twitter to misinform Americans about COVID, over and over again. You name it, Trump tweeted about it.

Now it’s finished. Twitter has muted Trump, banning him from the platform that he could reasonably argue he helped build into what it is today. Many of Trump’s supporters are calling Twitter’s decision an assault on free speech. It is not. A private company has the right to refuse service. Twitter’s move is more like a bar kicking out a drunk who’s chasing off other customers. Or a bakery refusing to create a cake for a gay wedding, if you prefer.

Many Trump supporters got another shock when the right-wing social media platform Parler was effectively disabled by Google, Apple, and Amazon. And the shocks may keep coming. It was revealed on Monday that Parler’s entire trove of user data has been hacked and stored, to what end we still don’t know.

Social media works by collecting our data and selling it, and they’ve got a lot of it on all of us. So do cell phone companies, which came as a shock to many of the “patriots” who ransacked the Capitol last week. Turns out the building has a massive cell phone infrastructure, one that can (and will) be used to determine what cell phones were in and around the area, and who they were communicating with. Using that data, law enforcement officers pulled many rioters off their return flights last week by tracking their cell phones, much to the Trumpers’ shock and dismay. (The hashtag #noflylist on Twitter and Facebook has compiled a number of videos of these folks being hustled off planes and out of airports, in case you’re needing a quick dollop of schadenfreude.)

It’s still astonishing to me that so many people apparently thought they could break into a federal building, destroy public and personal property, attack the police, take selfies of it all, and then just hop on a plane and head back home with no consequences. Sorry, folks, if you had your cell phone with you in the Capitol last week … well, oops. And according to what limited geographic cell phone data has been released thus far, quite a number of folks in Shelby and Crittendon Counties should be expecting a call from law enforcement soon.

Meanwhile, members of Congress were given a briefing Monday about numerous plots and demonstrations still being planned for Washington, D.C., in coming days. The FBI is also warning of demonstrations of one kind or another for state capitals around the country. Whether the takedown of Parler and the arrests of what will soon be hundreds of Capitol terrorists will impact these nefarious plans is anyone’s guess.

In any event, with another impeachment in the works and the Biden inauguration still to come, the week ahead looks to be another challenging one for all of us living in these turbulent and not-so-United States. Buckle in. Stay safe. We’ll get through this. The current wave of madness is surely cresting.