The Facebook Oversight Board’s decision to maintain former President Donald Trump’s ban — at least for now — from the social media platform has conservatives up in arms.
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, fulminated that “big tech” had turned Trump into a martyr. Gingrich also argued that Facebook and other social media platforms were “censoring” conservatives and conservative thought.
Other rightwing deep thinkers such as U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Fox News mental giants Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson echoed Gingrich’s complaint. The Facebook ban of the former president was “cancel culture” run amok.
PUH-LEASE.
The irony of the same folks who wanted to throw professional athletes out of the leagues in which they play — if not out of the country in which they live and pay taxes — simply for respectfully taking a knee during the national anthem is thick enough to choke a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
These are, after all, many of the same people who wanted to see the Dixie Chicks tarred and feathered just because they said they were “embarrassed” by the president of the United States.
Cancel culture worked just fine for the Gingrich-Cruz-Hannity-Carlson crowd in those instances.
But let’s put aside the blatant hypocrisy for a moment.
Instead, let’s focus on what the Trump defenders’ arguments reveal.
Trump wasn’t banned from Facebook or any other platform because he was conservative, at least as conservatism generally is understood.
Go to Facebook and post impassioned soliloquies about the need for lower taxes and limiting the role of government in American life and you may put people to sleep, but no one with any authority will say boo to you. You also can argue, vociferously, for more restrictive immigration policies, a stronger national defense and a greater adherence to traditional values and people may wish you’d opted for the decaf, but you won’t face any serious consequences.
Trump wasn’t banned because he spoke conservative “truths.”
Far from it.
He was banned because he egged on a crowd that stormed the U.S. Capitol, killed people and threatened to topple the duly elected and duly installed Congress of the United States. He was banned, at least in part, because he fomented insurrection.
There are, I know, supposed conservatives who argue that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees Americans the right to take up arms against their government as a check on abuses of power.
The problem with that argument is that Article 3 of the Constitution has a word that defines attacking the United States or its government.
That word is treason.
If the only consequence Donald Trump suffers for attacking his own country is that he can’t post on Facebook or Twitter, then he’s getting off light.
But the appeals to insurrection weren’t the only reason Trump was banned.
There also was the fact that he lies almost as often as he breathes. He lied about the coronavirus pandemic, about his dealings with the Ukraine, about his relationship with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, about his wealth, about his taxes, about his opponents, about his allies…pretty much about everything that moved.
For reasons that elude me, social media sites long could exist as fact-free zones. Traditional media, such as newspapers, faced severe penalties if they published something — even a letter to the editor — that damaged a person’s reputation through false or unsupported accusations.
Not so for social media.
One way to clean up the toxic waste sites that form much of the social media landscape would be to demand that they operate under the same standards of accountability traditional news media do.
That, though, is a problem for social media moguls to ponder.
What puzzles me about conservatives is their determination to link their brand with incessant lying. There was a time when to be conservative was to be a staunch advocate for telling hard truths.
Not serving up one whopper after another.
Demanding that statements posted on social media states not be acts of treason and that they be truthful and supported by factual evidence isn’t censorship.
It’s called editing.
And demanding to live in a world in which one can say or do whatever one wants, regardless of the harm it does to others, without ever facing consequences for one’s actions isn’t freedom.
It’s an adolescent temper tantrum.
John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. Send comments to editorial@therepublic.com.
