Trump's threats to social media act as preview of his team's incompetent malice

Marcy Wheeler brought up a very good point on Bluesky this weekend.

It's probably time for Dems to stop the self-flagellation and start talking about the cracks in this effort to force digital platforms to carry Nazi speech.

www.donaldjtrump.com/agenda47/pre...

That tainted-looking link, obviously, goes to The Criminal's dot-com "agenda," and specifically to a transcript of a 2022 speech by The Criminal vowing that if he's returned to power he'll crack down hard on social media providers who take action to hide dangerous conspiracy theories or "censor" the free speech of racist Nazi chuds. It's instructive.

FIRST, within hours of my inauguration, I will sign an executive order banning any federal department or agency from colluding with any organization, business, or person, to censor, limit, categorize, or impede the lawful speech of American citizens. I will then ban federal money from being used to label domestic speech as “mis-” or “dis-information”. And I will begin the process of identifying and firing every federal bureaucrat who has engaged in domestic censorship—directly or indirectly—whether they are the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Health and Human Services, the FBI, the DOJ, no matter who they are.

The basic premise is that racist harassment online of the sort that Elon Musk has now prioritized on "X" will not only be allowed, but it'll be a crime for social media outlets to attempt to stop it. The same would be true for conspiracy theories. I'll point out once again that fascism relies on conspiracy theories as its primary means of governance, so if The Criminal and The Criminal's allies seem very worked up about this it's because even the most timid public attempts at fact checking have the potential to damage Dear Leader and Dear Leader's weird and insipid whale-decapitating cronies. So it's right out.

SECOND, I will order the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime, which is absolutely destructive and terrible, and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified. These include possible violations of federal civil rights law, campaign finance laws, federal election law, securities law, and anti-trust laws, the Hatch Act and a host of other potential criminal, civil, regulatory, and constitutional offenses. To assist in these efforts, I am urging House Republicans to immediately send preservation letters — and we have to do this right now — to the Biden administration, the Biden campaign, and every Silicon Valley tech giant, ordering them not to destroy evidence of censorship.

THIRD, upon my inauguration as president, I will ask Congress to send a bill to my desk revising Section 230 to get big online platforms out of censorship business. From now on, digital platforms should only qualify for immunity protection under Section 230 if they meet high standards of neutrality, transparency, fairness, and non-discrimination. We should require these platforms to INCREASE their efforts to take down UNLAWFUL content, such as child exploitation and promoting terrorism, while dramatically curtailing their power to arbitrarily restrict lawful speech.

That last part is quite instructive, because it mirrors the strategy outlined by Project 2025's roadmap to authoritarianism. The roadmap makes a great deal of noise about protecting children by declaring wide swaths of things to be "pornographic" and imprisoning anyone who "distributes" it; specifically called out is anything that acknowledges the existence of gay or trans persons.

The adjudicated rapist and Jeffrey Epstein friend accused of participating in Epstein's child predation will be the administration's poster child for this new push to "protect children," which is likely to come down to banning any materials that might help child abuse victims know when they're being preyed on and what rights they have to stop it. I'll add as an aside here that the Nazis were themselves prolific child predators so, once again, none of this is straying very far from its previous historic incarnations.

FOURTH, we need to break up the entire toxic censorship industry that has arisen under the false guise of tackling so-called “mis-” and “dis-information.” The federal government should immediately stop funding all non-profits and academic programs that support this authoritarian project. If any U.S. university is discovered to have engaged in censorship activities or election interferences in the past—such as flagging social media content for removal [and] blacklisting—those universities should lose federal research dollars and federal student loan support for a period of five years, and maybe more. We should also enact new laws laying out clear criminal penalties for federal bureaucrats who partner with private entities to do an end-run around the Constitution and deprive Americans of their First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendment rights. In other words, deprive them of their vote. And once you lose those elections and once you lose your borders like we have, you no longer have a country. Furthermore, to confront the problems of major platforms being infiltrated by legions of former Deep Staters and intelligence officials, there should be a 7-year cooling-off period before any employee of the FBI, CIA, NSA, DNI, DHS, or DOD is allowed to take a job at a company possessing vast quantities of U.S. user data.

FIFTH, the time has finally come for Congress to pass a digital Bill of Rights. This should include a right to digital due process—in other words, government officials should need a COURT ORDER to take down online content, not send information requests such as the FBI was sending to Twitter.

Rather than picking any of this apart, I think it's tremendously useful as an example of how the Trump "Administration," which has now been stripped of every last person who refused to go along with Trump's violent coup attempt, his democracy-destroying propaganda campaigns, his near-sexual attraction to Vladimir Putin and other world dictators, and the many, many felonies he's now been convicted of or still awaits trial on, will function.

1) Trump's pronouncements here are sheer gibberish. They are plainly unconstitutional on their face; if we are to take it at face value, the Trump camp believes that if a gay couple comes into your private business to purchase a wedding cake from you, you can chase them out—but if a steroid-abusing meth addict wearing full Nazi regalia comes into your store, starts insulting or threatening everyone in the building, and pulls down his pants to crap in the middle of your floor, you are obliged to let him do it because Free Speech. It also requires courts to say that those big long legal contracts they shove at you and demand you click an "Agree" button to acknowledge are, in fact, illegitimate because you can't impose terms and conditions on your customers.

That's not how any of this works, and we'll have to see how Trump-friendly (aka fascist) courts square the theory that businesses can refuse service to anyone based on their principles but also it's a crime if they refuse service to someone based on their principles. Oh, they'll back Trump up. It'll go to the Supreme Court. At least three of the court's conservatives will absolutely, no-question declare that you have to allow Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and incels to harass everyone else on your platform Under Penalty Of Law, but the others might decide that that's not a right they want to have their names stapled to for all of history.

On an unrelated note, I'm now a religious leader and Uncharted Blue is a church, so none of this affects me.

2) Trump's corporate masters don't want this. Elon Musk wants this, because he's on Team Evil. Trump's ultra-fascist racist pervboys want this, the Stephen Millers and the Jim Jordans and the Mike Johnsons, but the moneyed interests of corporate America who have backed Trump because they wanted tax cuts and deregulation absolutely do not want their customers to have these new rights. They don't want courts to get anywhere near this, because if their products become Nazi-riddled cesspools, for example their public helpdesks or anywhere else, Their Products Will Die.

So right off the bat, just on this one issue, we see that the financiers of Trump's rise are either (a) boned or (b) going to have to somehow convince The Criminal's underlings that corporate cash flows are more important than enabling violent basement chuds whose only major purchases are Nazi memorabilia and anime-themed body pillows.

3) Trump didn't write any of this. Of course he didn't; we've seen Trump's writing and it is the written equivalent of spaghetti thrown against a wall, then more spaghetti thrown against that wall, then an entire warehouse full of spaghetti thrown against the wall until nobody can even tell there was once a wall somewhere in the middle of that.

Trump does not, absolutely does not, give a flying damn about the intricacies of Section Something-Something, this is purely something written for him to read out. The question becomes: Who wrote it?

That is going to be the operative question of the entire Trump administration, because even back in 2016 we saw that Trump was openly hostile to hearing about any issue or program that didn't involve carving his own likeness into a mountain somewhere. The Trump we've seen in 2024 is an incoherent, rambling mess, and it's not going to get better. All of this, every bit of it, is going to be written for him, presented as if he was the one who thought it up, and Trump's contribution will be to sign his name wherever he's asked to.

He's going to be the weakest strongman in history—a puppet of those around him. Journalists need to be teasing out who's pulling each string, and who's getting paid for pulling each one. There will be prepared announcements like this one, things that The Criminal has no particular interest in but is willing to do because the stupidest and most crooked minds in all of Republicandom insist to him that "the base" will love it. And in the meantime Trump will be again preoccupied with courting bribes and near-bribes, trading petty little things like golf tournament sponsorships in exchange for overlooking a genocide here or there.

If there's any small silver lining to any of this, it's that the collection of people Trump has assembled are, and I mean this with new religious conviction, the stupidest and most incompetent f--kups America has to offer, and at least half of Trumpism's campaign promises revolve around doing things (tariffs!) that one half of his coalition or the other desperately does not want. The infighting has already started, and is only going to get worse through December and January.

Trump's purportedly leaning to Very Stupid UltraExtremists as his frontrunners for various administration positions. Tom Homan is said to be the likely leader of Trump's deportation plans, which means it will likely turn criminal quite quickly. Elon Musk has purchased himself a seat as Stunt Jared Kushner, the person who Trump will vaguely wave at as his "solve everything, I don't give a shit" double—and Musk's interests so far have been focused squarely on sucking up as much federal money as he can while the sucking's good. Democrats may want to propose a new Mars program for him to play with; for only a trillion dollars of national debt we could likely keep him preoccupied to the point where he loses interest in his decaying Nazi social network and, if we're lucky, volunteers to lead the first manned Mars expedition himself.

But the conjunction of incompetence, conspiracy obsession, naked corruption, invigorated base racism and an earnest attempt by Trump to crush the entire national economy through tariffs that will hit some of his top benefactors very, very hard? That's a recipe for absolute chaos.

Our job, as a new religion founded on the principles of Everything Elon Musk Wants Sucks (there are other principles forthcoming, but have you ever chiseled anything onto stone tablets? IT'S NOT EASY), is to fuel that chaos in every way we can. You say Truth Social now has to allow posters to post anything they want and it's illegal to ban them? Oh you sweet summer child.