I told you months ago that Donald Trump was preparing to censor the Internet for political
gain and it's going to happen, or at least he's going to try and I'm going to tell you
about it, but let's think back to the foundation of all of this.
The foundation of all of this actually goes to quote fake news, Fake News, and talking
about journalism licenses as Donald Trump has done, and talking about shutting down
certain media outlets and talking about how social media is just all left wing and they've
really got to do something about it.
I told you from the beginning, it was all a pretext to eventually try to clamp down
on Internet speech politically along political lines.
And then a couple of months ago, Trump had, maybe it was a month ago, Trump had this just
comically laughable social media summit at the White House.
And of course, no left-wingers were invited.
I pointed this out at the time and of course the entire pretext of the social media summit
was that, oh, the right is being censored online and it's also unfair.
None of it is true, of course.
And now politico has learned over the weekend that there are drafts going around of an executive
order by Donald Trump, which would be a truly authoritarian nightmare.
The likes of which I don't believe we've ever seen before in the modern sort of internet
news era.
What we know so far is a draft of the order exists.
It would allow the administration to fight back against what they say, our liberal cesspools
on social media.
And it is believed that there would be penalties for a social media company that quote censors
political viewpoints.
And this is, I can't, it's almost impossible to explain the severity of what is going on
now.
No one yet has gone on record about what the penalties would be to social media platforms,
but this is truly a free speech horror.
Let me explain to you why it's so dangerous.
Twitter has policies, for example, against bullying trans people by mis-gendering them
as just one example.
The left believes this is simply an issue of treating people correctly.
It's an issue of Internet bullying period.
It's not political issue and the same way that we'd not argue today that a policy against
calling black people, the n word is not a political issue.
Most of us, I know that there are some out and out racist who would disagree, but in
2019 most people understand a policy on a social media platform against targeting black
people with the n word is not a political policy.
It's just we treat people in a respectful way in the way that they should be treated.
That is the view of Twitter when it comes to deliberately mis-gendering people to the
point of it being bullying the right believes and has said that merely having a policy around
bullying that includes how you gender people on the Internet is a left wing bias.
So this gets us back to Donald Trump's potential internet censorship policy.
A policy like what Donald Trump is proposing would supposedly prescribe punishments for
limiting political speech and they would argue that a policy against anti-trans speech, including
deliberately mis-gendering people in a way that is bullying is politically biased action
by Twitter.
They would argue that Twitter, by not allowing incessant mis-gendering to the point of bullying,
Twitter is silencing a political viewpoint, which I guess is the political viewpoint that
it's fine to mis-gender trans people deliberately to the point of bullying.
Can you see how dangerous this is?
This is an incoming fascistic restriction on speech from those who claim.
Remember that they're all about speech, they don't want to limit speech, and we can actually
simplify a ton of what's underlying this.
Trump doesn't like people saying things about them on the Internet and he wants to find
a way to either make it illegal or to make it punishable by fines or some kind of other
penalty.
Of course, there are a lot of right wingers who have other priorities here and they happen
to line up with Donald Trump.
They believe social media is all left wing, all that stuff.
They do believe it, but it's super easy to get Trump on board by telling him, Mr President,
you can punish the companies that are allowing all of these mean things to be said about
you.
These are private companies.
Conservative supposedly are all for private companies making their rules and functioning
with as little regulation as possible.
Why don't conservatives just leave these platforms, start their own sort of like a gate, a couple
finding a different baker to bake them a cake.
The truth is it's a lie.
They don't really like private business and a marketplace of ideas.
If the ideas of the business or the marketplace aren't the ones that they like.
If anything, Twitter is going easy on things that violate their terms and conditions because
if Twitter actually enforced the terms and conditions on Donald Trump's Twitter account,
he would have been banned by now.
Trump regularly bullies people on Twitter.
Trump regularly threatens violence on Twitter.
The sort of glimmer of hope here, because this executive order from what we know so
far looks truly horrifying.
The one glimmer of hope is that courts strike this down, but remember that increasingly
Trump controls the courts.
Trump has two supreme court justices that he has selected.
I believe Trump is now selected 25% of it may be district and appellate courts.
We did the story last week and I forget the numbers, but the point is Trump is increasingly
controlling.
Every month Trump has more control over the court system that would ultimately adjudicate
whether this incoming executive order is even legal.
So we've got to get him out now, which really means November of 2020 I don't know any other
way around it.
It's, it must be done because this now is starting to become a true authoritarian nightmare
even for things as simple as just speech on the Internet.
As soon as I have more details about the executive order draft, I will absolutely get them to
you.
Make sure you're following the David Pakman show on Instagram at David Pakman show.
I did post a few hours ago a tomato update, my tomato plants, big developments with my
tomato plants in the literal and proverbial sense over the weekend and I posted
there's a story to my Instagram page, David.
Dot. Patrick, check that out.
We'll take a quick break and do back after that,