Dear friends,
It was natural to imagine that 2021 would mark a turning point, but the horizon isn’t as bright as we had hoped.
I have been cursing Twitter ever since I figured out what it is. POTUS has a whole press office at his disposal and one would think that the ‘dignity of the office’ (oops! turns out that an office is only ever as dignified as its inhabitant) would obviate the need for tweets from the most powerful person on the planet. I still cannot comprehend that someone who flushed his home toilet with a golden handle would have so little regard for polish where it matters. There’s so much I don’t understand.
It is cold comfort that Twitter and Facebook have finally cut Trump off.
"Facebook's own research showed that two thirds of the time a user joined an extremist group on Facebook, it's because Facebook's own algorithm recommended it," Adam Sharp, Former Head of News, Government, and Elections at Twitter, said.
Sharp had a change of heart when it comes to kicking the president off of Twitter.
The president has repeatedly violated Twitter’s stated rules, such as they are, with little meaningful action by the company. Why should any company have such arbitrary power — first to amplify and then to muzzle incitements to violence?
Over the weekend, a beloved former student introduced me to the work of Carlos Maza. The third Maza video I watched offered a concise indictment of ‘the free market’ as the dominant force in society. Maza uses simple graphics to show that the objection to government power is usually posited as a threat to the individual, while it is, in fact, primarily a threat to corporate power, the real danger us all.
To give a single example, the poor suckers who have been manipulated into doing Trump’s bidding believe that mask-wearing is a greater threat to their freedom than the health insurance companies that may cost them their life savings and their homes if they are unfortunate enough to get sick with Covid. New deaths from the coronavirus are up 47% in the last two weeks and new cases are up 38%. Tell me again that we don’t need good government.
Until Big Tech is regulated by the government to protect us as workers, consumers, and citizens, we are in DIY-mode. There is a campaign called Stop the Hate for Profit:
Stop Hate for Profit is a diverse and growing coalition that wants social media companies to take common-sense steps to address the rampant racism, disinformation and hate on its platform. It includes thousands of businesses, numerous prominent celebrities as well as some of the most prominent civil rights groups and nonprofit organizations in the country including ADL, Color of Change, Common Sense, Free Press, LULAC, Mozilla, NAACP, National Hispanic Media Center, and Sleeping Giants.
As of January 2021, we are asking that Facebook, Twitter, Alphabet and other social media platforms #BanTrumpSaveDemocracy by permanently removing Donald Trump from their platforms. Access to these services is a privilege, one that Donald Trump clearly has forfeited based on an indisputable pattern of behavior that preceded his calls to violence on January 6. If platforms do not remove Donald Trump by the presidential inauguration on January 20, when there must be a peaceful transition, the Stop Hate for Profit Coalition will call on companies to stop advertising on those platforms.
If you use social media, please make use of the coalition’s social media toolkit. And watch Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “message to fellow Americans and friends around the world.”
What else should we do? Among the many things I have learned from the weekly organizing calls with the organizers of The Frontline is how to effectively respond to trolls. This is the most effective DIY move I’ve seen. The call is run as a webinar, rather than a Zoom, and hundreds (sometimes thousands?) of activists show up each week to be inspired, educated, and mobilized to political action. On each call, the organizers acknowledge the likelihood that not everyone on the call is a friend, and that periodically, hateful remarks will turn up in the chat. They remind participants that the best way to respond to such remarks is to fill the chat with love for the person speaking and support for the work and our shared goals. Last week, I missed the offending remark entirely (though I am a consummate chat-reader) because of the flash-flood of messages from upstanders. This is something we can all practice and teach our children.
Register for The Frontline’s organizing call Wednesday at 8 PM. Watch and learn: there is love-in-action in the chat.
There is no alternative to impeachment; Trump must never be able to run for elected office again and no child should ever attend a school with his name on it. Of course, that will require specific legislation. Those of us who teach will need to continue the good fight against evidence-free sources of ‘information’.
Sign this petition calling on all those with the Constitutional power to remove Trump to do so immediately.
with love,
L