To say the past few days have been overwhelming is an understatement. I am still trying to wrap my mind around the events that have transpired. It feels like after 911 , but even more intense, in part due to the role of social media. In some ways it is worse because at least after 911 the nation was united, but now it is more divided than ever. Although there are some similarities to the conditions leading up to the Civil War, the Trump-ists, analogous to the Confederates, do not have anything resembling a sovereign governing body or territory. It is also reminiscent of the protests during the tumultuous decades of the 60s and 70s. The BLM protests caused more nominal damage protracted over many months, but the storming of the Capitol and getting inside, symbolically, was a much more forceful and brazen–given the obvious risks of infiltrating a presumably heavily defended federal building–display of power than just ransacking a Target or burning random buildings.
Finally, as a coup de grâce, Trump’s Twitter account was perma-suspended for ‘inciting violence,’ which has become a vague sort of catch-all for anything deemed offensive to the left and deserving of censorship, without having to provide any further justification or specifics. Trump’s penultimate Twitter post can be interpreted to mean that the legacy of the Trump administration will live on in the hearts and minds of the 75 million Americans who voted for him; it takes some olympic-level mental gymnastics to interpret the tweet as a call to arms.
The idiots on twitter are parroting the “it’s a private company argument,” except that Twitter is not a fully private company ,but rather a publicly traded one that has a fiduciary duty to act in the best interests of shareholders, and thus Mr. Dorsey does not have sole discretion over how Twitter is run like he would if it were a sole proprietorship, and therefore if Twitter’s banning of Trump is deemed sufficiently bad for shareholder interests, the management responsible can be overturned by a board and proxy shareholder vote and Trump’s account reinstated.