Why Is The Taliban On Twitter While Trump Remains Banned?
Leftists claim to be concerned about threats of violence, yet they seem to be willfully ignorant of their own faults -- and that's not good for America.
While the Wall Street Journal and the UK Economist are keeping Afghanistan in the headlines, most major US newspapers are doing everything in their power to keep the most serious human rights catastrophe since Obama’s policy of democratic uprisings pushed Syria into civil war and created ISIL out of the news — and off the front page.
This media bias isn’t a one-off.
News this morning from a Reuters exclusive shows that the events on January 6th were uncoordinated and chaotic — something that was self-evident to most observers — are barely making headlines today. Bad news typically being released on a Friday, it goes to show the lengths some are willing to take to undermine any bipartisan report that comes out regarding events that day.
Of course, the caging of these things remains somewhat suspect:
The chaos on Jan. 6 erupted as the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives met to certify Joe Biden's victory in November's presidential election.
It was the most violent attack on the Capitol since the War of 1812, forcing lawmakers and Trump's own vice president, Mike Pence, to scramble for safety.
Most violent since the British burned the US Capitol?
You mean, more violent than an actual bomb that ripped through the US Senate in 1983? Or perhaps more violent than when actual communists detonated a bomb in the US Capitol in 1971? Or when a German sympathizer set off three sticks of dynamite inside the US Senate switchboard in 1915?
Or more violent than when a mob attempted to break into a Senate Judiciary hearing by pounding on locked doors in 2018 so as to prevent now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh from being appointed to the US Supreme Court?
It’s not an insurrection when they do it.
Or maybe the definition of an insurrection is when three dozen cities are convulsed by violent mobs for five long months leading up to the November elections?
Words Mean Things
I am digressing a bit from the headline — but on purpose. What follows is not an exercise in equivocation, but rather one of proportionality and double standards.
When political violence is excused on one side as acceptable discourse, it becomes much harder for the other side not to treat the new and lower standard as the new field of discourse.
For instance? Twitter.
Do you know who has access to Twitter right now? The litany of bad actors is terrible to behold: Hamas, Hezbollah, Planned Parenthood, the Islamic Republic of Iran, various and sundry violent BLM/Antifa organizations, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) — even al Qaeda has access to Twitter.
You know who doesn’t have access to Twitter?
Joe Concha over at The Hill fires back at assertions made by the Washington Post that this state of affairs is indeed something tolerable:
Enter the Washington Post on Wednesday to defend Twitter. The Post published what amounted to a defense of the Taliban's "strikingly sophisticated" social media prowess and juxtaposed it with Donald Trump's.
“For a group that espouses ancient moral codes, the Afghan Taliban has used strikingly sophisticated social media tactics to build political momentum and, now that they’re in power, to make a public case that they’re ready to lead a modern nation state after nearly 20 years of war,” two of the Post’s technology reporters wrote.
"The answer, analysts said, may simply be that Trump’s posts for years challenged platform rules against hate speech and inciting violence," the piece adds. "Today’s Taliban, by and large, does not."
Of course, the Taliban is already maiming and killing people in Afghanistan — not to mention rounding up Afghans who co-operated with the US military.
Physicians, Heal Yourselves?
Many years ago, Americans believed that the antidote to bad speech was not good speech — but free speech.
The dichotomy of giving the Taliban a platform while denying it to former President Donald Trump? On the basis of what if? Not only is such a position telling, but it is antithetical to what most of us believe as Americans at our very core.
Worse still, when you weigh the scales we begin to see a very disturbing and alarming pattern of willful blindness among the blue checkmarks and gatekeepers on the left.
The BLM/Antifa riots during the summer of 2020? Peaceful protests. Nevermind what the media would have said if it was three dozen unorganized state militias barricading cities, destroying property and threatening violence or employing violence — for five months. Rightly, the media would have called such actions an insurrection and an act of political terrorism.
Did we mention that of the 15 people arrested in the alleged kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer (D) that 12 were informants working for the FBI?
That sort of information might lead more than one reasonable observer to conclude that — rather than the work of right-wing militia — this scheme was more FBI plot than terrorist threat.
Yet for the vast majority of 2021, CNN and MSNBC have defined the events of January 6th as an insurrection and a coup attempt — whipping up their audiences with a climate of fear and distrust, not in an attempt to return to normalcy, but rather to fuel a climate of distrust.
That’s politically useful, I guess. But it is precisely the sort of inflammatory rhetoric that Twitter et al. claim they want to diminish.
…or at least, preserve for their own exclusive use.
The Fatal Conceit At Play
For 20 years, experts and policy makers in the United States have spent over $2 trillion dollars using our military to enforce their will upon a population dispersed in an area the size of Texas — to the tune of $300 million a day.
Violence, surveillance, the suspension of everything we might describe as civil liberties, suppression of worship, denial of goods, bribes, offers of employment, education, more bribes, the implementation of modern counterinsurgency (COIN) methods, material systems mapping, technology and much else besides.
To borrow a line from The Pogues:
Vietnam, Nicaragua, El Salvador
How foolish of you not to open your doors
To the Hersheys, Budweisers, McDonalds and more.....
This wonderful life could be yours.
They failed.
For the political left in this country who imagines they can control what they design pace Hayek, how many more examples do we require where the manipulation of the public — whether softly by public relations types or harshly by ideologues and fanatics that have plagued humanity since Cain — inevitably collapses into a heap?
In Afghanistan? It is 17-year old boys falling off of airplanes.
In America? It is failing in our classrooms, shutting down our economies, redefining marriage and sexuality — all while selling the public on the idea that it is only violence when the right mimics the left.
One should be crystal clear on this point: THIS IS NOT A CALL TO LOWER OURSELVES TO THE BASER INSTINCTS OF VIOLENCE.
In every instance, violence is the forfeiture of reason and politics. Some individuals are fond of quoting von Clausewitz that war is merely an extension of politics — Clausewitz was wrong.
This should be a constant reminder that what the left calls toleration isn’t virtuous at all, but the enforcement of vicious behavior in pursuit of an ideological end.
If you want freedom, then defend freedom.
But the dichotomy and rank hypocrisy of silencing voices on America’s political center-right while giving a soapbox to actual proponents of violence isn’t just morally wrong — it is censorship in service to propaganda.
The late William F. Buckley Jr. used to remark that the political left often claimed to want to give a hearing to other views — but found themselves shocked and offended to discover that there were indeed other views.
The media — what’s left of it — should be a bit more aware of this condition. Most conservatives feel it with a resentment bordering on an appropriate sort of anger. Of course, this would require a degree of introspection the political left has yet to be able to display other than through facile attempts to be more authentically aggrieved than their victims.
Shaun Kenney is the editor of The Republican Standard, former chairman of the Board of Supervisors for Fluvanna County, and a former executive director of the Republican Party of Virginia.