Hot take: Twitter banning Donald Trump is good and is in keeping with past media practice in American history.

Yes, I'm aware of the dangers of large monopolies dictating what is and what is not acceptable speech. But we've seen this kind of thing before.

In the 1950s, the antisemitic AMERICAN MERCURY magazine was essentially driven from the newsstands by a distributors' boycott.

I wrote about this in my article in the @JournAmHist last fall.

The AMERICAN MERCURY story occupies a special place in the mythos of American conservatism, because it was a right-wing antisemitic magazine that became so toxic William F. Buckley disavowed the publication.

This was, according to that narrative, a bold stand against the fever swamps of the far right that Buckley made on principle and was responsible for sending the MERCURY into a well-earned obscurity.

Expect... not really.

The MERCURY was already teetering by the time Buckley disavowed the magazine in 1959, in large part because of a magazine distributor's boycott.

See, what appeared on the newsstands -- which were the way most newspapers and magazines made their sales in the '50s -- was ultimately up to the distribution companies, an industry that was effectively cartelized.

And the big companies wanted nothing to do with the MERCURY.

In fact, the MERCURY got its second wind in 1957 when American News -- the monopoly that controlled most of the newsstand market -- was broken up by the government.

This meant they could negotiate with one of the smaller successors to get the magazine back on the stands.

It didn't last, though -- even the smaller post-American News companies dumped the MERCURY when it became apparent they wouldn't change their content, and most of its professional journalists had all jumped ship by 1958.

This is all, incidentally, well before Buckley felt it necessary to condemn the magazine.

The relevance for today is this: corporations have censored -- directly or indirectly -- this kind of speech before.

This poses immense challenges to American radicalism, which is more often -- by a considerable degree -- the subject of state and corporate repression; however, realistically those challenges would still exist regardless of corporate policy towards the far right.

I think Twitter should be either broken up or nationalized; finally doing the right thing after spend 5 years enabling the far right when it no longer seems politically advantageous to do so should not buy the company public sympathy.

But -- after 5 years -- they have *finally* done the right thing.