My friend makes an excellent point and truly dives into the freedom of speech issues surrounding Trump's twitter ban, as well as providing a perspective on free speech that is not First Amendment/US-centric. Very refreshing. https://twitter.com/clothedvillainy/status/1347767898371051523

So it is with a heavy heart that I must don my American flag shirt, fire up my grill, cry out to my bald eagle familiar, and summon all the hegemonic power of the United States Constitution to disagree... within the US, at least.

I think that his common-sense, regulatory-framework approach can work in functional democracies with some degree of a sense of societal responsibility. I disagree that it can work--culturally--in the United States.

The reason the US framework lends itself to all-or-nothing, government and wider-society skeptical responses like our First Amendment is that Americans, fundamentally, are apes.

Get us into a community beyond Dunbar's Number, and all we do is see everyone outside our tribe as fodder for a violent retribution for the crime of existing differently than us.

The US Constitution is built on a framework of skepticism that government, even that started with good intentions, will remain good. The early Federalists, for example, believed that over time, the American legal system would develop into one where respect for the law

promoted the tendency of people to be lawful. The Anti-Federalists, on the other hand, saw that your average American was prevented from violent grift not by a sense of moral duty to fellow man, but by the fact he wasn't smart enough to think of one.

200+ years of maturity have not improved the American constitution sufficiently that we may be governed in any other manner than our Constitution. Let us say that we agree the power of major tech corporations to dominate the online marketplace of ideas has become worrisome.

The US government would create an agency, or grant powers to an existing one, such as the FCC, to oversee the activity of online media companies to ensure fundamental fairness and right of access.

Under a Democratic administration, this agency would begin with the best of intentions, high-minded policy statements about equal access and allowing the marketplace of ideas to flourish. An amount of power would be doled out, sufficient to enable "sensible" regulation.

And then some cousinfucker in Alabama or Arkansas would start "Billy Bob's Page o' Hollerin'" that was wall-to-wall slurs and bigotry, ending each blog post with a call to gas the Jews and begin a race war.

"Oh no no no" our sensible, moderate liberal would say, "that cannot stand." And so Billy Bob would be censored and removed, and all right-thinking people would say, "well yeah, he was an asshole."

But Billy Bob's Uncle Beauxregard, who served as a nine-term representative from West Pennsyltuckio, would be quite chuffed that his nephew got censored of the sin box for a few words that his mammy used to use when she cooked him possum fritters, so...

He would bide his time. And when our sensible moderate Democrat centrist limped from office, and the American people decided a movie star cowboy real estate mogul was just tough enough to really put this country back on track, they'd elect a Republican.

And as the sensible deep state moderates of the FCC faded away, and fresh young ideologues hand picked by Representative Beauxregard made their way to President Movie Cowboy's desk, you'd see the FCC start to change.

The precedent set by the Banning of Billy Bubba would be twisted. After all, the FCC would say, isn't it equally as hateful to call someone a n****r as it is to call them a n*zi? Don't precocious white kids who want to use the Gamer Word in school papers suffer equally?

And so, Mama Commie's Mommunism Mommyblog which advocated the gulag of all nazi sympathizers would find itself removed for "hate speech." "But that's not hate speech!" the moderate liberal masses would cry.

"Too fucking bad," says the Republican FCC commissioner. "We're in charge now, and you're going to get as good as you gave when you were in charge!"

"But we just banned nazis! We weren't saying YOU were a nazi!"

"And we're just banning commies! Same thing!"

So after eight years of Movie Cowboy's fuckery, the American people would wake up and realize, "Oh shit, that's right, the country ends in flames when we elect Republicans," and they'd go back to the next mealy-mouthed milquetoast Democrat who simpered on stage.

And the Democrat would (predictably) usher the Republican FCC commish out the door to replace him by what he thought was a safe, moderate, bipartisan pick of the least objectionable Republican he knew, a golfing buddy from the country club.

now-Senator Beauxregard would meet with his Republican colleague over a steak dinner, and tell him, "Now boy, don't you go out there throwin' them Demoncrats any bones at the FCC! Y'all be tough on 'em, or we'll fix it so your boy ain't gettin' into no Harvard."

Then the FCC commissioner would come out and ban the worst white supremacist podcast he could find, and also a trash-talky liberal blog where some post-college grads said mean things about the memory of Dear Ronald Reagan.

And the people would shrug and say, "hmm, yeah, but at least he's even-handed," as the Overton window got dragged further and further away from the FCC's stated high-ideals mission.

When the cycle spins again, and now we've elected the Large Adult Son of an oil magnate to the Presidency, and he outsources every major decision to a group of vampires and ghouls hellbent on starting a war somewhere, anywhere, for profit, the FCC again passes back to...

AN IDEOLOGUE WHO BELIEVES ALL ANTI-WAR SENTIMENT IS UNPATRIOTIC AND DESERVING OF A FIRING SQUAD, or at least a good censoring.

Soon every left-of-center antiwar TikTok is cause for sedition prosecutions, and the landscape is even more restricted. But once FratBrosident is impeached, and another sensible moderate Democrat is in office, the FCC again...

finds itself unable to restore us to our original vision where only violent nazis were banned, and we're back to having to tolerate hate speech while, in an attempt to appear fair to appease backwoods churls, anything more left-leaning than a whiff of Chomsky is banned.

And so on, and so forth, until the only "safe" opinions to hold in America are moderately center-right anti-social-safety net opinions that won't upset the billionaire class cracking the whip over our backs.

No, the problem with the American Constitution is that it governs Americans, who are a people so monumentally hard-headed and stupid we can't be governed any other way than to take the hands-off approach and tell us to sort our own shit out.

Yes, it would indeed be terrible if PayPal or VenMo or whatever decided that, in addition to punishing sex workers, they decided to punish LGBT people or Palestianian activists.

But Americans are not going to solve that problem through coming up with sensible regulation, because we pervert and warp all sensible regulation with our desire for factionalism and tribal revenge against our greatest enemies, our own countrymen.

Instead, we have to be told that we cannot have that power, that we have to leave those people over there alone, because if we don't, we'll try to find a way to fucking kill them.

And if a company chooses to misbehave, the only weapon Americans can safely wield against it is our vociferous, ferocious desire to squash all nuance and call them out in the public square for a (verbal) flogging.

The only better approach in this dumb country to solving these disputes would be to bring back the code duello and let us settle the matter on the field of honor if we cannot settle it rationally in the courts.

We are not a people made for polite society. We are an endless frontier, a people of perpetual pioneering spirit and drive that is incompatible with urbane and refined society. We're moonshine cut with wood alcohol, not a wine that will appreciate with age.

And that is why the American approach to the First Amendment works. We ban the stuff that history and tradition say we have to, and leave the rest for people to sort out on their own without the help of government, which cannot be trusted because we cannot be trusted.