Whether they’re meat-mouthed MAGA instigators who got kicked off Twitter for issuing one too many epithet-laced tirades about what should happen to their enemies, or green-haired antifa trust fund sloths exiled for doxing people as fast as their bitten-down fingertips can type, this Thanksgiving was their greatest ever.
Recent Twitter acquisitor Elon Musk issued a poll just before our national attitude-of-gratitude day to decide the proposition, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?”
Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
In an electoral landslide no American is ever likely to see in real life, the Thanksgiving Day final count showed 72.4 percent of 3,162,112 respondents voted to cry mutant and let loose the trolls, while just 27.6 percent voted to keep them out.
Musk did not hesitate to herald the return of the banished, tweeting, “The people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
The people have spoken.
Amnesty begins next week.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2022
You might remember Musk from such previous Twitter-ban reversals as last week’s, when a similar poll encouraged the Tesla/SpaceX boss to reactivate the account of Donald Trump, who was issued a permanent suspension on January 8, 2021 for his tweets surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.
Trump has so far demurred the offer to return to his Musk-reanimated Twitter page, telling followers at his own, much, much smaller networking site, Truth Social, “Vote now with positivity, but don’t worry, we aren’t going anywhere. Truth Social is special!”
Still, reopening the door to Trump—not to mention Georgie madwoman and U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene—and now, perhaps, to a total wave of craze as he lifts the Arkham gates, Musk is reiterating that he alone runs Twitter.
That should have been clear enough in the first hours of Musk’s October takeover, when he got the ball rolling on his promise to fire half of the company’s 7,500 employees by immediately canning CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, general counsel Sean Edgett, and Vijaya Gadde, head of legal policy, trust and safety. It was this executive cabal, along with ever-hated co-founder Jack Dorsey, that the Twitter outcasts have long accused of enforcing its conduct policies with an extreme bias against conservatives.
The move to welcome back an untold legion of gabblers lacking impulse control is also another clear signal that Musk has decided, on second thought, that, no, he certainly will not be consulting a “content moderation council” of lesser executives in deciding who will be allowed reentry to his special playground—these are the same minds that predicted Musk would never readmit Trump, either.
While we’ll have to wait until next week to see which Twitter monsters of yore will be returning, some of the famous departed include disgraced arch-right frightener Milo Yiannopoulos, kicked out in 2016 for a series of attacks on actress Leslie Jones following the release of the Ghostbusters reboot in which she starred, calling the actress “fat” and “another black dude,” among other things, and political ghoul Roger Stone, who was dismissed in 2017 after tweeting at CNN’s Don Lemon, “stop lying about about the Clinton’s and Uranium you ignorant lying covksucker !!!! You fake news you dumb piece of shit.” He also suggested that the network’s Jake Tapper “must be held accountable for his lies and very severely punished.”
While the ultimate function of the First Amendment is the protection of unpopular, troubling speech, it is also argued that it must as vigorously defend the merely stupid blithering of the emotionally unkempt. Under that theory: Muskie, you’re doing a heck of a job.
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