Meta - aka Facebook - has announced that it has finally reversed itself and is letting former President Trump back on the trademark social media site. As per Fox News, the report goes like this: Trump issues statement after Meta announces end of 2-year Facebook ban, allowing him to return to the platform
The story says:
Nick Clegg, president of global affairs at Meta, said the company determined Trump is no longer a "serious risk to public safety" and they had ‘guardrails’ in place for his return.
"To assess whether the serious risk to public safety that existed in January 2021 has sufficiently receded, we have evaluated the current environment according to our Crisis Policy Protocol, which included looking at the conduct of the US 2022 midterm elections, and expert assessments on the current security environment,’"Clegg wrote. "Our determination is that the risk has sufficiently receded, and that we should therefore adhere to the two-year timeline we set out. As such, we will be reinstating Mr. Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts in the coming weeks. However, we are doing so with new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses."
In response, the former President has replied as follows:
"FACEBOOK, which has lost Billions of Dollars in value since ‘deplatforming’ your favorite President, me, has just announced that they are reinstating my account," he wrote shortly after 4 p.m. "Such a thing should never again happen to a sitting President, or anybody else who is not deserving of retribution!"
And with this news, liberal media went crazy.
Notable in the liberal furies was New York Times reporter Mara Gay. Ms. Gay went on MSNBC and, without the slightest sense of irony, said that what Meta said it was about - making the site politically neutral- was a “fool’s errand.” She added:
Whether you’re a company or an institution, you don’t want to hand over the keys of democracy to have someone destroy that democracy. So do you want to be that institution that really helps take down the country?
If this was years ago, we would ask moral questions, do we want a chemical company — as a chemical company, should we be supporting weapons of war? I mean, these are questions that are not new in American history, but we should be asking them. Meta may not have the same responsibility as a business. It has a responsibility to its shareholders, fine, but we can still ask those moral questions, and we should.
Well.
There are few things more amusing than watching far leftist extremists accuse others of what they themselves are about.
In this case, Gay is saying that having a former President of the United States being allowed to express his opinions on issues of the day -- something known to Americans as free speech -- is a threat to democracy. In Gay’s bizarro world, allowing free speech by a political opponent is how to “destroy democracy” and acting as an “institution that really helps take down the country.”
Makes perfect sense, right? Shut down the political opposition, suppress free speech - and that is saving and promoting democracy.
Gay’s remarks in favor of suppressing Trump’s free speech come in the same time period that NewsMax reveals AT&T has had its DirecTV dropping NewsMax, the conservative channel that has made a point of carrying Trump’s rallies, among other things. (And full disclosure, I am a NewsMax contributor.)
In fairness, it must be acknowledged that DirecTV is bringing on board the conservative channel The First, including the legendary Bill O’Reilly. The First describes itself as follows:
The First is a new network for free speech and big ideas. It’s a home for people who don’t automatically believe the first thing that they read in the New York Times or hear on NPR, Fox, or CNN. A platform for people who are little bit skeptical, a little bit curious, and whole lot interested in diving much deeper into the issues that matter. It’s a forum for new thought, new approaches, and an enlightening voice for a new America that embraces the founding principles and ideals that formed the greatest country on the planet.
This is decidedly all to the good. The problem for DirecTV is that having dumped first OAN and then NewsMax, in an environment where powerful Democrats in Congress are calling for carriers like DirecTV to stop carrying conservative channels period - and yes, that includes Fox - the question is how long will The First last?
What the two episodes have in common is they give fodder to those who have seen decades of attacks on conservatives designed to silence their free speech. All done, but of course, in the name of saving democracy.
There is nothing really new here. Whether it is barring some conservative speaker from speaking on a college campus or de-platforming an entire conservative TV channel or demanding that the late Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity or any other talk radio or TV host be yanked off the air, the objective is always the same: in the name of democracy, shut down free speech, the central pillar of any democracy.
So Mara Gay of The New York Times, the liberal newspaper whose employees demanded and got the resignation of the paper’s Opinion Editor because he had the audacity -- the audacity! -- to publish an Op-Ed written by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton is out there. Out there taking Meta to task for supporting free speech. While AT&T's Direct TV de-platforms a second conservative channel.
