Twitter Cannot Be Saved. It’s Time For Free Speech Proponents To Let It Die

I had high hopes for Twitter under Elon Musk’s watch. After all, how could the tech giant get any worse after banning the New York Post, which was founded by Alexander Hamilton himself, for the crime of reporting on possible corruption of the family of a leading presidential candidate in the middle of a close election?

We now have an answer: by banning conservative Christians for reporting on the horrific mass shooting perpetrated by an apparent “trans” person who hated conservative Christians so much she stormed a Christian school in Nashville, opened fire, and murdered three 9-year-old children and three adult staff.

What happened in Nashville was not just another story on the news. We’ve worshipped at Covenant Presbyterian. Dear friends of ours work there, and children we’ve known and loved for years attend school there. We wept throughout the day on Monday, desperately praying and waiting for news of our friends. And when the dust cleared, and facts began to emerge about the demonic evil that was visited upon that school on Monday, we reported the facts about what happened.

One of those facts was that the shooting came just days ahead of a planned “Trans Day of Vengeance,” an event planned by an outfit called the Trans Radical Activist Network.

“I am glad I was in the Stonewall Riot,” the group’s web page announcing the event states. “I remember when someone threw a Molotov cocktail, I thought, ‘My god, the revolution is here.’”

Pictures of radical trans activists sporting T-shirts that state “Trans rights… or else” and feature outlines of guns proliferated on social media throughout the week, making clear exactly what these activists desired to happen.

Well, it happened on Monday at a quiet Christian school atop a hill in the middle of Nashville. And by Wednesday afternoon I was banned by Twitter from accessing my account for reporting on the shooting, for reporting on the Trans Day of Vengeance which may well have inspired the cold-blooded murderer, and for sharing a link to a news story from The Daily Wire, another conservative news outlet based in Nashville.

Twitter claimed my reporting violated Twitter’s terms of service and that I had personally threatened, incited, glorified, or expressed a desire for violence. Such a claim isn’t just false; it’s defamatory. Twitter published a notice on my feed (which I can no longer even access) stating I violated its rules. Again, such a claim is false and defamatory. Twitter has a right to ban me for whatever reason it wants, but it doesn’t have a right to viciously lie about me. See the tweet and Twitter’s e-mails to me for yourself:

Ella Irwin, the head of Twitter’s Orwellian “trust and safety group,” claimed on Twitter on Wednesday that the tech company wasn’t banning accounts for reporting on the Trans Day of Vengeance. Instead, she claimed, the company was merely trying to remove scheduling and logistics information for the event, lest people gather and commit violence. She claimed no accounts were being banned or punished for reporting on the event. That is also false. (I would include links to Irwin’s tweets so you can read them in full context, but unfortunately, I’m banned from accessing the service, so you’ll have to take my word for it or search for them yourself).

Irwin and others cling to the facade of safety: We’re only doing this so as not to inflame people, lest they join the Trans Day of Vengeance event. Let’s be clear about this rationale: It is a lie meant to suffocate both the facts and those precious few of us who dare to report them. It is no different than banning reporting of the Holocaust for fear it might incite someone to launch a new one, or banning police and accusing them of murder because they posted a wanted poster with the picture of a murderer on the loose.

What the people behind this censorship are truly worried about is the prospect of the American people understanding the true evil underlying transgender ideology and the danger it poses to the country and its survival. They don’t want you to understand how every major institution of power in this country bends its knee to the radical trans movement, tells its adherents they are victims, and tells them that anyone who utters the verboten truth that boys cannot become girls and girls cannot become boys wishes to commit genocide against the so-called trans community.

What do you think is the logical conclusion of telling delusional, mentally ill people being surgically mutilated and pumped full of hormones that Christians and conservatives want to commit “genocide” against them? That’s the question you’re not allowed to ask because they know how you’ll answer it because you watched with your own eyes what happened in Nashville on Monday.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican member of Congress, was banned from accessing her account for highlighting the radical trans activists’ “Day of Vengeance.” Luke Rosiak, an investigative reporter for The Daily Wire whose article I linked in my tweet, was banned from accessing his account. Tom Elliott, who runs the invaluable media clip service Grabien, was banned from accessing his account. I am banned from accessing my account unless I delete a tweet that Twitter itself has already removed from my feed. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s probably a duck, and if it walks like targeted ideological censorship of conservatives for the crime of reporting facts and acknowledging biological reality, then it’s probably targeted ideological censorship of conservative reporters, publishers, and even elected representatives.

As someone who regularly uses Twitter to both publish and consume the news, I was hopeful Musk would be able to clean out the rot inside Twitter once he took over. I hoped he would make good on his promise to restore Twitter as a free-speech platform. I even ponied up the $8-per-month fee for his Twitter Blue service because I wanted to support his efforts. A lot of good that did.

It’s now abundantly clear that despite spending a whopping $44 billion to acquire the company, Musk isn’t in charge of it. I don’t know who actually is, but nobody who believes in free speech would spend the days after a mass shooting banning Christians, conservatives, and prominent reporters and news publications for having the audacity to report on what happened and what might have caused it. After all, you can judge a tree by its fruit.

Nearly a year ago to the day, another reporter for The Federalist was also banned from accessing his account unless he deleted a tweet deemed offensive by Twitter’s Bolshevik censors. John Davidson was banned for tweeting that Rachel Levine (formerly Richard Levine), a high-ranking Biden administration official who claims to be transgender, is indeed a man, and that no amount of lipstick and dress-up can change biological reality. He linked to a story on the topic from The Babylon Bee, a popular Christian conservative satire site. His account was locked, and he’s been banned from accessing it ever since. Are you noticing a trend? Our pleas for his account to be unlocked fell on deaf ears.

When a rage-filled and mentally ill “trans” person shoots up a school, the media blame Republicans, or the NRA, or gun makers, or anyone other than the shooter and her warped ideology. They turn the victims into villains, and they turn the murderer into a martyr.

Twitter responded no differently. It didn’t ban us and lock us out of our accounts for lying, but for telling the truth. Why? Because the facts of Monday’s mass murder are fatal to the left-wing narrative, and the only thing the left wing and its myriad institutions in government, business, and media care about is the narrative. The narrative must be protected at all costs, even if it means lying about the facts and those of us who report them.

No amount of lofty rhetoric or grandiose plans from Musk about his love of free speech and facts can compete with the cold, hard reality that the service he owns doesn’t just oppose free speech; Twitter detests it. The totalitarian drones who spend their days scouring the Internet for anyone who dares say the emperor has no clothes, boys can’t become girls, and radical trans activists are murdering people who oppose their evil ideology prove that the Twitter of 2023 under Musk is the same anti-free speech cesspool it was in 2020, when it banned, under false pretenses, the longest-running paper in circulation in America from reporting on corruption allegations surrounding Joe Biden and his son.

As my friend and colleague John Davidson (also banned by Twitter from accessing his account) noted in a discussion this morning, “Censorship of reportage or discussion of violent extremist groups, whether trans or jihadi, under the pretext that one is ‘promoting’ violent extremism, is some next-level Orwellian bullsh-t, and only serves to reiterate a point I made in my recent Imprimis article about the Twitter Files: ALL social media content moderation is censorship and propaganda. All of it.”

Twitter is toast, and the sad truth of the matter is that Musk either can’t, or won’t, fix it. Musk may never get his $44 billion back, but until Twitter repents and stops producing rotten fruit, conservatives should keep their $8 in their pockets. At some point, instead of hoping the poison vine will produce fine wine, you just have to acknowledge reality and let it die.