We all know that Donald Trump is an idiot and/or suffering from some kind of debilitating metal disorder. But I still expect better of him than he delivers.

You may imagine how disappointing it was to see the president of the United States complaining that his 1st amendment rights were violated by twitter flagging his violent threats as violent threats.

This is genuinely upsetting, because it’s so stupid. It’s straight out of the playbook of some conservative 19-year-old apologist on Facebook: “Waaaa waaa my free speech is being stifled” when that free speech is actually, you know, not “free speech” at all. As we know, Twitter is a platform owned by a private company and – ostensibly – anarcho-capitalists like the Trump administration ought to favor the corporation’s rights over the individuals. That’s how Hobby Lobby wound up having an official corporate stance on religion which trumps the beliefs of its staff. That’s only the beginning of the stupid, though: this reveals that Trump couldn’t even read up to and past the 1st amendment in the constitution. Not that I’m a believer in the constitution, but anyone who is going to paint themselves as a believer in the constitution ought to at least understand the god damned thing.

I am required to illustrate:

Personally, I would prefer if it said that “government agencies, congress, the judiciary, and public utilities shall…” but our founding fathers were not goofy enough to foresee Donald Trump. Few were. If Twitter were a public utility then I think it would be perfectly reasonable to say they could not block any speech that is not already regulated under the US’ substantial patchwork of laws that … regulate free speech. For example, inciting violence is regulated speech, as was the ‘sedition’ (literally: criticism of government) that landed Eugene V. Debs in jail. I think I might gain a tiny shred of respect for Trump if he went to prison to defend a free speech right, but he’s just bleating on Twitter, which puts him in the company of Alex Jones and other crackpots, who don’t understand that Twitter is a corporation that – unfortunately – can do pretty much what it wants with its data. I find it so ironic it hurts my teeth, to contemplate how the government that has favored corporate supremacy at every turn is now suffering from that. [The Pentagon’s JEDI project is where the real pain will kick in as the government learns what it means to be “just another customer.”]

We should acknowledge and welcome Trump into the elite lower-tier of internet wankers: the blockheads who complain that their free speech is being suppressed when someone (other than congress) says “that’s enough out of you” and blocks them. Any blogger has had run-ins with those combative idiots, the internet equivalent of barracks lawyers.

Twitter, of course, is part of the problem – part of the reason why we have a Twitter-addled dipshit in the white house projecting his incoherent public policy with his stupid little hands holding his smart phone. The fact that Twitter is still A Thing is a problem; it ought to have gone the way of FOX news, by now. It exists as an example of what Groucho Marx said, “I wouldn’t want to join a club that would have someone like me Donald Trump as a member.”