Tangle - Allowing Trump back on Twitter.

Episode Date: May 12, 2022

On Tuesday, Elon Musk said he would reverse Trump's Twitter ban if he takes over the company. Plus, are Republicans trying to ban IUD's?You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I'm your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we're going to be talking about Elon Musk saying he might allow Trump back on Twitter. It was a much-anticipated decision that seems to be official, though obviously Musk's Twitter takeover is not yet complete. So we're going to be diving into that issue today

and some opinions from the left and the right. Before we start, though, I want to give a quick promotion for tomorrow's newsletter, our subscribers-only newsletter coming out. I have been inundated in the last few weeks with people asking me about 2000 Mules, which is the new film that alleges to document how Democrats stole the 2020 election. I watched it last night. I am going to write about it tomorrow in Tangle. This will be a newsletter only, and the only way to get it is to be a subscriber. That means you have to go to readtangle.com slash membership and become a subscriber. If you do that, you will get the newsletter on 2000 Mules tomorrow. I think it's going to be a pretty interesting piece. So I hope you check it out. All right. As always, Finland, a historically neutral country, is calling to join NATO without delay after Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Finland and Russia share an 830-mile

long border. Number two, the Senate voted down a bill 49 to 51 that sought to codify a right to abortion into federal law with all Democrats except Joe Manchin voting in favor and all Republicans voting against it. Number three, family members and survivors of the Surfside, Florida condo collapse won a $997 million settlement that is now awaiting court approval. Number four, the governors of Virginia and Maryland asked the Justice Department to stop protesters from gathering at the homes of Supreme Court justices, saying it should enforce a federal law that prohibits demonstrations intended to sway judges on pending cases. Number five, Florida's congressional map drawn by Governor Ron DeSantis was struck down by a DeSantis-appointed

judge who said it discriminated against Black voters. The state is expected to appeal the ruling. Elon Musk said today he would reverse Trump's permanent ban on Twitter if his deal to buy the social media giant goes through. Twitter banned Trump's account following the January 6th attack on the Capitol after officials accused him of inciting violence. Banning Trump from Twitter didn't end Trump's voice. It will amplify it among the right. And this is why it is morally wrong and flat out stupid. I know we've covered Twitter a few times in the last month, so we'll

give it a rest after this, but this story felt particularly important. On Tuesday, Elon Musk said he would reverse Trump's Twitter ban if his takeover of the company is completed. The remarks ended months-long speculation about how Musk would takeover of the company is completed. The remarks ended months-long speculation about how Musk would handle one of the most controversial moderation steps Twitter has taken in its history. Musk made the remarks at the Financial Times Future of the Car Summit. He said his decision was founded in a belief about permanent bans, which he believes the company should use sparingly. Permanent bans should be extremely rare, Musk said, and really reserved for accounts that are bots or scam spam accounts.

I do not think it was correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice. I don't own Twitter yet, so this is not like a thing that will definitely happen because what if I don't own Twitter? Musk also noted is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don't own Twitter? Musk also noted that Trump has pledged not to return to Twitter, instead saying he was committed to Truth Social, a Twitter competitor he has tried to launch. Twitter CEO and former co-founder Jack Dorsey, who was in charge when the ban initially happened,

said he supported Musk's decision. Trump was permanently banned from Twitter shortly after the riots at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Twitter cited the risk of further incitement of violence and referenced two Trump tweets in a post about his ban. The first tweet read, The 75 million great American patriots who voted for me, America first, and make America great again will have a giant voice long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form, with three exclamation points. A follow-up tweet said, to all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th. At the time, the company justified the ban by saying these two tweets must be read

in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the president's statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from his account in recent weeks. It also noted that the second tweet may also serve as encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the inauguration would be a safe target as he will not be attending. In a moment, you'll hear some reactions to Must Plan from the left and the right, and then my take. All right, first up, we'll start with what the left is saying. All right, first up, we'll start with what the left is saying. The left says allowing Trump back on is a mistake, though some question the efficacy of permanent bans.

Many call Trump a liar and say he is not owed a bigger megaphone. Others criticize Musk for being naive and inconsistent. In CNN, Holly Thomas wrote about the breathtaking cluelessness of Elon Musk. A self-avowed champion of free speech, Musk said that the decision to suspend Trump was morally wrong and that it didn't end Trump's voice, it will amplify it among the right. Both of those assertions are incorrect, she wrote. Banning Trump was the only conscionable response to January 6th and deplatforming is proven to quash provocateurs. But the fact that Musk is able to act on these ideas regardless speaks to an axiom that Trump himself exemplified. In today's America, one person with no conscience and access to the right pressure points can do

almost anything they want. And as Trump's record shows, people who are prepared to misrepresent the truth as a means to or excuse for abusing their power once will almost certainly do so again. In November of 2019, the New York Times investigated the 11,390 tweets Trump sent in his presidency to date, Thomas wrote. Over half were attacks on other people, and they set the tone for his presidency. Trump ruptured U.S. foreign policy, antagonized nations already at loggerheads, and in fall of 2017 tweeted that North Korea may not be around much longer, which the country's foreign minister called a declaration of war. When the coronavirus pandemic

hit, Trump repeatedly referred to it as the China virus, a label associated with a dramatic surge in anti-Asian racial hatred online. After he lost the U.S. election, the lies he spread on Twitter were among his most popular posts ever and stoked unprecedented violence. In Wired, Gilad Edelman criticized Musk's rationale, but said he may be onto something about permanent bans. As usual, the precise logic of Musk's reasoning is hard to follow, Edelman said. He previously suggested that under his ownership, Twitter would allow any content that doesn't violate the law. But on Tuesday, he said that Twitter should still suppress tweets or temporarily suspend accounts if they say something that is

illegal or otherwise just, you know, destructive to the world. In case that was too precise, he added, if there are tweets that are wrong and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible, and a suspension, a temporary suspension, is appropriate but not a permanent ban. If anything, deleting tweets that are wrong and bad suggests a broader, more easily abused standard of content moderation than Twitter currently deploys. Wrong and bad according to whom? The most likely explanation for Musk's conflicting statements is that he's simply making this up as he goes and has not given any serious thought to how content rules should work on the social platform

that he's trying to spend $44 billion to buy, Edelman said. And yet, buried in Musk's free speech word salad is a crouton of wisdom worth chewing on. Maybe Twitter really should rethink the use of permanent bans, not just for Trump, but for everyone. Cutting someone off from Twitter or from other major social platforms can seriously constrain their ability to participate in public debate. As the Supreme Court held in 2016, to foreclose access to social media altogether is to prevent the user from engaging in the legitimate exercise of primer amendment rights. That was referring to an act of government, not a private enforcement decision. That distinction matters for legal

purposes, but from the user perspective, the impact is the same regardless of who's doing the banning. Nicholas Goldberg said Elon Musk is the one who is flat out stupid about Trump and Twitter. Trump is a liar, Goldberg wrote. Untruths, threats, fear-mongering, and bullying are his weapons of choice. His enemies are mocked and belittled. The Washington Post counted 3,573 false or misleading claims during his four years in office, beginning with his misstatements about the size of his inauguration crowd. Not all of Trump's lies are necessarily dangerous, but many are, and perhaps none was more so than his final lie in office, his insistence that the 2020 election,

which by all reputable accounts was unequivocally won by Joe Biden, was in fact rigged, mismanaged, and stolen. That lie continues to pose an extraordinary threat to American democracy. Does that mean Trump ought to have no speech rights? No, of course not, Goldberg said. He can speak and write as much as he wants, protected by the Constitution. Does that mean Trump ought to have no speech rights? No, of course not, Goldberg said. He can speak and write as much as he wants, protected by the Constitution. But Twitter doesn't owe him a megaphone.

I don't mean to suggest that this is an easy open and shut issue. Anyone who believes in and cares about free speech and wants to see robust debate, even uncomfortable debate, about important issues, has to think long and hard before coming out in favor of closing down opportunities for people to spread their messages. But I'm sorry, no private platform has an obligation to host Trump or others of his ilk. Alright, that is it for what the left is saying. That brings us to the right's take. Many on the right support allowing Trump back onto Twitter. They argue Twitter's enforcement is inconsistent and Trump never should have been banned in the first place.

However, some wonder if Trump coming back to Twitter actually would hurt him and Republicans. In the New York Post, Douglas Murray argued that permanently banning Trump was ethically unsustainable. How can it be right that a few kids in Silicon Valley can silence the voice of a former president of the United States, Murray asked. Who are they to decide what you and I can and cannot hear, and who we can or cannot hear from? Twitter's censorship started by taking out a few flamethrowers on the political right, and no one much bothered to stand up for them.

But then the censorship came further and further inland, eventually muzzling America's oldest newspaper, and finally silencing the holder of the highest office in the land. Whatever you think of Trump, the hypocrisy stinks. Twitter still allows the Taliban to have accounts on Twitter. Numerous Islamist terrorist groups have kept using the platform. The government of Iran still spews out its propaganda on Twitter. Numerous Islamist terrorist groups have kept using the platform. The government of Iran still spews out its propaganda on Twitter, and it is only very recently that Twitter seemed to have noticed that the Kremlin has been having a grand old time on

their platform. How can the company justify ruling an American president beyond the pale while the Russian president is A-OK? In short, reinstate Trump and make Twitter great again. In the New York Times, Ross Dutat rejected the notion that Musk was a conservative, instead pegging his ideology as a dynamist. A term like conservative doesn't fit the Tesla tycoon. Even Libertarian, while closer to the mark, associates Musk with a lot of ideas that I don't think he particularly cares about, he wrote. A better label comes from Virginia Postrel in her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies. Musk is what she calls a dynamist, meaning someone whose primary commitments are to exploration and discovery, someone who believes that the best society is one that's always inventing, transforming, doing something new.

Liberalism in the Obama era was an essentially dynamist enterprise, not because liberals were absolutely committed to capital-S science, but because those years encouraged a confidence that the major technological changes of the 21st century were making the world a more liberal place. Ever since Trump bent history's arc his way, however, that confidence has diminished or collapsed. Now, liberals increasingly regard the internet as the zone of monsters and misinformation, awash in a liberalism easily manipulated by demagogues, a breeding ground for insurrectionists. And if digital technology has become particularly suspect via the transitive property, so has the larger idea of innovating your way out of social or environmental problems,

empowering the part of the environmental movement that wants to tame capitalism to save the planet, for instance, at the expense of the part that imagines taming climate change with fleets of Tesla and nuclear power plants. Whatever else Musk wants with Twitter, and obviously you should assume that he wants to make a lot of money, this seems like the ideological trend he hopes to resist or halt, the liberal retreat from dynamism, the progressive turn toward ideological regulation, the pervasive left-wing fear that the First Amendment and free speech are being weaponized by authoritarians and need some kind of check. The Wall Street Journal editorial board wondered how allowing Trump back on Twitter would play out politically.

Liberal Twitter is appalled, but we wonder if returning would help or hurt the former president, the board wrote. Twitter banned Mr. Trump after the January 6, 2021 ride at the Capitol, and the constant din of his media presence has since been muted. He communicates with emailed statements and occasional interviews with friendly journalists. Our sense is that this may have helped Mr. Trump. With him out of the spotlight, Americans haven't had to listen to the daily controversies that dominated his presidency and were a major reason he lost to Joe Biden, of all candidates. Instead, the public focus has been on President Biden's policies and their results, it added.

Voters can contrast today's inflation and the rest of the relative policy success of the Trump years. If Mr. Trump is back in public view, picking fights on an hourly basis and blaming everyone for his election defeat, he may remind voters why they grew tired of his antics and made him a one-term president. Alright, that is it for the left and the right's take, which brings us to my take. So, for starters, I would bet good money that Trump is coming back to Twitter. I know the former president says he is staying on Truth Social, but that platform has had nothing but hiccups and is largely inconsequential in terms of spreading

his message. How many Truth Social posts from Trump have you heard or read about? He has 2 million followers there, all of whom are almost certainly his most loyal supporters, compared to the 80 million he had on Twitter. Does anyone believe a man with such a laser focus on media attention would turn down his megaphone if Elon Musk handed it back to him? Certainly not me. I also agree he should come back. Musk's rationale aligns nicely with my view of issues like this. Temporary bans are useful, but a permanent ban was always an extraordinarily harsh penalty. In the context of what happened then, I wrote that it did not appear tenable to keep Trump on Twitter. I think that was true. Given the absolute spiraling of January 6th and everything that happened that day,

putting Trump in timeout was a no-brainer. But a permanent ban, as Musk said, is a different animal. I also wrote this in the days after Trump was banned. What typically happens when people are deplatformed is not that their influence or power is diminished, but that they are martyred in the eyes of their supporters, entering another plane of importance now that they have been directly targeted by the quote establishment or big tech. Indeed, such a sweeping move does not delegitimize or destroy them so much as it empowers them by affirming their position and the belief of their ardent supporters

that they are so important as to need to be targeted. I truly don't know what the answer is, I don't, but I just can't shake the feeling that this all feels off, that it's all going to make things worse, and that it's absurd to see the President of the United States ban while actual dictators remain on Twitter. Perhaps it's true that for many regular Twitter users of a liberal orientation, life without Trump on the platform has been pleasant. But it appears my prediction about Trump was accurate. He was martyred.

His ban is now one of the many bullet points conservatives cite about big tech bias and the stolen election. Four in five Republicans in battleground states still support him. Elected and prospective Republicans bend over backwards to get his endorsement. And Trump carries on, now on Fox News, Truth Social, etc., still the ostensible leader of the party and the clear favorite right now to win the Republican nomination in 2024 if he actually runs. If anything, Trump's ban actually helped him. As the Wall Street Journal noted, Trump regularly shot himself in the foot on Twitter. From a purely political stance, I don't think Democrats who are worried about the 2022 midterms or the 2024 election

are thinking this through. The odds Trump improves their chances by existing on Twitter as he did before seem much higher to me than the reverse. January 6th should have been a death blow for his political career, but instead he has largely fallen into the background and been rehabilitated almost entirely by virtue of taking up less oxygen while President Biden flounders. Along the way, he created an entirely new social media company, and someone like Musk taking over Twitter caused a surge in people returning to the platform. The ban is also deeply inconsistent. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini calls for the literal genocide of Jews with no repercussions, but Trump gets banned for saying he wasn't attending the inauguration which Twitter interpreted as a signal it'd be safe to attack Washington

D.C. That's quite the leap. Vladimir Putin's Twitter account is perfectly intact, tweeting about the special military operation to protect Donbass even as he slaughters innocents in Ukraine. The Taliban, which is currently forcing women back into the Stone Age in Afghanistan, has a spokesman with 612,000 followers on Twitter, and he is not alone. Twitter has repeatedly defended allowing the Taliban to prosper on their platform, but Trump is still in exile. It's nonsensical. Musk also made a larger point, one that I've made several times in this newsletter.

Permanently banning Trump has only siloed him. It has simply divorced the country even further and pushed people into tighter, smaller information bubbles that are far less frequently pierced by opposing viewpoints. Trump has been banned from Twitter for over a year. He comes back and breaks the rules he should get banned again. Twitter has rules and they should be enforced evenly. But given how it has handled other enforcement policies, and given the time that's passed, it's unclear why this should go on much longer. All right, next up is our reader question. This one is from an anonymous reader in California. They said, there's been a slew of articles and Twitter posts claiming that many Republican

anti-abortion laws will also outlaw IUDs. I can't seem to find this in the text of the trigger laws. Do many Republicans want to outlaw IUDs or is it Democratic fear-mongering? So there are definitely some extreme proposals out there. State Republican parties have passed over 500 abortion restriction laws since January, and I imagine that will continue or accelerate as the Roe ruling gets closer. Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn has expressed opposition to the right to access contraception, calling the Griswold v. Connecticut case, which enshrined that right, legally unsound. Blake Masters, a Peter Thiel-backed Republican Senate candidate in Arizona,

said he'd oppose any judge who doesn't view Griswold as wrongly decided. Meanwhile, the Kansas Republican Party is pushing a Value Them Both amendment to its state constitution, which protects abortion, and the amendment would include a 20-year prison sentence for any woman who receives an abortion. As for IUDs and contraception, there are two main drivers of those headlines. One is Idaho State Representative Brent Crane, who said he is going to hold hearings on banning IUDs in Plan B. The other is Louisiana House Republicans, who advanced a sweeping anti-abortion bill this week that, quote, ensures the right to life and equal protection of the law to all unborn children from the moment of fertilization by protecting them by the same law as protecting other human beings. That would effectively make the use of in vitro

fertilization, IUDs, and emergency contraception homicide. So, do many Republicans want to outlaw IUDs? Honestly, I don't know. So far, only a few are really going on record in support. But it isn't just fear-mongering. The threat is very real, and it's also logical. Most pro-life Americans desire to ban abortion from the moment of conception, and they've been calling for bans on things like IUDs for years. It should be noted that IUDs typically prevent sperm from reaching the egg, though depending on how you define pregnancy, some feel interfering with a fertilized egg is on par with abortion. Many in the anti-abortion movement haven't exactly been shy about these views. These kinds of laws are precisely why I sounded the alarm about the Roe v. Wade ruling and part of what makes me so concerned about the future.

All right, next up is our story that matters for the day. This is a tough one. Overdose deaths in the United States reached a new historic high in 2021, according to new data from the CDC. 108,000 people died from drug overdoses from January to December 2021. That's about a 15% increase from the number of deaths in 2020 for Rita Ahmed, a research scientist with the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics said. Nearly 94,000 died in 2020. 80,000 of the overdose deaths in 2021 involved opioids, and 71,000 involved illegally manufactured fentanyl, which is increasingly mixed into a range of illicit drugs like cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine,

and even prescription drugs. For the first time in a decade, the number of teenagers dying from drug overdoses also rose. NPR has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. to it in today's newsletter. All right, next up is our numbers section. The percentage of Americans who said Twitter should ban Trump, according to a January 2021 poll, is 61%. The percentage of Americans who opposed Twitter's ban of Trump, according to that same January 2021 poll, was 39%. The percentage of Americans who said the ban should be lifted in February of 2021 after Trump had left office was 54%. The percentage of Americans who said the ban should stay in place in February of 2021 after Trump left office was 46%. $1.57 trillion is the amount by which the U.S. budget deficit has fallen this year thanks to rising wages and employment. $6.7 billion is Disney's first quarter earnings from its parks, experiences,

and products segment, up from $3.2 billion in 2021. Alright, last but not least, our have a nice day section. Astronomers announced today that they have captured the first direct picture of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. The New York Times called it a supermassive black hole, a trapdoor in space-time through which the equivalent of 4 million suns have been dispatched to eternity, leaving behind only their gravity and a violently bent space-time. There's a picture of this black hole. It's kind of just like an orange blob, but it's still pretty cool. In today's newsletter, you can go check it out.

All right, everybody. Thanks so much for listening to the podcast. Like I said at the top of the show, if you want to hear from us tomorrow and hear our coverage of this new, very popular movie, 2000 Mules, alleging election fraud in 2020, you need to subscribe, readtangle, alleging election fraud in 2020,

you need to subscribe, readtangle.com slash membership. If not, we'll see you Monday. Peace. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo. The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn and music

for the podcast was produced by Diet 75. For more from Tangle subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com. you