Summary: after Maximum Leader Donald Trump was booed by an estimated 41,000 baseball fans during game five of this year’s World Series, right wing acolytes dutifully repaired to Trump State Television, also known as Fox News, to deplore the fans’ exercise of their First Amendment rights. They were accompanied, sadly, by a whole contingent of schoolmarmish Democrats bleating the same refrain. The hell with all them. The Constitution guarantees the right of free speech and assembly. Kudos to the 41,000 fans who insisted upon their constitutional freedoms, even in the face of a wannabe dictator.
Meanwhile, the solipsistic boy-zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg, easily the most toxic person in the country after Donald Trump, continues to try to defend his dangerous and un-American platform before Congress. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Orange County’s own Katie Porter took Gospodin Zuckerberg behind the woodshed. Unfortunately, as much as AOC and Katie Porter, with some help from “give ‘em hell Maxine” Waters, demonstrated to Mr. Zuckerberg the disdain in which he is held by the increasingly large number of Americans, all that will happen is to drive Gospodin Zuckerberg even further into the arms of Gospodin Trump, Gospodin Putin, and the Moscow Kremlin.
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“The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
-U.S. Const. Art. II. § 4
“[T]hey should hold those fans accountable.”
-Republican propagandist Frank Luntz on the Ingraham Angle, Monday, October 28, 2019
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
-U.S.Const. Amend. 1
“... Frightens me worse than bombs.”
-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
Aux Barricades, Citoyens!
-French revolutionary slogan
“Maximum Leader” Donald Trump’s ego took a bruising Sunday night during Game 5 of the 2019 World Series. During the fourth inning of the game, played in Washington DC’s Nationals Stadium, located in the city that voted 96% against Donald Trump in the 2016 election, fans, noticing Moscow’s man in the stands, began to boo The Donald. The boos soon morphed into a crowd-wide chant of “lock him up,” evidencing the manifest belief of a substantial number of fans present that Donald Trump is a traitor to the United States, guilty of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.”
The condemnations quickly started rolling in. The schoolmarmish left, always ready to present its throat to be cut, or its orifices to be violated, was quick to chide the fans for unsportsmanlike behavior. From the right, the condemnations were a little bit more disturbing. Speaking on the “Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, a.k.a., Trump State Television, Republican propagandist Frank Luntz suggested that some entity, presumably the unbelievably corrupt William Barr’s Justice Department, “should hold those fans accountable.”
Aside from sounding like the suave Pyongyang stylings to be expected from the North Korean state, Luntz’s comments reflected a dangerous lack of a basic understanding of the United States Constitution. The First Amendment is very clear. “the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,” is not to be trammeled, violated, invaded, infringe, or abridged on the mere ipse dixit of Donald Trump or his redeless followers. Contrary to the fondest imaginings of The Donald and his redeless, right wing followers, the Constitution of the United States has not been suspended.
The fans who were calling for Donald Trump to be locked up were well within their free speech and peaceable assembly rights. The Donald, for all his thinness of skin, really has no card to play here. One who occupies the office of President of the United States, no matter how illegitimately or with what Russian assistance he may have bought the office, is nonetheless expected to have a skin like that of a rhinoceros. He ought to bear up, as Abraham Lincoln put it, “like the boy that stumped his toe,—'it hurt too bad to laugh, and he was too big to cry.'”
Donald Trump's failure to understand that the Constitution demands of him a certain thickness of skin frightens me, as George Orwell once put it in his essay Politics and the English Language, "worse than bombs." But, Donald Trump and his enablers, who all seem to be suffering from or enabling the same kind of dangerous psychopathology, love to dish it out, but seem curiously unable to endure the slings and arrows of an outraged population. And so, the Donald, venturing into a crowd that he and his campaign operatives had not vetted, assumed the risk that a bunch of angry Americans, proud and jealous of their constitutionally guaranteed rights of free speech, peaceable assembly, and petition, would have given The Donald a piece of their collective mind.
And having given The Donald a piece of their collective mind, the 41,000 fans who remonstrated with him in the bluntest terms imaginable, deserve much better than to be chided by schoolmarmish Democrats about their “unsportsmanlike” utterance, and certainly deserve far better than to be implicitly threatened by Frank Luntz or other thuggish Trump “enforcers.”
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Of course, Donald Trump is not the only person in our body politic wishing he could hire enforcers to stop people from remonstrating with him. The arrogant, Asperger boy-zillionaire Mark Zuckerberg must certainly have wished, as he testified last week before Congress, that he could’ve hired a couple of burly Samoans to bitch slap Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Irvine Congresswoman Katie Porter, and Los Angeles’s own “give ‘em hell, Maxine” Waters.
Zuckerberg, who has, in the last couple of years, garnered to himself a reputation for being one of the most toxic personalities in the United States, and whose platform is the subject of well-nigh universal disdain within the body politic, seems not to understand that his evident desire to transform himself into some kind of “Citizen Kane” is not sitting well with the American public.
The extent of Zuckerberg’s dangerous ego is perhaps nowhere better demonstrated than in his push to create a crypto currency to compete with Bitcoin, the preferred crypto currency of criminal enterprises all over the world. Moreover, Facebook’s preferred name for this crypto currency, “Libra,” meaning “pound,” reflects an ill-concealed desire on the part of the boy-zillionaire to compete with Sterling, which though somewhat dickie in light of boorish Boris Johnson’s Brexit bumblings, is still one of the most significant, and the oldest, currencies in the world, dating back to the eighth century.
Of course, not satisfied with trying to set up Facebook Libra as a substitute for currencies issued by sovereign nation states, Gospodin Zuckerberg also sees Facebook is acting as some sort of political arbiter within various bodies politic around the world. His testimony before Congress last week, in which he skated very close to, if not crossing the edge of, perjury, was a bravura performance of arrogance, obfuscation, deflection, dismissiveness, disrespect, disingenuousness, and the occasional outright lie.
Of course, what has got most Democrats and other rightly thinking Americans so annoyed at Facebook and Gospodin Zuckerberg is Gospodin Zuckerberg’s blithe willingness to take what Senator Elizabeth Warren has called “gobs of money” to continue to promote the Trump campaign’s lies. As Senator Warren has opined, Facebook has “incredible power to affect elections and our national debate. They’ve decided to let political figures lie to you.”
But while Facebook will allow political figures to pay them gobs of money to lie to the American public, Facebook’s own moderators have been censoring the commentary of individual users for years. Facebook makes no secret of its preferential options for Donald Trump, Bernard Sanders, and the anti-vax movement. Criticize any of those three, and a user can find him or herself sent to “Facebook jail” for lengthy periods of time. Hypocrisy? Very much so.
What has been so responsible for the boy-zillionaire’s personal toxicity, to say nothing of the disdain in which his platform is held is the casual, solipsistic arrogance Mark Zuckerberg has displayed again and again toward the United States Congress. His behavior toward the state of California, whose welcoming climate for innovators and inventors made Facebook of the monopolistic giant it is today, has been equally reprehensible.
When state Senator Richard Pan was physically attacked outside the Capitol building in Sacramento by an anti-vax fanatic who posted a video of the attack to Facebook, Facebook refused Senator Pan’s request to take the video down, offering some typically weasel-worded, mealymouthed Facebook gobbledygook explanation as to how the video “didn’t violate community standards.” That’s very much akin to Facebook’s contemptible behavior with respect to the genocide of the Rohingya, the mosque massacres in Christchurch, (where Facebook continued to keep a live stream video of the shooting up for 17 minutes, ostensibly because they didn’t think it violated their “community standards,”) or various other displays of egregious hate speech that by any objective measure should violate Facebook’s precious “community standards.”
Moreover, it is becoming fairly clear, especially given Zuckerberg’s statement that a Warren presidency would “suck” for Facebook, that Facebook is slowly but surely being co-opted by the American right and by Donald Trump. Facebook is happy to take gobs of money from Trump, from Trump supporters, from the Kremlin, and from Gospodin Yevgeniy Prigozhin (“Putin’s chef,” the Russian oligarch who runs a whole clutch of pro-Putin troll factories). And in taking gobs of money from all these malign actors, Facebook turns its back on any kind of American patriotism whatsoever. Maybe it's time we citizens stormed the barricades, like the angry inhabitants of Paris stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, setting in train the revolution that destroyed the ancien régime.
The world got along just fine under an ancien régime without Facebook for the first 4.5 billion years of Its history. We can get along without Facebook now. It is time for Facebook to be investigated either as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization under the federal criminal RICO statute, or as a criminal syndicalist organization under California state law. Either way, it’s time to break up Facebook, forfeit its assets to the State of California, prosecute Gospodin Zuckerberg, and incarcerate him, as Oregon Senator Ron Wyden has suggested, preferably in the supermax prison at Pelican Bay, without limitation of time.
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Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He makes no secret of his disdain for Gospodin Zuckerberg and his platform. He agrees with Senator Elizabeth Warren that Facebook should be broken up, no matter how much such an outcome might “suck” for the boy-zillionaire. The opinions set forth in this post are Mr. Marchand’s own, though he expects that Mark Zuckerberg, with all his Trumpian thinness of skin, won’t like them one little bit.
