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bigotry
Meet Mary Miller: The New Face of GOP Censorship
Do you want this bigoted Republican telling you what books you and your children can read?
Apr 15, 2026
When it comes to protecting children from sexual abuse and exploitation, Illinois Congresswoman Mary Miller is an odd choice for the job. The downstate Republican was first elected in 2020. During her 2022 reelection campaign, one of her employees was a man named Bradley Graven. The conservative Washington Examiner reported that Graven “was convicted of soliciting sex with a minor,” but this conviction did not stop him from fundraising for Miller, collecting signatures on her behalf, and chauffeuring the candidate around.
Shortly into her first term, Miller gave a shout out to Adolf Hitler in a speech before right-wing group Moms for America. Miller told the group “Hitler was right on one thing: he said, 'Whoever has the youth has the future.'” Miller later apologized for her compliment to der Fuhrer, saying she was referring to the efforts of “left wing radicals” to “re-educate young people.” Miller, unsurprisingly, does not see anything wrong with the efforts of right wing radicals like herself to re-educate young people.
And Miller is, to be clear, a right-wing radical. Often described as a “Christian nationalist,” she proclaimed that the United States was “founded as a Christian nation” when she opposed a Sikh leading a prayer at the capitol after misidentifying him as Muslim. She is a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus, and in return that caucuses political action committee is her largest campaign donor.
These seeming handicaps aside, Miller introduced House Resolution 7661, the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act” on February 24th of this year, a misleadingly titled bill that restricts federal funding for schools unless they take action to ban “sexually oriented” books from classrooms and school libraries. For the purposes of the legislation, “gender dysphoria” as well as "transgenderism" [sic] considered sexually oriented. Schools could lose federal funding merely for having a title that features a trans person or fictional transgender character. On March 17th, the bill advanced from the House Committee on Education and the Workforce to the House floor.
Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it.
Congressional supporters of HR 7661 are notable for their anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric. Miller claimed the 2022 Respect for Marriage Act “attacks the traditional family.” Committee Chair Tim Walberg, who released a statement saying the bill will “safeguard children from inappropriate content in the classroom” went on a jaunt to Uganda in 2023 to urge their government to “stand firm” on maintaining their “Kill the Gays” law. Randy Fine, one of the most notorious anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigots in the House, has also made statements calling for the eradication of the LGBTQ+ community. One could continue down the list but the point is made.
Miller and the gang are operating under the simplistic notion that children will become gay or trans simply from reading a story with a gay or trans person in it. Children, though, are complex beings with a variety of influences acting on them, social, biological, and familial. If educators were capable of influencing children to such a degree that Miller believes, they would focus on ensuring students complete schoolwork on time, study for tests, and bring classroom materials, not on changing their gender identity or sexual orientation. As gay rights pioneer Harvey Milk said during the campaign to defeat the homophobic Briggs Initiative: “If it were true that children mimicked their teachers, you’d sure have a helluva lot more nuns running around.”
One is reminded of the US Senate testimony of comic book publisher William Gaines (Tales from the Crypt, Mad Magazine).In the 1950s, a moral panic asserted that crime and horror comics were making criminals out of helpless children, who, like automatons, followed the examples of comic book characters.“What are we afraid of?” Gaines asked. “Are we afraid of our own children? Do we forget that they are citizens, too, and entitled to select what to read or do?” The anti-comics crusade was popularized by psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who worried about the “homosexual” influence Batman, Robin, and Wonder Woman were having on their young readers in his sloppily researched tract Seduction of the Innocent. The current censorship efforts are an unfortunate repetition of Wertham’s pseudoscientific arguments.
As expected, HR 7661 has been opposed by the American Library Association, the National Education Association, Authors Against Book Bans, PEN America, among many others. The advocacy group 5 Calls has created a simple script for contacting Members of Congress and Senators to ask them to oppose this bill.
This horrific bill, HR 7661, represents the first attack on children’s freedom to read at the federal level seen in the United States. It creates a national censor deciding what every child in the United States can read. Under the guise of protecting children, Mary Miller—a woman who hired a convicted sexual predator and who once praised the Nazi dictator—has set herself up as the face of censorship and thought control in the United States. Would you let this woman decide for you what to read?
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Bad Bunny vs. MAGA’s Bigoted Vision of America
The hatefulness and histrionics of Trump's allies exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves.
Nov 08, 2025
The selection of musical megastar Bad Bunny to headline the Super Bowl’s halftime show has ignited a storm of controversy among conservative circles. The ostensive reason is that Bad Bunny (born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio) is a Puerto Rican who sings in Spanish, and thus according to his MAGA critics, he does not represent “America.”
For the new form of conservativism known as MAGA, the vision of America and Americans is narrow, and does not include the likes of Bad Bunny. Newsmax host Greg Kelly, for instance, claimed Bad Bunny “hates America, hates President Trump, hates ICE, [and] hates the English language!” Fox News host Tomi Lahren, meanwhile, claimed Bad Bunny is “Not an American artist.” Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson not only mislabeled Bad Bunny as “Bad Bunny Rabbit,” he argued Bad Bunny was not a role model, calling for replacing him with someone with “broader Appeal,” like 82-year-old Lee Greenwood.
The Bad Bunny controversy raises the question: what is America and how should it be represented?
The histrionics of MAGA leaders exemplify how the ill-formed and culturally biased so easily make fools of themselves. For instance, the trope that Bad Bunny is not American demonstrates profound ignorance. Bad Bunny was born in Bayamon, Puerto Rico. As such, he was a United States citizen at birth. Puerto Rico has been a US possession since its conquest in 1898, and its residents have been US citizens since the passage of the Jones Act in 1917.
As for Bad Bunny hating America, this claim is nothing short of odd. Though Bad Bunny did not support candidate Trump in 2024, and disagrees with ICE roundups, 75 million Americans did not vote for President Trump (something that residents of Puerto Rico cannot do), and we suspect millions of others, including the authors here, do not support mass ICE roundups. Such free speech stances, which are at the core of the First Amendment of the Constitution, in no way reflect any disdain for this country. As James Baldwin poignantly taught decades ago, and is the case for millions of others today, it is our love for this country that leads us to question it in order to push it towards our laudable goals of freedom and equality.
Further, Bad Bunny singing in Spanish in no way means he hates this country or its dominant language, English. Bad Bunny is fluent in English but prefers to sing in his native tongue of Spanish. While Trump proclaimed English as the country’s official language, such a declaration does not carry the weight of law. That edict also appears to run afoul of a host of US Supreme Court decisions embracing our multicultural and multilingual country, including Meyer v. Nebraska, which held invalid efforts to forbid teaching foreign languages, and Lau v. Nichols. holding that failure to provide non-English instruction violated students’ civil rights.
The United States of America is a multicultural, multiracial nation made up of the descendants of immigrants from all over the world, as well as Indigenous nations and other lands that were conquered during a period of US imperial expansion in the 19th century. Puerto Ricans have fought bravely and died valiantly in America’s wars since WWI, and they contribute in numerous ways to make America great. So, why being a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican makes of Bad Bunny less of an American in MAGA cohorts?
For months now, we have been witnessing a whitewashing of the American experience spearheaded by the Trump administration. Museums, colleges and universities, and even our very diverse military have all been forced to scrub references to the valuable contributions made by women, people of color, and immigrants (except for white ones).
Puerto Ricans, a Spanish-speaking, Latin American people of color (who also happen to be US citizens), do not fit the MAGA mold, and Bad Bunny’s fame is a reminder that our nation, based on the principle of E pluribus unum (Out of many, one) can be proudly represented by many people in many ways.
Previous Super Bowl halftime performers, many of them foreign-born, have reflected our nation’s best (and diverse) talents, but suddenly, a Puerto Rican is not American enough? Turning Point USA’s “All American” alternative halftime show is quite revealing of MAGA’s cultural whitewashing attempts by promising “Anything in English.”
This piece was first published in the Miami Herald.
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Charlie Kirk’s Toxic Legacy of Hatred and Division
We can condemn political violence and this hideous murder while also condemning Charlie Kirk for the rotten, vile hatred he fomented.
Sep 11, 2025
In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, part of a distressing wave of political violence stalking this country, it would seem that the United States is coming apart at the seams, poised at the precipice of disintegration. So much hatred, so much anger, so much toxic rot, and so many, many guns. We are boiling a poisonous stew. Can anyone save us? Is there anyone or anything that can possibly cool us to a simmer, at least? At this time, it appears not—in fact, frighteningly, the rage that got us to this grim, spooky moment seems only to be spiraling.
Charlie Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the Left. Trump seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the Left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk's assassin or their politics. In a predictable yet grotesque display, Trump raged, “For years, those on the radical Left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Trump went on to enumerate the attempts on his own life, the shooting of United Healthcare’s CEO, the shooting of Steve Scalise, and “attacks ICE agents”—zero mention of the assassinations of Democratic Minnesota lawmakers or others who don’t fit Trump’s vision of worthy right-wing martyrs.
It is not clear how we climb out of this cauldron we are boiling in. We must all condemn political violence on all fronts. We must also acknowledge that Kirk’s legacy of bigotry and division wages its own violence...
The man who said there were “good people on both sides” of the Charlottesville killings by right-wing white supremacists could not bring himself to even mention the tragic shootings of people on the other side of the political aisle.
Soon after Kirk’s murder, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) lunged for the political jugular, telling reporters, “Democrats own what happened today....some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.” Mace hurled this profoundly reckless, irresponsible attack without a shred of evidence about the assassin’s politics.
These are not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit. They, along with Charlie Kirk, led us into it. Kirk became a wealthy influencer by spreading toxic rage and fear and division.
We can honor the sadness millions are feeling over Kirk’s murder, and maintain basic civil human decency, while also being honest about the deeply harmful and offensive things Charlie Kirk said. We can condemn political violence and Kirk’s murder while also condemning Charlie Kirk for the rotten, vile hatred he fomented.
And yes, while respecting that many are mourning, this is precisely the time to remind people of the hatred and division Kirk sowed and profited handsomely from.
Consider what Kirk said about Black women leaders and affirmative action. Assailing affirmative action “picks” Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, Kirk said, sickeningly, “you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously” without affirmative action. “You had to steal a white person’s slot.”
Let’s sit with that for a moment. Charlie Kirk said these exceedingly smart, strong, successful Black women do not have brain processing power. This is the supposed hero for whom Trump lowered the flag to half-mast.
Kirk was an equal opportunity hater who called Martin Luther King, Jr. “awful,” and “not a good person,” while insisting, “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
In his gruesome rage against affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion, Kirk also spat out, “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’” That is some deeply racist garbage.
Kirk called gay and transgender people “groomers” who are “destructive,” opposed gay marriage, and campaigned against gender-affirming care for transgender people, insisting, “We must ban trans-affirming care—the entire country. Donald Trump needs to run on this issue,” Media Matters reported.
The legacy Kirk leaves behind burns on, a flame of reactionary anger and bigotry that keeps this country at a boiling point.
When Zohran Mamdani shocked the nation by winning the New York City Democratic primary, Kirk vented, hideously, “Twenty-four years ago a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11…Now a Muslim Socialist is on pace to run New York City.” Kirk peddled in paranoid, racist, and Islamophobic right-wing nonsense. He called Islam “the sword the Left is using to slit the throat of America.” How profoundly rotten and hateful can one be?
Because Kirk was so energetically prolific, one can find endless examples of his fearmongering and bigotry. What needs to be said now, even or especially in this moment, is that Charlie Kirk mightily helped foment the rage and division that seems to engulf and define our nation today. Kirk helped create this toxic, poisonous stew we are drowning in—he fed it and profited from it.
Despite the unseemly frothing of Trump, Mace, and others, we do not know—as of this writing—who shot Kirk or why. We do not know if it came from the left, the right, or something else altogether. It is reasonable and right to condemn all shootings and political violence. I absolutely condemn the violence and this murder, just as I condemn the bigotry Kirk fomented in his brief time on this earth.
It is not clear how we climb out of this cauldron we are boiling in. We must all condemn political violence on all fronts. We must also acknowledge that Kirk’s legacy of bigotry and division wages its own violence—a cultural, social violence that causes real pain, rage, enmity, fear, and isolation. The legacy Kirk leaves behind burns on, a flame of reactionary anger and bigotry that keeps this country at a boiling point.
No one person will save us. We can hope (and work) for a cooling period that at least lowers the flame and slows the spiral. We can all say, stop the violence, stop the shootings. And let’s also say, just as strongly—stop the hatred, stop the fearmongering, stop the bigotry.
Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Nancy Mace as a senator from North Carolina. She is a representative from South Carolina. It has been updated to reflect this.
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Bernie Sanders Condemns Israel's Destruction of Gaza Universities
"There are no protests on the college campuses in Gaza," said the Vermont senator. "You know why? Because every one of the 12 universities in Gaza has been bombed and destroyed."
May 08, 2024
U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday denounced the Israeli military's total decimation of Gaza's universities during floor remarks on protests that have broken out on American college campuses over the past several weeks.
"There are no protests on the college campuses in Gaza," said Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. "You know why? Because every one of the 12 universities in Gaza has been bombed and destroyed."
Sanders' remarks came during a floor debate over a Republican resolution ostensibly aimed at condemning antisemitism on college campuses. GOP lawmakers and President Joe Biden have repeatedly smeared campus protests against Israel's assault on Gaza as antisemitic and ignored the prominent role Jewish students have played in the nationwide demonstrations.
After Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.) attempted to pass the GOP antisemitism resolution via unanimous consent, Sanders—who is Jewish—rose to block the measure, criticizing it as insufficient and proposing an alternative that condemns antisemitism as well as all other "forms of bigotry in this country, whether on college campuses or elsewhere, including Islamophobia, homophobia, racism, and the growing attacks against the Asian American community."
Sanders' proposed resolution also expresses support for "the right of students and all Americans to peacefully protest," whereas Scott's measure attacks recent campus protests as "hotbed[s] of blatantly antisemitic rhetoric and action."
"The fact of the matter is that 67% of Americans, according to recent polls, support the United States calling for a cease-fire, and 60% oppose sending more weapons to Israel," Sanders said. "And that's what the protesters are talking about: They are asking why it is we are complicit in the humanitarian disaster taking place in Gaza."
Watch Sanders' remarks:
LIVE: Today I offer a simple resolution:
NO to antisemitism.
NO to Islamophobia.
NO to racism and bigotry in all its forms.
YES to free speech and protest under the 1st Amendment, whether on a college campus or across our nation. https://t.co/czTwnQnz6b
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 7, 2024
According to the United Nations, more than 80% of the Gaza Strip's schools have been damaged or reduced to ruins by Israeli forces since October, including all of the enclave's universities.
Last month, a group of U.N. experts said that "it may be reasonable to ask if there is an intentional effort to comprehensively destroy the Palestinian education system, an action known as 'scholasticide.'"
"The persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future," the experts added. "Students with international scholarships are being prevented from attending university abroad."
American campus protests against Israel's assault on Gaza have offered some measure of hope to Palestinian students whose lives have been thrown into chaos by the U.S.-backed war.
Hala Sharaf, a second-year medical student who moved to Cairo to resume her studies amid Israel's assault, told Al Jazeera that the U.S. student campus demonstrations "have made us feel so hopeful for rejecting what America and Israel are doing to us."
"The student protests in America make me feel like I'm not alone," said Sharaf. "My message to them is to keep the focus on Gaza. Don't forget about Gaza."
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Progressives Condemn On-Air CNN Pundit's 'Disgusting Racism' Against Ilhan Omar
One progressive lawmaker described CNN contributor Scott Jennings' comments as "reminiscent of the anti-Muslim bigotry we saw in the George Bush post-9/11 era."
Mar 14, 2024
Progressive lawmakers, advocacy groups, and commentators rushed to the defense of Rep. Ilhan Omar on Wednesday after a CNN pundit called her a "public relations agent for Hamas" during a primetime segment earlier this week.
Scott Jennings, a conservative who has contributed to CNN since 2017 and also writes for the Los Angeles Times, made the remark in response to an interview in which Omar (D-Minn.) questioned whether Israel and the Biden administration are doing everything in their power to achieve a negotiated end to the war on Gaza, which is now in its sixth month.
Omar pointed to reports that Israel declined to send negotiators to Egypt after receiving a proposal from Hamas that it deemed unacceptable. The Minnesota Democrat also accused Jake Sullivan, President Joe Biden's national security adviser, of "not sharing the full picture" when he provided an update on the status of cease-fire talks earlier this week.
"You can certainly have certain demands that you want, and we obviously want the hostages released to return to their families or American hostages that are included. There is an infant that is included in those hostages," said Omar. "And so it is important that we do everything that we can, but we can't be dishonest to the point where we are saying that everybody is doing everything that they can to be at the table to negotiate a cease-fire that can lead to a permanent solution."
Jennings said during Tuesday's segment that he is "surprised that in a year of our Lord 2024, there is a public relations agent for Hamas sitting in United States Congress." Jennings added that he didn't "hear a word" of concern about the hostages still being held by militants in Gaza—even though Omar explicitly said she supports their release.
Omar, who has received death threats for criticizing Israel's war on Gaza, has said repeatedly that she wants the release of all hostages and condemned the October 7 Hamas-led attack as "horrific" and "senseless violence."
CNN pundit calls Democratic Rep. @IlhanMN a “public relations agent for Hamas” with no push back.
Islamophobia is not only normalized in American politics, it’s rewarded. pic.twitter.com/aoe8qIIhNf
— Jeremy Slevin (@jeremyslevin) March 13, 2024
Jennings received no pushback from his fellow CNN panelists. Observers noted that CNN fired contributor Marc Lamont Hill over a speech in which he demanded an end to Israel's longstanding oppression of Palestinians.
"Scott Jennings is reverting to one of the oldest Islamophobic tropes in the book, which is to allege that Muslim Americans are secretly terrorist sympathizers. People have been fired from CNN for much less," said Waleed Shahid, a Democratic strategist and former spokesperson for Justice Democrats, an advocacy group that also spoke out against Jennings' comments.
"Disgusting Islamophobic and racist comments with no correction or condemnation from CNN," the group wrote on social media. "CNN should be issuing an apology to [Omar] and Scott Jennings shouldn't have a job. The normalization of Islamophobia like this on CNN is what leads to anti-Muslim hate crimes."
Mehdi Hasan, a former MSNBC host and editor-in-chief of the media company Zeteo, joined the chorus denouncing Jennings' remarks, which he described as "disgusting racism and Islamophobia."
Jennings is hardly a fringe character in conservative politics: He worked in George W. Bush's White House and on the 2002 reelection campaign of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), a leading cease-fire supporter and Omar ally in Congress, described Jennings' comments as "reminiscent of the anti-Muslim bigotry we saw in the George Bush post-9/11 era."
"It is disgusting and must not be normalized," Bush wrote. " CNN should denounce this hateful, dangerous, and blatant Islamophobia immediately."
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) asked, "How on earth is this kind of blatant Islamophobia so casually accepted without pushback?"
"This is shocking," she added.
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Outrage over Bigotry, Islamophobia in Wall Street Journal & New York Times
'These outlets should apologize publicly & diversify their staff & perspectives to meet their ethical and moral obligations as journalists.'
Feb 04, 2024
The nation's leading newspapers were under fire this weekend after publishing opinion pieces seen as "Bigoted," "Islamophobic," "Racist," and "Reckless."
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece published on Friday afternoon read 'Welcome to Dearborn, America's Jihad Capital.'
And on Saturday, The New York Times published a piece by long-time columnist Thomas Friedman titled "Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom."
Dearborn, Michigan, a city with the largest Muslim population in the US, has increased its police presence, fearing hate attacks after the Wall Street Journal branded it America's 'jihad capital.'
The Islamaphobic article was written by Steven Stalinsky, who is a commentator on' terrorism' and has served as executive director of the pro-Israel Middle East Media Research Institute based in Washington, DC.
The mayor of Dearborn, Abdullah H. Hammoud, said Saturday that the city's police officers were ramping up their presence across places of worship and major infrastructure points following the publication of Stalinsky's piece that he called "bigoted" and "Islamophobic." The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee condemned the piece as anti-Arab and racist for suggesting the city's residents, including religious leaders and politicians, supported Palestinian Islamist group Hamas and extremism.
In response to the Wall Street Journal piece, President Joe Biden tweeted Sunday afternoon:
"Americans know that blaming a group of people based on the words of a small few is wrong. That’s exactly what can lead to Islamophobia and anti-Arab hate, and it shouldn’t happen to the residents of Dearborn – or any American town. We must continue to condemn hate in all forms."
Shortly after Biden's tweet went out, Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer tweeted:
"Dearborn is a vibrant community full of Michiganders who contribute day in and day out to our state. Islamophobia and all forms of hate have no place in Michigan, or anywhere. Period."
Friedman's piece in the New York Times entitled, "Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom," posited Iran as a metaphorical "parasitoid wasp" with proxies in Yemen, Lebanon, Iraq, and Syria as caterpillars. Friedman claimed, "We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle," suggesting that the US militarily destroys the entire Middle East to annihilate Iran and its allies. He concluded that he could "contemplate" the Middle East by watching Animal Planet.
Abed A. Ayoub, Executive Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, tweeted:
"Go ahead and say this about any other people and see the reaction - @tomfriedman would be fired before the ink dries. This election season kickoff is a reminder that anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia are mainstream. That’s why this trash is acceptable to so many, and there will be no accountability."
Erin Overby, former Archive Editor at The New Yorker, tweeted:
"This @nytimes column by Thomas Friedman comparing countries in the Middle East to animals, pests & insects is so virulently racist it could have run in Der Sturmer or on Radio Rwanda pre-‘94 genocide. It’s appallingly offensive & Friedman should be fired."
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The Way to Saving Twitter Is Down a Road Elon Musk Will Never Travel
Consistent and enforceable content-moderation is the key to social-media success. It's also good for, you know... democracy.
Jul 12, 2023
Numbers don’t lie. And in this case they tell a tale of Twitter’s continued demise under the misguided reign of Elon Musk. They also suggest a clear path out of this mess, one Musk is highly unlikely to take.
According to data that researcher Travis Brown provided to Free Press, nearly a third of the tens of thousands of previously suspended accounts restored under Musk’s “general amnesty” have opted to subscribe to the Twitter Blue “verification” service.
This is noteworthy as the rate of blue-check subscribers among Twitter’s general population of regular users is far lower—well below a half of 1%—according to research from Brown, who Twitter just banned.
So what can we glean from this?
First, it shows that Absolutist Elon is continuing to silence his critics. Brown has been doing legitimate research that provides useful data for academics and journalists about Twitter’s performance—something Musk has repeatedly tried to conceal.
Blue-Checking Bigotry
It also suggests that Musk is cozying up with people who were previously suspended under Twitter’s former content-moderation standards. While these pre-Musk standards were far from perfect, the platform at least had in place a team that dedicated itself to trust and safety issues.
The “amnestied” accounts include those belonging to neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, MAGA election deniers, Putin propagandists, trans- and homophobes, and misogynists—a relatively high percentage of them is now buying into Musk's blue-check regime.
Their high subscriber rate has turned Musk in their favor, if his bigotry- and disinformation-laced tweets and replies are any indication. Musk seems to believe that Twitter’s path to success involves stoking the fires of the “hellscape”—and reaping the subscription rewards of its toxic protagonists.
Good content moderation is good business.
Throughout his tenure as “Chief Twit,” Musk has had several opportunities to right Twitter’s ship, including restoring the platform's content-moderation and election-integrity capacity. But he’s consistently chosen to do the opposite—catering to fellow right-wing reactionaries while alienating the advertisers that once accounted for about 90% of Twitter’s revenues.
This approach has been disastrous for Twitter as a company. As we at Free Press have said repeatedly: Good content moderation is good business.
Sinking Twitter’s Ship
And the data bear this out. Since Musk announced his bid to take over the platform more than a year ago, Twitter revenues have tanked—down about 60% over the year, according to reporting by The New York Times’ Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu.
This downturn has coincided with Twitter’s steady retreat from moderation, exposing Musk’s phony free-speech rhetoric as a cover for “perpetuating racism resulting in direct threats to communities [of color],” in the words of one McDonald’s marketing exec.
Other platforms have sensed Musk's vulnerability and rushed into the online space to provide alternatives. (See: Bluesky, Mastodon, Spill, and Threads.)
Will these alternatives repeat Musk’s mistakes or will they learn a lesson from his many failures?
Some have been more successful than others at attracting a critical mass of users. Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Threads has surpassed 100 million new users since it launched last week.
And Twitter seems to be feeling its self-inflicted pain more and more. Recent press reports have the platform's traffic in decline since July 5. Similarweb reports that Twitter’s web traffic was down 5% following the Threads launch, and down 11% compared to the same period last year. Cloudflare also reported that Twitter's audience size was in steady decline since the beginning of the year.
Despite the new challengers, the question remains: Will these alternatives repeat Musk’s mistakes or will they learn a lesson from his many failures?
That lesson, again, is clear: Consistent and enforceable content-moderation is the key to social-media success. It's also good for democracy. Just look at the numbers.
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We All Must Speak Out Against Any Rise in Anti-semitism
Whether your views align with the right or the left, many of us are clear that antisemitism among white supremacists, militant extremists, Christian nationalists, and other bigots poses a deadly threat to all of us.
Mar 04, 2023
Jewish communities across the country have been targeted with violence or harassment as anti-semitic hate crimes reach record levels.
In late January, a man tossed a Molotov cocktail — a firebomb — into the entrance of a New Jersey synagogue in the middle of the night.
In early February, a man walked into a San Francisco synagogue firing blank shots from a gun during a religious gathering. And in the suburbs of Atlanta that same week, Jewish families found flyers with antisemitic images and messages littering their driveways.
These terrifying incidents are only a fraction of a disturbing trend in American culture. That trend is especially visible on the far right, whose anti-semitism is now louder, bolder, and more aggressive than it’s been in most of our lifetimes .
At times like these, all of us need to be better neighbors to each other. This got me thinking about an experience I had 15 years ago as a city council member in Ithaca, New York.
A local rabbi approached me then and explained that in traditional Jewish communities, certain types of work and activities — like carrying objects outside the home — are prohibited on the Sabbath.
Tradition accommodates this restriction by creating a larger area called an eruv: a space that defines home as several houses and streets within a community. The boundaries of the eruv are designated by markers around the neighborhood, often attached to utility poles and wires.
The eruv symbolically enlarges the home, so the necessities of faith and of daily life can coexist.
For years, the rabbi said, the Jewish community had asked to put up eruv markers in parts of Ithaca, but the city council hadn’t responded. I was happy to help and even happier that we got it done. But there was some pushback from some of my colleagues, who opposed what they called “catering” to a religious community.
That deeply saddened me then and now. Here’s why.
Whether your views align with the right or the left, many of us are clear that antisemitism among white supremacists, militant extremists, Christian nationalists, and other bigots poses a deadly threat to all of us.
That has been true for a long time — it’s one reason Black, Jewish, and progressive communities were such strong allies to each other during the civil rights era. But for a variety of cultural and political reasons, I now worry these alliances are fraying. When good people are not aligned in opposition, tolerance for division and evil becomes commonplace.
Think of Nick Fuentes, the far-right activist who grabbed headlines for his dinner with Donald Trump and Ye (formerly known as Kanye West). Fuentes and Ye have openly praised Adolf Hitler. Not long ago, this would have been unthinkable in public life.
The way to combat the rising tide of hate and fragmented solidarity is with a strong, progressive, multiracial coalition. All of us must come together to dismantle the forces behind the divide-and-conquer agendas intended to harm Jewish and Black people, along with immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and indeed most communities in one way or another.
In other words, like the eruv, our communities need to symbolically enlarge our home.
I’m reminded of a quote by Rabbi Leonard Beerman: “We need those who have the courage to be ashamed, who have the muscle to care. And more than caring, we need those who will preserve and cultivate an enduring vision of the good, who will maintain a vision of the future as a permanent possibility in the present.”
Our real and symbolic home should be with each other, where we are united by our shared humanity and where hate by any name is excluded. Let’s make that space, and welcome each other in.
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We Need a Systematic Analysis of the Racism in this Country
Jun 21, 2015
Dylann Roof, a young white man armed with a virulent, toxic hatred and a 45 caliber pistol, walked into a historic black church and was welcomed with open arms as a stranger into a Bible study. Taking advantage of the well-known hospitality of this sanctuary, he sat for an hour with a group of 10 people, none of whom had any idea that nine of them would be dead within an hour.
The massacre in Charleston is not just an isolated hate crime carried out by a mentally ill racist in South Carolina. It is simultaneously representative and starkly indicative of the rampant racism structurally embedded in America, the responsibility for which, it might be argued, bears no exemption for any American, especially white Americans, north or south, republican or democrat. As Richard Wright wrote in his 1945 non-fiction memoir, Black Boy, America "insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness."
That cloak of righteousness shields white America from having to face their contemporary prejudices and the historical biases from which they are a result. This cloak of invisibility also inhibits their moral and psychological capacity to acknowledge and understand the magnitude of those historical and contemporary prejudices and their effects on our society. The Charleston shooting was not an anomaly but a manifestation of the violence cultivated in America toward black communities. The shooter, Dylann Roof, is a product of a system that has been breeding hatred and bigotry in America since the first Africans were kidnapped and forcibly transported here in the 15th century as slaves under deplorable, maliciously inhumane conditions.
Prophetic voices in African American literature and the arts have long challenged these deadly views, calling all Americans to "stand in the gap" and risk lifting the cloak of invisibility that surrounds racial violence to see what lies beneath. In an August 9, 2012 interview, Dr. Maya Angelou argued that transatlantic slaving, as an inherently violent institution, connected with colonial conquests, put an imprint of violence on American culture that needs to be addressed on a systematic and systemic level. Today her voice rises from among the dead: "It is imperative that Americans, all Americans, recognize the imprint of the first Africans brought here and the first white women brought here in bondage. I'm trying to say that the word slavery and the term enslavement has lost so much of its weight until people mouth the words without realizing what they're saying, what they're calling up. We have not moved on. We have made some steps toward fair play, but we have not really moved on. It is ignorant, not wise, to think that we can get on without remembering what happened, who did what to whom, to what success, and for what reasons."
Today, this systematic analysis is needed perhaps more than at any other time in our history. As Rev. Clyde Grubbs of Tuckerman Creative Ministries for Justice and Healing noted on Facebook: "The son tells everyone he knew that Black people were taking over the country, and he wore racist decals on his clothing. He told everyone he knew that something must be done to save the white race. He was public in his attitudes, attitudes that were dangerous. He was able to live at home and access the propaganda of racist hate groups (organized terrorists.) His father gifted the gun to his son. The state doesn't require registration of gun, nor notice of selling gun, or gifting gun. Son kills people with gun in an act of racist terrorism. But somehow the killer is a disturbed INDIVIDUAL. So? Are Racism and Psychopathology completely unrelated phenomena? Are Racism and Patriarchy and Privatism and Violence and Destruction of God's Creation really all separate, discrete, separate realities that need to be taken up in isolation from each other?"
Racism kills. In fact, the prevalence of racial epithets in Google searches has been linked to rates of black mortality by Daniel Chae, University of Maryland professor of epidemiology and biostatistics whose research has shown that "African-Americans living in areas where many people are Google-searching for a racial epithet are 8.2 percent more likely than whites to die of any cause." Racism, says Chae, is an environmental hazard. Quoted in the Huffington Post, "I view racism as being a social toxin that over time leads to premature mortality," he said. "Racism kills people," Chae said. "That's not breaking news at all." Meanwhile, in South Carolina the Confederate battle flag flies high as highways throughout the state tout the names of Confederate soldiers that fought to the death to preserve racist institutions while some excuse Dylan Roof's actions as being the result of an alleged mental illness or try to fit it into some other neatly packaged narrative that defers from having to face the real issue at hand; racism.
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