Indignity Morning Podcast No. 537: Silenced by social platforms.

EASY LISTENING DEP’T.: Before we get to the larger news, we're going to start with something very small, or at least something petty, that turns out astonishingly and yet obviously, to be of world historic import. It's in a passage by Ben Smith writing for Semafor. “The Trump administration,” Smith writes, “from the president down to the middle levels of obscure cabinet departments is populated by people whose defining experiences in public life involved being silenced by social platforms. This predates the social media wars of the late 2010s.” Smith continues. “One Trump appointee told me that a radicalizing experience was being booted out of the Gawker comments section way back in the day.” Of course it was. Of course the vicious dullards and bigots who are running the country into ruin are the same people who were being dullards and bigots in the comment section back in the day. From Trump on down, and laterally out through the titans of Silicon Valley and their fascist enthusiasms, this is a political movement built on profoundly unpleasant and unlikable people being furious that they can't make other people like them or respect them.

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