Celebrated god-slayer Richard Dawkins has come out in favor of Twitter’s ban of President Donald Trump, insisting free speech is not in danger from Big Tech.
Asking whether Twitter’s ban of Trump is “a worrying Free Speech issue,” Dawkins told his own 2.9 million Twitter followers Saturday that it is not, for two reasons.
First, “Trump went far beyond expression of opinion (which should be protected) to outright lies, demonstrable falsehoods,” Dawkins asserted.
Second, these falsehoods were “calculated to incite violence,” he declared, adding in another tweet that “Trump certainly did incite the insurrection, in his speech to the deplorables on the day & elsewhere.”
Dawkins also favorably cites CJR columnist Joel Simon, who wrote that no matter what your view on free speech, social media companies “are in an impossible position, because the most important source of misinformation is no longer a rogue state or a terrorist organization. It’s the president of the United States.”
The British evolutionary biologist, who denies the existence of human free will and moral accountability, went on to attack the entire Republican Party.
“Isn’t it time to stop using the acronym GOP?” Dawkins said in another post. “The Republican Party has finally lost all claim to being ‘Grand’. And as for being ‘Old’, the Republican Party in its present form is now approximately four years young.”
“Pity Senator [Josh] Hawley [R-MO], Trump stooge and traitor to democracy,” Dawkins wrote. “He’s lost his publishing deal, he’s shunned by his colleagues, and his only friends are swivel-eyed conspiracy theorists, gullible little fools and a hirsute loon with horns.”