I know millions awaken each morning and immediately check their Twitter feed. I am not one of them. It doesn't make me superior—it doesn't make me anything—except I would never know that Marjorie Taylor Green's Twitter account has been closed had I not read it in the newspaper.
Nor would I care. I don't believe that muzzling humans accomplishes much, even a quisling like Green, who is ignorant and negligent of her oath of office. The squeaky idiot will always get the grease. Look at Donald Trump, another victim of Twitterwrath whose fans still manage to ingest their daily portion of his tripe.
Still, although I don't pay much attention to Twitter, I know of Marjorie Taylor Green, and suspending her from Twitter is not enough. Expelling her from public office would be more appropriate; arresting her would be best. And when she's carted off to jail, she must be accompanied by Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and countless other lesser-known but equally lethal purveyors of false and misleading claptrap that has left hundreds of thousands dead.
It's treason, and it's murder. In the 1950s the Rosenbergs were convicted of betraying their country and paid for it with their lives. In terms of the impact on the average citizen, Green, et al., have done worse.
If that's oversimplifcation, allow me to oversimplify further. Since the Covid-19 vaccines became readily available about a year ago, there have been close 400,000 additional Covid-19-related deaths in the United States. Those figures alone are indefensible in a developed country like ours, but then we are only 62% fully vaccinated: upwards of 200 million Americans are either partially vaccinated or, in most cases, not vaccinated at all. For most of them, it's a conscious choice. However, since most of the deaths since last spring have occurred among the unvaccinated, maybe 200,000 of those deaths have been unnecessary— the result of having been fed lies and misinformation by people like Green, Carlson, and Jones. (Yes, Green is in demand as a speaker for her support of Trump's Big Lie and uses that forum to promote spurious and sometimes dangerous Covid information.)
These are striking and blatant —some would say criminal—betrayals of their fellow citizens. Why is that not a prosecutable offense?
A few weeks ago, a man in his 60s contracted Covid-19. He was a Covid denier—no masks, vaccine, distancing, etc. He had bought into so much misinformation that, as his condition worsened and his son came to visit him at home, the man refused to let him in. He had "heard somewhere" that the vaccinated were shedding the virus "all over the place." No amount of scientific data would change his mind, nor was he influenced by the fact that he was already sick. To him, the concerned son was a carrier and a threat. The son left; two weeks later, predictably, the man died. Two victims—one dead, the other wracked with guilt that he could not convince his own father of the truth.
We can sympathize with both: counteracting miracle claims and political fantasies with facts is nearly impossible when the airwaves and social media are overrun by the immoral, the fraudulent, the avaricious, and the debauched.
Symbolically and literally, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Americans is on the hands of Green, Carlson, Jones, and all the other cynical and exploitative public figures who continue to peddle misinformation. It is mass murder on a scale that makes Ted Bundy and Jeffrey Dahmer look like beginners.
Some will claim that my modest proposal would be an assault on free speech; I say it's more a rescue mission.
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