Judge throws out Trump Twitter lawsuit - and a key libertarian talking point

Ruling rejects attempts to blame the government for private sector censorship.

Photo (cropped) by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

Our nation’s trolls suffered a major defeat last evening when the courts, in a seventeen page ruling, sided decisively with the mods. US District Court Judge James Donato has ruled that Twitter did not violate Donald Trump’s right to free speech when it banned his account last January.

So far, most of the coverage of this ruling has focused on what it means for Trump himself; since the legal questions are so simple and straightforward, few journalists are going to bother with them.

There is, however, a political question here that leftists should pay attention to because it bears directly upon an emerging line of libertarian rhetoric. When Trump was first banned, the right’s fury at the mods was so white-hot that it was impossible to deflect — and this was when complaints about “woke capitalism” began their recent surge. It only took a few months, however, for Republican pundits and operatives to begin the hard work of pivoting their critique away from capitalists and back towards their preferred target: Big Government. And in the Trump case we’ve seen that journey come full circle, with the plaintiffs arguing that it was actually the state to blame for his ban.