Parnell Palme McGuinness’ piece at the weekend, “Looking back in hatred? Be careful not to miss the future”, is in many ways a collection of standard columnist brain truisms.
With a vague call for less “hate” in politics, it burrows deeply into a meaningless centre point between several things that are in no way equivalent.
So, apart from arguing that Scott Morrison has become a “witch” the public demands “we continue to burn” (hold him to account for secret ministries or robodebt? Guys that was months ago!) McGuinness argues that Donald Trump was “an easy target”, but people who hated Trump were the ones who hated democracy.
The piece takes much of its fuel from “The Twitter Files” narrative, equating Twitter limiting the distribution of one New York Post story in 2020 with Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” interference in the US election in 2016. McGuinness gives the impression that Twitter, pre-Elon Musk, was a faintly sinister partisan agent. Pointing to the decision to suspend Trump from the platform in the lead-up to the 2020 election, she asks whether Trump was the “real threat to democracy” or was it “the impulse to overthrow a sitting president, if even just technologically and just on Twitter?”
And it would have been a shocking and partisan move, for sure. If it had happened.
The piece has since been amended, with a terse note that Trump didn’t get suspended until after the election. This piece of information would have taken less than a minute to check.
Moreover, we suspect we know why the note wasn’t more specific about exactly when Trump was booted off the platform.
Trump got kicked off Twitter the January after the election, on account of, you know, “the risk of further incitement of violence” after the Capitol riots. The ones where a militia invaded the seat of government to prevent a democratically elected president from being confirmed? The election result Trump refused to accept, and encouraged his follower not to accept? So perhaps not the best example of how it’s the anti-Trump forces that don’t like democracy.
