On Saturday, I was perplexed by photos online of Trump boarding his plane en route to a bitcoin conference. There was no bandage on his right ear. I re-posted one of the photos on Twitter and wrote, “look closely at his ear that was ‘hit’ by a bullet from a AR-15 assault rifle.”
“Fake news,” someone responded. “It’s the wrong ear,” said another, which of course was not true. “This is an old photo,” which I felt the need to reply to. I re-posted a screenshot of New York Times photographer Doug Mills’ Twitter post of the same situation of Trump boarding his plane, which included the date and time of his photo. Doug is one of Trump’s favorite photographers and Trump has publicly called him “my genius photographer.” So I thought the maga world would at least believe Doug Mills.
They didn’t. The comments turned ugly. Mostly about me, but also some that disparaged Doug Mills.
Since 2017, I’ve been accustomed to having vile and hateful comments thrown at me. But I had now exposed someone else, Doug Mills, to be the recipient of hateful messages on MY Twitter account. Not cool.
On top of that, I’ve been at a cabin with no Internet and sporadic cell coverage for the past week, which made it difficult to post anything in the first place but also a challenge to push back against the hate.
So I de-activated my Twitter account. It was a gut decision, made only by me. I am still not sure if this is a temporary or a permanent action.
I was unaware that some on Twitter were a
responding that Elon Musk had deleted my account. How would I know? I wasn’t able to access Twitter. I did receive a few DMs here on Instagram about this, but didn’t think much about it.
Until…late last night, I received a text message from a New York Times reporter asking me to comment about my supposedly “being kicked off X for posting a photo of Trump’s ear.” And then this morning, I received a text message from a childhood friend who asked, in jest, “Is there a Free Pete Souza donation site?”
It was time to respond. I have so much more I want to say about the state of social media, but for now I want to make it clear that I was not kicked off Twitter. I kicked myself off.
For those who care. He wasn’t banned, he deleted his account.
I should have made this a top-level comment:
TL;DR: he wasn’t banned, he quit:
Source (Instagram)
Thanks for posting the work I probably should have.
That’s almost weirder