I advise all non-Democrats to form emergency email lists of friends and neighbors and interesting/interested strangers. At some point before the election, many of us will be removed from major social media. The purge is ongoing. Who knows how far it will extend before the election?

Democrats, of course, do not need to do this. A few may be purged for show, to fool the masses into thinking these purges are not about electing the Democrat to replace Trump. But we know it is. Major figures at Alphabet and Twitter have confessed to it already, though not specifically tying it to the purge program. Because the purges go on slowly enough, we who remain on social media are mere boiling frogs. Or, to switch metaphors: “first they came for the Jews.” But it’s not Jews, it has been Alex Jones, followed by scads of folks; now it is QAnon; tomorrow, who knows?

I write long enough sentences and use big enough words that I might be safe. It’s easy to dismiss me, to look away. And I believe so few pieties it’s easy to dismiss me as a perhaps-harmless crank.

But many, many influential nodes in political freethought shall be suppressed.

And my Democrat friends will say it is all worth it, because “orange man bad.”

Anyway, 20 years ago email listserves revolutionized communications and ushered in a brief and glorious period of free communication and connected ideas. That they have fallen by the wayside with the popularity of social media (itself in no small part funded and influenced by, shall we say, certain extremely interrested parties) does not mean they cannot be taken up again. Remember, email was designed to resist nuclear attack.

The current controlling efforts of social media outfits like Tw, Fb and Yt (Alphabet) are bad, but they are not, surely, WORSE than nuclear war.

twv