Trump’s #AskTheGays Misfire Prompts Call for Conservative Twitter

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Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 07:05 pm

Conservatives have been revealed through numerous social media interactions to be thin-skinned. We see this frequently, especially through the lens of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed, his chosen medium for insulting people who have in any way challenged or questioned him.

Wednesday in Atlanta, Trump said, “Ask the gays what they think and what they do, in, not only Saudi Arabia, but many of these countries, and then you tell me, who’s your friend, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton?”

Well yeah, there is always more to reality than Trump’s simple bluster, isn’t there, as this tweet shows:

When Donald Trump said, “Ask the gays,” the Twitterverse quickly responded by putting the presumptive Republican nominee in his place. In fact, as Huffington Post trends editor Jenna Amatulli quipped the other day, it was the “best Twitter meme Donald Trump never wanted.”

That is just one example, of course. There have been many others. Like reality, social media does seem to have a liberal bias. And that bothers Fox News addicted conservatives. They need to be able to sign onto their social media accounts with some feeling of assurance that their reality bubble will not be penetrated.

Enter Newsmax talkshow host Steve Malzberg, with the answer to the pesky prickings of unwelcome facts: “We need a conservative Facebook, a conservative Google, a conservative Twitter.”

You get what he’s saying. You know, something to go along with the conservative alternative to Wikipedia, “Conservapedia.” We can be sure it will be at least as accurate as Conservapedia’s claim that “Trump seems to be on the side of the homosexual agenda.”

Of course, as Human Rights Campaign (HRC) tells us, “Trump has been a consistent opponent of marriage equality,” which, says The New York Times, is a “position he has held since at least 2000” – a long time for Trump to hold any opinion.

And it was Trump’s complete, but by no means unique, tone deafness to LGBT issues, that led to the “ask the gays” fiasco. Donald Trump is not on the side of the “homosexual agenda,” of course, and can’t be while he is saying he will overturn marriage equality, and pals around with people who want to kill gays.

So a conservative-friendly (meaning fact-hostile) social media platform gives conservatives a place where they can pretend anything they want to be true, sort of like what Fox News has done with the mainstream media. Then Malzberg can enjoy conservatweets about non-existent massacres of Christians in our streets.

You can certainly see the appeal this would hold for conservatives, harassed daily by fact-friendly tweeters. They say social media “censures” conservatives, when in fact it corrects them, and mocks them for being egregiously “wrong,” shall we say. It must be awful for them, having their deeply cherished illusions so rudely ripped away, again and again by people who don’t get their information from Fox News.

But here again the pesky prickings of reality intrude, and People for the American Way’s Brian Tashman has some advice for Malzberg, writing “The Newsmax host may want to ask Janet Porter of the Religious Right group Faith 2 Action how creating a conservative alternative to Facebook turned out.”

The fact is, though Trump and other Republicans like to pretend they represent some silent majority, the silent majority speaks again and again on social media, telling conservative clowns exactly what it thinks about them. The bruising answer is that the silent majority isn’t impressed with gay-bashing, misogynist, racist a**clowns like Donald Trump.

Having your own Twitter isn’t going to change that. It just gives you a place to pretend it’s not true.

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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