On January 8, 2021, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey banned President Donald J. Trump for life. The opportunity for virtue signaling proved irresistible to Dorsey. After the debacle in the Capitol on January 6, Dorsey did what he had been wanting to do for years: cleansed his platform of dissent. Democracy means that the Democrats say what is what. Dorsey made sure that there would be no questioning, by the people, of the “people’s will.” Trump voters are deplorable, after all, and therefore ought to have no say in how their country is run. Dorsey relished banishing their leader into outer darkness, which won Dorsey almost infinite merit in the dharma scheme of the woke Left.
Facebook cracked down, too. Apple quickly followed, and soon Amazon kicked Twitter alternative Parler off its servers. Better get on board with the leftist groupthink, or else be cast out from the lucrative ranks of woke capitalism. If you are not on board with the Marxist reconfiguring of the United States of America, you are anathema. A lume spento. You are out the door—no, you don’t even exist. You have virtually disappeared; all that remains to mark where you once stood is your ghosted Twitter profile, with the terms of your excommunication stamped across its darkened background.
The Twitter Rapture is upon us. It has been a long time coming, but it is finally here. Those who are not destined to be shackled in the “portal coil” of 280 characters have been snatched out of the midst of their peers mid-tweet. Just like that, in an instant, by the thousands and tens of thousands, they are gone.
Orthodox. Faithful. Free.
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I, for one, welcome this development. It is a very good piece of news. What a mercy to have been spat out of the mouth of the beast and coughed up back into real life again. If you have been Twitter Raptured, rejoice! And if you have never been on Twitter in the first place, I congratulate you. Let us welcome our wayward brothers and sisters back into the fold of the living.
But wait. Why is it such a good thing to be kicked off of a globalist hive-mind, lorded over by a techno-Marxist billionaire with a nose ring?
Well, I’m glad you asked.
To put it bluntly, Twitter is the essence of Protestantism. It is rooted in no true principles, relies solely on the blunt force trauma of mobbing gang-ups against nonconformers, has a totalitarian prickliness for doctrinal purity in direct and inverse proportion to the inscrutability of what is being professed (in other words, it is intolerant precisely insofar as it is woke), and it relies on all three satanic principles of the Lutheran revolt against God: sola fide, sola scriptura, and sola gratia. If you are tweeting, you are being groomed to join the thoroughly Protestant modernity, when it ought to be your Catholic pleasure to defy at every turn. Twitter is Calvinism in sound bites. Consider:
Sola fide: There is no Twitter church; no apparatus of buildings and priests and sacraments. There is only a blue check mark. If you have a blue check mark, you are a member of the Twitterverse by dint of your having bought into the worldview of Twitter, namely their “policies” and “guidelines,” the vague penumbra of being against “hate speech” and “bullying” and “disputed information.”
When Twitter says that information is “disputed,” it doesn’t say by whom. You are not allowed to ask. It is just disputed. Believe it, or you are gone. Sola fide.
Also, the Twitter gang does not look on works but on faith. If one is, say, Bill Clinton, a serial rapist, one may still use Twitter, because Clinton’s heart is in the right place—he’s a Democrat—even if, well, his works leave something to be desired. Ditto for raging anti-Semites, such as Louis Farrakhan and the Ayatollah Khamenei.
It is not what tweeters do; the fact that the Twitter Elect accepts them lets them remain in the good graces of the Twitterverse. All tweets are subject to review. It does not matter necessarily that someone is calling for violence. What matters is whether the right people are calling for violence against the wrong people. And you only know what is right and wrong by submitting to the “general will” of the Twitterverse.
Sola scriptura: On Twitter, you are allowed to deal only in micro-utterances of 280 characters, and many tweeters post the disclaimer that retweets are not endorsements of the retweeted content. Every person is pope, deciding the meaning of every syllable of every word. Every Twitter page is the dominion of a little prophet, priest, and king. What the tweeter says, goes—unless the tweeter is deemed to have lost the faith, in which case refer to the Sola Fide section above.
When there is a dispute about what words mean, or about who is orthodox and who is not, then it is decided by the pile-on method. The tweeter who gets piled on the most, loses. Pile-ons led by Twitter saints—those with celebrity statuses conferred by the Geneva of Hollywood, or who have the most followers on Twitter, like a Baptist preacher with his own television network—are particularly damning. It’s a numbers game in the end. Orthodoxy is not what is true, but who has the biggest army.
But whatever happens, there is only the word on the screen. As with Protestantism itself, there is no outside-of-the-text. And the bylaws of Twitter are final, the ur-text of all tweeting. What is written is law, forever.
Sola gratia: Your tweeting continues only at the pleasure of the congregation leader, Jack Dorsey. Dorsey is the David Miscavige of the Woke Mob. He decides who stays and who goes. He alone. His grace is your salvation. His wrath is your doom. Be warned.
Given the above, if you are a Catholic using Twitter, you are being Protestantized. If the Twitter Rapture did not catch you on the first round, then auto-rapture, my friend, and rejoin the human race.
Be a man, not a bird. Speak, don’t tweet. Speak to me, to her, to him, to them and to us. Use your real name, and call me by mine. Come, let us reason together, like men.
If you have been Twitter-raptured, halleluia! Reach out to your brothers and sisters, take them by the hand, and walk with them out of their own cyber-hells. It is a great day, this which the Lord has made. We are set free from the fleshpots of our captivity.
The Twitter Rapture is upon us. Amen, I shout, amen!
[Photo Credit: Hannah McKay-Pool/Getty Images]