Pennies from Twitter Heaven

How twitter became a perfect self-priming propaganda machine

As a lifelong atheist, I suspect I am not eligible to bill myself as “another angel in twitter heaven.” But that is indeed the elevated state of transubstantiation I now find myself in. Although as a Jew (yes, there are atheist Jews), that latter metaphor is probably off-limits to me as well. Where’s a good trope when you need one?

I had been planning to entertain you with an essay titled “Elon Musk: Lord of the Memes.” And I still intend to sometime soon. In fact, here’s a teaser.

But the rest of that rollicking will have to wait. Because while I was rifling through my substantial file of Musk memes gleaned from twitter in the past month, twitter’s barely pubescent minders saw fit to permanently suspend my account of 11 years and 11,400 followers for tweeting about my own medical condition.

So we have a spooky case of auto-manifestation in which an essay I was writing about a person buying twitter to end censorship must be postponed because I became the latest target of the platform’s runaway censorship and now need to write about that instead.

At least I am among illustrious company in that spectral, overcrowded virtual refugee camp known as twitter heaven, waiting for the day Elon springs us all. I join the ranks of numerous doctors, scientists, researchers and journalists who have been deplatformed by the Red Guards of Rectitude in knee pants for muddying the official narrative with nonconforming fact.

Any official narrative will do, where the twitter purge is concerned—Covid, Ukraine, gender ideology, election results. But the official Covid narrative seems to have been my downfall. And along with me, the likes of mRNA inventor Dr. Robert Malone, tech millionaire Steve Kirsch, investigative journalist Mary Beth Pfeiffer, and many more.

Crimes and Misdemeanors

And what, you may ask, was my word-crime that ended my decade-long tenure on twitter this morning? See for yourself.

In dispensing its righteousness, the twitter kinderfest aloft Market Street in San Francisco decreed:

I took them up on their generous offer to appeal my suspension and quickly dashed off this defense:

Everything I stated in my tweet is accurate: "I'm very immune suppressed as leukemia patient, extremely low IgA & IgM. Lymphocytes (B-cell & T-cell) very suppressed from 4-yrs treatmt. Got Delta in sept. It was mild. Used ivermectin. Was FINE. Virtually all Covid lives could be saved w early Rx. Vaxx mandates kill & maim."

The fact that you personally don't agree with my statement does not mean the statement is untrue. And it certainly does not mean that I should be deplatformed.

I can provide ample government-sourced data to support each part of the tweet. The VAERS database alone is more than enough information to verify that vaccine mandates do indeed maim and kill. And the Ivermectin claim can be equally well supported by doctors treating patients and publishing results in peer-reviewed medical journals.

Nothing in my statement is inaccurate. It is therefore wrong for you to suspend me.

I am an award-winning investigative journalist with 40 years' experience. I hold a degree in biology with post-graduate coursework in molecular biology. I am a Democrat and a progressive Leftist. What you are doing is wrong.

The Gang of Four (or four hundred, who knows?) on Market Street thanked me for my input. So now I wait and run a lemonade stand in twitter heaven, slaking the divine thirst of Malone and Kirsch, et al.

I am not hopeful that my appeal will yield reinstatement from the Wojak politburo. For that, twitter will need a new sheriff.

The Great Gaslightenment

It wasn’t until after I shot off my hasty appeal that I noticed twitter had not actually accused me of falsehoods or inaccuracies. Rather, my word-crime was “spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19.”

So even if I can unequivocally establish the accuracy and validity of the content of my tweet (which I can), it is still a hanging offense because it is “misleading.”

What then does misleading mean in this situation where veracity can be proved? It would appear to mean: Anything that leads people in the undesired direction, i.e., away from the official narrative.

So by that logic, if the official narrative itself is false or faulty, then any presentation of the truth is, by definition, “misleading” because it will lead the viewer away from rather than further into the official narrative.

It’s a perfect self-priming perpetual motion machine for propaganda. The official narrative is offered as the truth, no matter how baseless and absurd. And any attempt to prove otherwise will automatically be branded misleading, and the speaker deplatformed, because—yes—truth can lead people away from fiction. In that hyper-contorted logic-ball, truth is technically misleading. 

I find this discovery relaxing. Up until now I had expended a great deal of effort on twitter and elsewhere trying to prove the accuracy of my statements. But in the Great Gaslightenment, I am not even being accused of inaccuracy, just leading people away from the official narrative, which could result in them hurting themselves on the truth, like tripping over a fallen tree limb across the path.

I think this means I no longer need to waste my one wild and precious life fetching links to data in peer-reviewed medical journals, and obediently dropping them at the feet of my critics. Because my veracity is not in question here, just the degree to which I am willing to support a clumsy and ill-executed narrative. And my answer to that is: Not at all.  

As an atheist, I also don’t believe in reincarnation—at least not in the classical sense of beginning a new life in a different physical body after biological death. But the metaverse, it turns out, is much more conducive to transmigration than the corporeal plane is. You can now find me at @AlsoGoldberg. Until they catch me.

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Kim Goldberg is a Vancouver Island writer and the author of eight books. Her latest is Devolution, poems and fables of ecopocalypse (Caitlin Press, 2020). Twitter: @AlsoGoldberg