Posted on 22 January 2021
Rick Wilson, the co-founder of the virulently anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said conservatives are being banned because they “suck” and “say evil shit.”
“Twitter and Facebook aren’t banning you because you’re a conservative. They’re banning you because you suck,” Wilson said on an episode of MSNBC’s The ReidOut with Joy Reid on Jan 13. “They’re banning you because you say evil shit.”
Wilson and Reid spent the segment rebuking accusations made by Republican lawmakers that those on the left are not censored as much as those on the right. One example brought forth was that of comedian and provocateur Kathy Griffin. Griffin twice posted an image of herself on social media holding a severed and bloody head that looked like Donald Trump. After posting the photograph for a second time Griffin claimed that she was reported to Twitter and made to delete the graphic photo. However, the photo still remains on the platform, but has a sensitive content filter that states, “The following media includes potentially sensitive content. Change settings.”
“So Hollywood is the same thing as Donald Trump inciting an actual riot and a coup?” Reid asked. She remarked that it was a “weird equivalence” to compare the lack of censorship levied against the left, to the heavy-handed censorship levied against politicians on the right.
Wilson, who is known for making over-the-top attacks on the right, told Reid it was the “most remarkable thing” to see “these tough guy, swagger monkeys” and “big, you know, alpha males … whining, and bitching and moaning about Kathy Griffith[sic] holding up an [indiscernible], a mannequin head.” Conservatives need to “toughen up,” Wilson said.
Throughout the segment Wilson appeared unable to discuss Republican concerns about censorship without reverting to name calling.
“This whiny bitch victimhood from Matt Gaetz and Ken Buck and Jim Jordan and Marjorie Taylor ‘Cuckoo QAnon’ Greene, and all of these other people, it is the most pathetic example of special pleading I’ve ever seen,” Wilson told Reid. “They act as if they’ve been oppressed somehow, that the world is against them somehow.”
Reid questioned how Greene, someone who has rallied against Big Tech censorship, could be considered a victim when she was “literally on the House floor saying she’s being silenced while she’s on the House floor, also on TV.”
She blamed Republican complaints about censorship on “lunatics'' who have been allowed into the party. “I feel like, Rick, that this is one of those examples of when you open the door to the crazy, to the lunatics. They all come in, and then after a while, the first lunatics you let in, they seem fairly normal.”
Reid concluded earlier in the clip that “what’s left in the [Republican] Party is the ridiculous.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Facebook and Twitter and demand that Big Tech be held to account to mirror the First Amendment while providing transparency, clarity on “hate speech” and equal footing for conservatives. If you have been censored, contact us at the Media Research Center contact form, and help us hold Big Tech accountable.