SKILLET frontman John Cooper has criticized Twitter for permanently suspending Donald Trump‘s account.
Earlier this week, Twitter had decided that Trump had crossed a line too far continuing to use social media platform to repeat debunked conspiracy theories about the election, even after thousands of his supporters violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in an insurrection that left five dead.
Yesterday (January 9), Cooper uploaded the latest episode of his “Cooper Stuff” podcast in which he suggested that Twitter’s decision to restrict Trump from broadcasting his message directly to his tens of millions of followers was a form of censorship, and that it amounts to an attack on freedom of speech.
“Look, I don’t follow Trump on Twitter. I’m not into it,” Cooper said. “Some people love it; some people hate it; some people are in between; whatever you are, censoring the president from Twitter, no matter what they’re saying… People say all sorts of weird stuff on Twitter — all sorts of violent, inflammatory stuff. Look, I get it. But that is not gonna lead to somewhere good, and I think it’s got a lot of people really freaked out.
“To me, that’s not the freakiest thing,” he continued. “The freakiest thing to me is all the subsequent things. I’m, like, wait a minute — what does this mean? If Twitter has the power to censor the president, what does that mean? I think that’s what people are freaking out about.
“There’s tons of people that are conservative that don’t like Trump‘s tweets. There’s tons of people that kind of wish he wouldn’t tweet so much. I don’t think that’s what people are freaked out [about]. I think people are, like, ‘Wait a minute. If they can do it to him, what does that mean for everybody else?’
“Already, people are losing their jobs — it’s been on the news; I’m sure you’ve seen it — people are losing their jobs depending on what they have supported. Because, basically, the idea is that if you are conservative, then that means you support the violence; you’re responsible for the violence. If you are conservative, then you support the violence, which is a product of white supremacy now — is what they’re saying.
“Freedom of speech is gonna be gone,” he added. “I don’t know if you know, people are calling — even CNN and other famous people; we’re not talking about just nobodies; we’re talking about influential people in the cultural elite — calling for news sources to be yanked down. Even CNN is calling for Fox News to be yanked down from the cable stations. I don’t know what this is gonna mean.”
