I want to start a campaign to block Donald Trump on Twitter. Not just block him, but make a commitment not to share his tweets, not to comment on them, and not to let them be the center of my universe. This is not because I want to stick my head in the sand like a privileged ostrich and ignore the bad things going on in the world that don’t impact me directly. It’s not because I’ve decided to let Trump become the new normal. It’s because I am more useful to God and more able to pursue meaningful social change with disciplined, intentionality if I look for a different frame of reference.
I was reading a Washington Post article about the way that Trump has completely turned the standards for political journalism on their head. The source of his political power is the outrage that he provokes from the “liberal media.” Every time he says something outlandish, the media reacts and his supporters howl with delight. Then he complains about being persecuted and his supporters are even more fired up. The reaction he triggers in the media is like the oxygen feeding his fire.
There’s a very toxic default assumption that I think too many of us bring to social media. We make it our duty to amplify every scandal. If enough people just share this ridiculous quote that is finally outrageous enough, then at last the world will wake up and our political landscape will shift. The problem is that’s not how human psychology works. Ridicule just makes the other side resentful and more entrenched in their views. We live in a post-truth social order where the only thing that matters is which scandal is defining the narrative. The only question is whether Trump’s latest tweet will finally shut up the conservatives who are still trying to get mileage out of Justin Trudeau’s imbecilic eulogy of Fidel Castro. It is so incredibly pathetic.
Instead of reveling in outrage and scorn, how about we actually start planning how we can support people who are vulnerable in the age of Trump? How many immigrants have you befriended in the last day? Do you know where your local mosque is? Or how about a totally different angle? Have you thought about actually getting to know your neighbors — all of them, whatever side of the political fence they’re on? What if instead of spending hours each night diligently retweeting and sharing the latest scandals (a.k.a. what I did last night), we invested our time in cleaning our houses and planning a block holiday party for our neighbors? A million block parties would do way more to change our country than a million retweets of the most poignant take-down of the alt-right.
I don’t think the hyper-vigilant monitoring of Donald Trump’s Twitter feed is what will stop fascism. Fascism is a social cancer that feeds on paranoia and a sense of persecution. It doesn’t get defeated by online hyper-ventilation. It gets defeated by calm and deliberate local organizing. Right now we’ve got a nation of people who are shouting into the vortex of cyberspace. Trump is a direct product of the abject failure to organize for concrete social change in working class white communities. So let’s block him on Twitter and use the time we would have spent reacting to him stepping out of our front door and walking over to our neighbor’s house to ring the doorbell.
The Rev. Morgan Guyton
The Rev. Morgan Guyton serves as director of the NOLA Wesley Foundation, a United Methodist campus ministry to Tulane and Loyola universities in New Orleans, La. He blogs at Mercy Not Sacrifice on Patheos.com, from which this post is republished with the author's permission.