Five Edicts of Social Media From Your King

Now that we as a culture are deciding that we prefer a draconian authoritarianism to the liberties our Founders enshrined in the law of our land, I thought I’d get a head start on setting up a nice dystopian future for all of us—before some other authoritarians decide to strike while the iron is hot.

Our new country will be, as seems to be your desire, a government of men and not of laws. Your entire rationale in 2008, 2012, and 2016 has been to vote for a messiah-figure to solve your problems, and you have looked the other way while both of these men have trampled on the rule of law. All of your politics boils down to whether you support THIS guy or THAT guy, and all of your political engagement thus reeks of either reactionary tantrums or triumphalist smugness vis-à-vis these fallible men. Your fawning and mewling over a Marxist technocrat who weaponized the IRS against his political enemies, sent automatic weapons to drug cartels south of the American border, radicalized our racial discourse and normalized the segregationist extremes of our sociologists and anthropologists was my first clue that you wanted to be ruled. Now, as you bend your knee to your latest ruler, begging him to fix a problem that he is not constitutionally empowered to fix, the die is cast for you, peasants. Therefore, in the new Mitchellonia, I will thus give you what you want: a king to rule you.

Eventually, I will compile a list of new laws that you will obey. Because I am that infallible king that you desire, I reserve the unique right to add to this list as I see fit, or simply “vanish” any laws about which I change my mind. But for now, I will happily replace your First Amendment (which you hate and devalue when anyone sees life differently than you) with these Five Edicts of Social Media Engagement. Henceforth, they shall be known as FESME. I know you ant-legs like nice big government bureaucracies and their acronyms, so memorize this one, Fools. This list will be given in order that moves from That Which Annoys Me A Lot to That Which Annoys Me The Most. It will not do to annoy me, manure-shovelers. We are all Mitchellonians, and I am your king.

Hear ye, hear ye, peasants of Mitchellonia! The following is your FESME, the law of your speech. You will cease and desist, from this time forward, to do the following:

5.            You will stop your incessant hypocrisy of thought and action on social media. If you continue to present yourself as “intelligent” and “educated” but remain constitutionally illiterate, you are neither intelligent nor educated, and should cease to present yourself as such. If, every time you lift your “political voice,” you provide aid and comfort to those who have murdered 34 million babies in the last 45 years, you no longer have the right to lecture the rest of your fellow Mitchellonians on how to “protect our children.” In fact, trotting out ignorant children to repeat your own logical fallacies on national television will be a spectacle no longer allowed, since it is an exercise in hypocrisy. From this moment forward, such activity on your part will be punished in the following way: YOU WILL BE IGNORED. After all, your constitutional illiteracy, reactionary fit-throwing, and illiberal desire to have your cultural problems solved by a bureaucrat are the hallmarks of infancy. What do parents normally do with screaming infants when they throw their fits in the grocery store? Ignore them. If you respond to them, their tantrums are validated. If you ignore them, they lose their audience…and eventually learn a different communication medium.

4.            You will stop parading your ignorance about guns on social media. Every time you spill your peasant tears about “bump stocks” or “semiautomatics” or “AR-15s” or some fictitious boogeyman called “machine guns,” you reveal your profound ignorance about the subject of guns. This subject wasn’t important enough for you to learn anything about until around 10 minutes ago, and now you think your opinion is valid? Ha, ha, ground-crawlers! The grownups in the room have been having the “gun” conversation for 300 years, and your infantile opinion is having no effect whatsoever on their views. Furthermore, your sobs about how the President or Congress should “do something” also reveal ignorance, since it is already illegal to do the things that criminals do. That’s why only criminals are doing them, boot-lickers! If you are not aware that the AR-15 is (in the words of one of our grownups) the “Toyota Camry of guns,” then you should be silent on the topic so that you do not further embarrass yourself. Violation of this law will result in the worst possible punishment: YOU WILL BE IGNORED. You are an infant, and will be treated as an infant. When infants cry, we grownups make sure they are fed, have clean diapers, and a steady supply of Miles Davis music on which to be nurtured. If they keep crying, we ignore them and they eventually learn to talk like big humans.

3.            You will henceforth cease and desist from employing any more of your logical fallacies. From this day forward, Mitchellonia will be a nation of grownups, and grownups have learned how to argue logically. If a criminal shoots up a school, grownups understand that the “problem” in this scenario is the criminal, not the gun. Every time you post some illiterate screed about “our gun problem,” you are painting your own forehead with a scarlet “I.” We only let you think that “I” is about you…it really stands for “Idiot.” Your logical fallacy of a non-sequitur WILL BE IGNORED, as well. Until you learn how to look at problems correctly, in context, and communicate logically like a grownup, you will simply be ignored. Your voice is not valid in this discussion any more than an infant’s is valid. Moreover, you will stop posting half-thoughts, emotionally overwrought reactions to every change in the news cycle, and stupid emojis. Today, Groveler, you are posting about “our gun problem.” Tomorrow, the news cycle will lead you by the nose to our next “problem,” and you’ll feel just as strongly about your idiotic solution to that one, too. And we grownups all know that you’ll not engage in thoughtful, considered discourse, but will simply “like,” “retweet,” or post a half-thought, half-sentence fragment, or half-word that represents the infantile fit you’re throwing this week. Your ad hominems, arguments from silence, straw man arguments, red herrings and general preference for mass hysteria will henceforth be IGNORED.

2.            You will cease and desist from sending your king any further game requests. In fact, if I see one more game request from one of you dirt-scraping citizens, I will banish you to the furthest reaches of Hades, which is being “unfollowed” or “unfriended.” I'll type this nice and slow so that even you Ed Sheeran fans can understand it: YOU WILL BE PERMANENTLY IGNORED.

The #1 Law: You will stop tagging me in Facebook posts. Your king is much too busy ruling over you civics-class-skipping subjects to check his notifications every 12 seconds when some of your other friends “like” your tagged post. The picture you posted of your king, moreover, is unflattering and irreverent. Tag me in one more post, you Blake-Shelton-listening-to buffoons, and I shall banish you to the netherworld of “Unfriending.” This Facebook-tagging nonsense surely ranks right up there with group texting as The Unpardonable Sin in Mitchellonia. You will not only have your citizenship in Mitchellonia revoked—YOU WILL BE IGNORED.

As you can see, being ignored when you throw a tantrum is the worst possible punishment for you. Ignoring infants has always been the business of grownups. In fact, as you will find in your new dystopian country, it is the most effective deterrent to infantile behavior that there is. For example, when you ignore a mass murderer, he doesn't receive the validation that drove him to his crime. Withholding his name and identity, just like we do with sexual assault victims, is the worst possible outcome for him. The same will apply to your own tantrums, which are tearing your civil society apart at no less a pace. Every time one of you peasants misunderstands the difference between “patriotism” and “nationalism,” you will be ignored. Every time one of you children embraces a Pelagian hope in your fellow children to build a utopian society, you will be ignored by your king, the real Lord of the Flies in your dystopia. This is how grownups solve the ACTUAL problem. Since you are part of the ACTUAL problem, the same solution will apply to you, as well.

The rule of law is over. The rule of man—for which you’ve shown a true predilection—begins now. Now go back to eating detergent and leave the governance of this fine land of Mitchellonia to the grownups who are clearly your betters.