Media Have Every Right to Cancel Trump

So, President Donald Trump has been booted off Twitter, as of now forever. Facebook also gave him the heave-ho. Apple and Google, meanwhile, have tossed the riot-friendly Parler app out of their stores.

Parler became a social media cave for the Trump-inspired looters, vandals, cop killers and other social misfits who rampaged through the Capitol. But Amazon may have delivered the harshest blow by refusing to store Parler's data in its cloud-computing service.

Having lost the presidency, the Senate majority and now major platforms for disseminating lies and calls to violence, Trump World, or what's left of it, automatically shifted into self-pitying snowflake mode. With quivering voices, its members accused the tech companies of censorship.

When Simon & Schuster announced it would not be publishing the book by one of the instigators, Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator called the move "Orwellian" and a "direct assault on the First Amendment." A graduate of Yale Law School should know that the First Amendment bans only government censorship.

These are all private companies, and private companies have every right to decide what they do or do not offer customers. I demand that Fox News give me an hour of airtime every week. I'm not getting it? Well, those are the breaks.

There will be a time for thoughtful debate on these companies' power to monitor the flow of information. That time is not this week. Having just endured a violent attempt to destroy the electoral process at Trump's urging, American democracy is now in Code Red. We're in a national emergency demanding an emergency response.