The Honorable Donald J. Trump, President of the United States
Dear Mr. President,
I am writing you today in the hopes that what I am about to tell you will serve as a textbook example of how one citizen was effectively “cancelled,” surreptitiously removed from the three largest social media sites- Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In.
My profiles in each of these cases were completely deleted, and without warning nor any notice, in a concerted effort to “cancel” me. The Twitter cancellation happened in the wee hours of Sunday, June 14, and then the LinkedIn cancellation happened in the wee hours of June 15th. Then, on the afternoon of Saturday, July 4th, the same thing happened to my Facebook profile, with a message that my profile- a profile I have had and maintained since 2009- “no longer met their community standards,” and thus twelve years of history- written, recorded and posted for posterity all vanished with a stroke of a keyboard, by some determined leftist apparatchik at Facebook. Why? Because in all my writings, I have consistently and fervently supported you and your presidency.
For the last decade I have written literally hundreds of essays which I have shared first to Facebook, then from my own webpage (http://www.drew.nickell.com), and subsequently to Twitter and Linked-In, as well. I also published a book Bending Your Ear-a Collection of Essays on the Issues of Our Times in 2016 containing many of these essays, and in which I predicted your Republican Presidential Nomination as early as the late summer/early fall of 2015 in several essays which followed and are published in my book.
Because I correctly predicted your nomination and election, I was able to build up a large following on Facebook- almost 5,000 friends and another thousand followers regularly read my essays and viewed my Facebook live recordings, when I was on the air locally in Hampton Roads. Also, my website acquired upwards of 10,000 subscribers and my essays have been read in over 90 countries across the world. Similarly, I had amassed more than 400 followers on Linked-In and just as many on Twitter, largely because the essays I wrote put words into what my followers felt inside, but could not precisely articulate these feelings, themselves.
My readers also knew of my steadfast, early and continued support for your presidency and all you are trying to accomplish for the American people, and all in the face of what I know to be the greatest push-back against any President in our nation’s history. I have been studying national politics, first as a hobby and then as an avocation since I was ten years old, so I know that of which I speak, as I also read the entire 1959 edition of the World Book Encyclopedia during my youth, prompting a lifelong love of history.
Essentially, Mr. President I have thus been given a “death sentence” by the “cancel culture” that is today’s social media, which is bound and determined to silence me- just so that no one will ever again see anything I have written, and will continue to write, so that the country I love will be left into your hands for the next five years. I wholeheartedly support you, and for all that you stand, against the very formidable powers- of media and of politicos of all stripes, with which you must grapple on a daily basis.
If anyone ever asks you or your staff, just what is the “cancel culture” and/or how social media giants use their own authority to cancel the voices of reason with which they happen to disagree- I hope you and your staff will feel free to use my unfortunate example as a teaching moment to all who would suggest that these platforms allow diversity of opinion- for that, sir, is their big lie, and I sincerely hope you can put a stop to this type of abuse.
May God bless and keep you, Mr. President. I am, sir,
Very appreciatively yours,
Drew Nickell