Bernie Sanders Says He’s Not ‘Particularly Comfortable’ With Trump Twitter Ban

Senator Bernie Sanders said in a new interview that he’s not “particularly comfortable” with Donald Trump’s Twitter ban because “tomorrow it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view” that gets banned as well.

Sanders spoke with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein for an interview that dropped Tuesday, an “unusually optimistic” conversation — as Klein put it — on everything from the covid relief legislation to the voting rights bill Democrats are pushing for to unionizing Amazon workers.

At one point Klein asked the Vermont senator about criticism that “liberals have become too censorious and too willing to use their cultural and corporate and political power to censor or suppress ideas and products that offend them.”

Sanders started by pointing to the Twitter ban of the former president and said, “You have a former president in Trump, who was a racist, a sexist, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law. This is a bad-news guy.”

But he continued, “If you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about that.”

Sanders admitted he doesn’t know what the right answer is, bringing up the Capitol riots (Trump was banned in the days after January 6th) and telling Klein, “Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories traveling all over this country? No. Do you want the internet to be used for authoritarian purposes and an insurrection, if you like? No, you don’t. So how do you balance that?”

One thing he warned about is that “yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned, and tomorrow, it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.”

“But the devil is obviously in the details,” he added.

You can listen to the full interview here. The relevant part starts at the 20:30 mark.