No one has ever accused The Wire’s David Simon of not knowing his way around a good piece of profanity; this is, after all, the guy who built one of the best crime scene investigation scenes of all time out of two guys finding different ways of saying “Fuck.” Still, Simon was in fine form last night, as he celebrated his return to Twitter—after a two-week suspension he received after telling a Trump supporter they “should die of a slow moving veneral rash that settles in your lying throat”—with another swear-laden tirade denouncing the censorship of the various fuckmooks, moral midgets, and beshitted hypocrites who run this “shithole platform.”
We’re doing Simon’s impromptu poem of vulgarity a disservice by summarizing, but in short, he’s asserting that, while it’s easy to label speech that uses violent rhetoric—like telling Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey that he should “die of boils,” a repetition of one of the “threats” that got Simon suspended in the first place—as illegal, Twitter is far less likely to challenge other forms of hate speech on its platform. (He seems especially angry at the idea that Alex Jones was allowed to spew conspiracy theories about the death of Simon’s friend Anthony Bourdain on the platform, free of consequence.)
It’s a point well taken, but really, we can’t help but just sit back in awe of Simon’s language. He’s a well-known artist of online vitriol anyway, but some of this stuff is an unabashed masterclass in telling other people to unpolitely fuck off: