There’s “Freedom of Speech… Just Watch What You Say!” That was the title of the third studio album by rapper and Law & Order: SVU actor Ice-T, but it could equally apply to the words of Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, who recently apologized for his platform’s popularity leading to the 2016 election of President Donald Trump.
The parallels between Ice-T and Trump don’t end there. The fact of the matter is that back in the 1990s, Ice-T was being encouraged by liberals to say whatever he wanted in his lyrics, which included foul language and politically incorrect slogans. It was Ice-T who notoriously got in trouble for his band Body Count’s tune “Cop Killer,” which featured the lyrics “Die, Pig, Die” and “I’m ’bout to dust some cops off.”
When it was released in 1992, no less a media organization than the Wall Street Journal editorialized in favor of Ice-T’s free speech rights to play the song. Then-Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin stated that listeners needed to “heed the anguished cry contained in [Ice-T’s] message.”
Flash forward to today, and Time-Warner is now one of the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party. Their publications, including Time magazine, have joined progressives in being some of the first to castigate Donald Trump’s Twitter messages and call for Trump being removed from the popular Internet network.
Perhaps Trump should take a few hints from Ice-T, whose past albums “Power,” “Repossession” and “Urban Legends” could inspire Trump’s reelection campaign in 2020. Watch as YouTube’s Wochit News gets to the bottom of who the Internet’s original digital gangster is in this provocative and revealing clip.