Maxwell Frost Enters “P**** A** B****” Into the House Record to Make a Point About Free Speech
Frost was referencing an iconic Chrissy Teigen tweet about Donald Trump.
Thanks to Representative Maxwell Frost, “pussy ass bitch” is now in the congressional record.
As he questioned former Twitter safety employee Anika Collier Navaroli in a House hearing on Wednesday, Frost asked Navaroli to read out loud the expletive quote from a Chrissy Teigen tweet about Donald Trump. Navaroli then testified that the Trump administration reached out directly to Twitter, jockeying for the company to remove the post.
“Free speech,” Frost remarked about Teigen’s tweet.
The exchange was part of a House hearing, inspired by the so-called “Twitter Files,” on whether Democrats worked with Twitter to suppress the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Frost’s line of questioning complicated Republicans’ narrative that Twitter colluded with the government to baselessly silence right-wing views.
Frost, the 25-year-old congressional freshman from Florida, further challenged the hearing’s supposed concern for free speech, asking whether his colleagues would host hearings on government officials suppressing free speech, rather than only private businesses making editorial decisions. Frost cited how his state’s own Governor Ron DeSantis is attacking free speech by targeting businesses that support drag shows and teachers who are teaching curriculum that DeSantis has sought to ban.
Much of the right-wing outrage driving the hearing revolved around trumped-up claims of cancel culture and of social media companies suppressing “free speech” (whether that be slurs, calls for violence, or even incitements of riots). Frost addressed this quite acutely, noting that “there’s a difference between a culture war, and how culture naturally changes,” as he suggested some of his colleagues are resistant to natural culture change. “Just yesterday, we heard a member equate immigration negatively to ‘changing our culture.’”
“The reality is that culture changes and adopts and welcomes more people. It becomes more understanding, and it also decides to reassess what’s acceptable behavior and rhetoric,” Frost said. “In this supposed culture war, they often conflate the right to free speech with the nonexistent right to not be criticized or held accountable for what you say on the internet or even real life.”
Questions surrounding free speech, online and offline, are indeed important, as are inquiries into policies on platforms where millions of people communicate. Frost’s lines of questioning, however, helped provide a reality check on how many of the concerns from the hearings’ most vocal proponents were about free speech versus about the right to say a slur, spread election or Covid conspiracies, or incite more riots on the Capitol.