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Donald Trump and the son he cursed with his own name are blasting social media. From Twitter to TicToc, from Google to Facebook, they contend these giants are trying to "silence conservative voices." Let me tell you a tale about free speech and silencing a voice.

In the early 1980s I was writing parttime for The Brownsville Herald. I taught fulltime with the BISD and the newspaper gig, mostly writing features and columns, deposited some botana bucks in my pocket so I could party with gusto in Matamoros. Though I had no formal deal with the dying daily, the editor fired me when I submitted a long article to a Valley monthly that the Herald would have never published because of its length. Perhaps, management was looking for an excuse to unload me. I was too controversial for their tastes.

I submitted pieces throughout that decade to various publications that came and went. In 1990 I started publishing my iconic El Rocinante. Employed at the school district, I penned a series in which I accused the BISD of racism for the manner the administration was treating two African-American coaches.

The superintendent and the athletic director filed grievances with the district. They wanted me fired and they nearly exceeded. Without even being informed that my future was on the agenda, I survived on a 4-3 vote.

Furious, they filed the same complaints against me with the Texas Education Agency. They wanted TEA to strip me of my teaching credential as if I were no different that a predator preying on little girls in my classroom. With Ben Neece representing me, we defeated these bigwigs in two separate cases based on the same grievance.

My BISD career ended my 39th year in the district when Superintendent Dr. Esperanza Zendejas pulled me into the principal's conference room and admonished me that if I continued to write in my creative fashion, I would face termination. I finished the year and retired. As much as I loved teaching, a writer's gotta write.

As to the Trumps' dealings with social media, I took El Rocinante to the internet in 2000 as Brownsville's first blog. I maintained El Rocinante on-line for several years until Google closed my site after I had taken conservative propagandists Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity behind the wood shed and whipped the shit out of them for their biased commentaries about President Barack Obama. As sharks swimming in the ocean, they convinced Google that the company needed to rid a resaca of this annoying minnow. Google eliminated my site.

I am serving a 30-day sentence with Facebook after I wrote a satirical piece in which I have Trump denying that he ever heard of Adolf Hitler even though there were several photos of Trump shaking hands with him. Who knows who demanded the submission be deleted and the author be punished!

This incident marked the umpteenth time that Facebook has suspended me. Irony of ironies, this was the fourth time that FB had muzzled me after I had penned anti-Trump broadsides. So don't be surprised that I'm not shedding any alligator tears for our president who has never shown any woman the sensitivity that he shows himself.

I'm not demanding the closing of the BISD, Google and Facebook because they punished me for exercising my right to free speech. It's their ball and field. They impose the rules and I either abide by their dictates or I find myself another venue to express myself.

As Sarah Cooper has demonstrated with her hilarious lip-sync impersonations of Trump on TicTok, there is always a platform in this wide-open world in which individuals like myself have access to outlets that offer greater protection from those critics who are hypocrites when it comes to paying lip service to the Constitution.

Their adherence to the First Amendment applies to their ranting and raving. When the opposition rants and raves more articulately, these reactionaries, who can't take as well as they give, demand a swift censorship of contrary views, whimpering they are being bullied or harassed or their adversaries are trespassing on community standards. Dictatorships count on these fanatical followers.

When it comes to climbing between the ropes and giving it your best shot, nobody is a bigger pussy than the pseudo macho Trump.

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