Mick Foley explained why he decided to take a six-week hiatus from Twitter earlier this year while doing an interview with Wrestling Inc.
Here is what he had to say:
On why he briefly left Twitter: “I got off Twitter for six weeks a while back, and there were two things that did it. It was the death of the young lady (Hana Kimura) in Japan by suicide due to bullying, and the other one was the president retweeted something by the Republican Cowboys,” Foley explained. “I have their names written down. Somewhere where the guy said, ‘the only good Democrat is a dead Democrat,’ and then immediately it was, ‘I know they’re going to try to take my words out of context,’ and I was like, ‘no, no, wait. I make a living using words.’ Those words are always meant to be taken literally. They were from the time of a former Civil War General who was told by a Native American in 1869 that there are some good Indians out there, and the guy said, ‘well, the only good Indians I’ve seen are dead Indians.’ And then that got taken into ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian.’ You name it. ‘The only good Nazi is a dead one.’ It’s meant to be taken literally, and I thought this guy has set the bar so low for civility that particular retweet didn’t even get a considerable amount of attention. And I just thought, ‘how far have we fallen that a president could retweet that and say, hey see you in New Mexico or see you in November,’ and I thought well, he’s got 80 million followers. I think as a guy who uses words and has written 11 books and been a pretty effective communicator, even without my bottom teeth, that those words are meant to be taken literally.”
On Donald Trump endorsing extreme viewpoints: “By hitting retweet, you are endorsing that viewpoint. You can’t say you’re just putting it out there. When you’re the President of the United States and you retweet something, you are endorsing it. So if you got 80 million followers, you just do the math, it’s like, okay, what if one in a hundred took you literally about the possibility of killing Democrats? Do the math. You’ve got 800,000 potential people taking that seriously. What if it’s one in a thousand? All you need is eight people with rifles, and they can terrorize a nation based on what one guy said. People go, ‘hey, aren’t you’re taking this too far?’ I did some studying on Rwanda. They killed 750,000 people with 250,000 machetes, not a single gunshot, and we’ve got a nation armed to the teeth. And we’ve got a guy fomenting violence, asking white nationalist groups to ‘stand back and stand by’, using coded language to let them know that you’re going to be okay. You can go and say four days later that you condemn white nationalism, but they know. They know as soon as they hear, ‘stand back and stand by’ that they can do whatever they want, and the president’s gonna look the other way. I just think it’s a really dangerous situation.”
