White House Petition to #DeportPiersMorgan Gathers Signatures Furiously!

Piers Morgan's post-Sandy Hook gun-control crusade earned him a peculiar American honor: his own deportation petition. Days after his on-air clashes with gun-rights advocates, a petition appeared on the White House's "We the People" site demanding that the British CNN host be deported for "engaging in a hostile attack against the U.S. Constitution" by targeting the Second Amendment.

The petition

The petition argued that Morgan, as a foreign citizen, had no standing to lecture Americans about their constitutional rights and should be sent home. It caught fire immediately, gathering tens of thousands of signatures in days and eventually surpassing 100,000, far beyond the threshold requiring an official White House response.

The #DeportPiersMorgan hashtag trended. Morgan, never one to miss a spotlight, addressed it on air with a mix of defiance and amusement, effectively daring his critics to keep the signatures coming.

The White House responds

The White House response, issued by press secretary Jay Carney, was a small masterpiece of democratic trolling. It declined to deport Morgan and used the occasion to defend the very freedoms the petitioners claimed to cherish: the First Amendment protects speech even, or especially, when it infuriates you. Deporting a journalist for his opinions, the response implied, would be a stranger attack on American liberty than anything Morgan had said about guns.

The logic was impeccable and the petitioners hated it, which was rather the point.

Why it mattered

The episode was a perfect artifact of the post-Sandy Hook moment: grief curdling into fury, fury hunting for a target, and the target turning out to be a British television host. It also demonstrated the strange new machinery of "We the People," where any grievance with enough clicks earned a presidential response, and where the response was often better written than the petition.

Morgan kept his job, his show, and his opinions. The petitioners kept their guns and their resentment. Everybody won, which is to say nobody changed their mind.

FAQ

What did the petition demand? The deportation of Piers Morgan, a British citizen, for his on-air gun-control advocacy.

How many signatures did it get? Over 100,000, well past the threshold for an official response.

How did the White House respond? It refused, citing the First Amendment's protection of free speech.

Did Morgan respond? Yes, on air, with amusement and defiance, treating the petition as a badge of honor.

The takeaway

Americans petitioned their government to deport a man for exercising free speech in defense of gun control, and the government answered by defending his free speech. The system worked. Nobody was happy. That is also the system working.