I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means
Elon Musk (@elonmusk)
Tweeted on April 25, 2022
[There are other things closely related that I thought I should point out at the same time.
Elon Musk’s buying Twitter is good for free speech. And a ‘nightmare’ for progressives:
despite warnings that censorship is necessary “for democracy to survive,” neither the Tesla CEO and billionaire nor ordinary citizens appear to be sufficiently terrified of free speech. Twitter confirmed Monday that Musk will acquire the company in a deal worth $44 billion. Once the deal is complete, Twitter will become a privately held company.
Progressives, in the meantime, have adopted a dangerous shift in their strategy of calling for corporations to censor speech.
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Obama favors free speech only if it does not include disinformation, including what he considers to be “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts and misogynist screeds.”
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He is talking about imposing “standards” on companies to force them to censor “lies” and “disinformation.”
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As is often the case, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stripped away any niceties or nuance. Clinton called for the European Union to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), a measure widely denounced by free speech advocates as a massive censorship measure. Clinton warned that governments need to act now because “for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation and extremism with no accountability. The EU is poised to do something about it.”
Clinton’s call for censoring disinformation was breathtakingly hypocritical. President Obama was briefed by his CIA Director John Brennan on “alleged approval by Hillary Clinton on July 26, 2016 of a proposal from one of her foreign policy advisors to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services.” The intelligence suggested it was “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.”
I have to wonder how Obama, Clinton, and/or Biden would respond to being censored for trying to spread disinformation by talking about “the gun show loophole”, “gun manufactures cannot be sued”, or “private citizens could not own cannons during the revolutionary war era”.
Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:
Twitter, Disney, Netflix, CNN+ and more stuff every day.
I told you guys a few months ago that we’d hit Peak Woke. They pushed too hard. Regular people are sick of this shit.
The tides are changing in the culture war.
On Sunday I had this very conversation with Brother Doug. My perception is that many people have been thinking this crap was near the breaking point for years and finally some people started openly talking about it and the dam has now burst. And people who were afraid to say something are now openly saying they aren’t going to take it anymore and are going to do something about it.
Brother Doug said that he has noticed that friends and relatives on Facebook on the political left have been keeping quiet about political stuff for several months.
Andy Ngô ️ (@MrAndyNgo) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:
From my sources: Vocal Twitter employees on internal chats indicate their biggest fear is Donald Trump being unbanned. Many express strong hatred toward @elonmusk & say they’re sick of hearing about “free speech.” They’re concerned about their mental health. #ElonMuskBuyTwitter
Hillel Neuer (@HillelNeuer) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:
I fear Elon Musk could undermine the ideological diversity, equity and inclusion at Twitter which currently maintains a careful balance of 98.7% for one side.
Just Asking (@WasJustAsking) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:
Just seems odd…haven’t they spent years saying they don’t limit speech based on a partisan bent? If that is the key thing he states that will change, and they claim they haven’t been doing it, what is the freak out about? 😉
And my favorite, David Burge (@iowahawkblog) tweeted on Mon, Apr 25, 2022:
If you think you’re having a bad day, spare a thought for the Twitter person who decided it was a good idea to ban the Babylon Bee
In case you don’t know, I think I have this correct, let me know if I misstated something and am spreading disinformation, The Babylon Bee had their Twitter account blocked pending their deletion of a tweet linking to their article The Babylon Bee’s Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine. The Babylon Bee refused to delete the tweet. Elon Musk took the side of The Babylon Bee and used $44 Billion of his pocket change to buy Twitter. He then informed them, “This is now a free speech platform. Enable The Babylon Bee account and, while your at it, there are a bunch of other accounts you need to enable before you go home for your free range tofu, gluten free, certified organic dinner and curl up with your copy of The Communist Manifesto. And tomorrow you are going to make your ‘unbiased’ algorithms open source. Sleep well.”
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey got the hint and not only his nose but his entire head down to his shoulders came out brown just before he said:
Elon’s goal of creating a platform that is “maximally trusted and broadly inclusive” is the right one. This is also [current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal’s] goal, and why I chose him. Thank you both for getting the company out of an impossible situation. This is the right path…I believe it with all my heart
I hope Correia is right. But always remember, the political left believes violence is a legitimate tool for them to use. And they believed they were on the edge of extinguishing Republican influence at all levels of government. If they think they were that close and see it slipping away their response may be… impolite. Prepare appropriately.—Joe]
New buzzphrase from Putin – and perhaps now the progressives: “There will be consequences…” In what form, nobody knows, but likely a lot of teeth gnashing and plaintive mewing.
I think we can expect something more than a mere gnashing of teeth and tearing of garments. As Tamara Keel once said, “Conservative speech is considered violence while Leftist violence is considered speech.”
I like Quillette/Jim Rutt’s take. Well worth the read: https://quillette.com/2022/04/27/musk-and-moderation/
All things come with choices. They can be used for good or bad.
I could see an intelligent guy like Musk being fed up with a bunch of communist woke crap. As his home country is being destroyed by it.
Which gives one a deep rooted hate that’s not easily forgotten.
On the devil’s curmudgeon side. Musk being a large part of government tech world.
He could be positioning Twitter for the American version of the Chinese social credit score app? It will be a money/power/control, maker/keeper.
Or maybe I’m just to jaded. We’ll see.
a very good post.
and, bless musk. this should, btw, prove a very good business decision, as i bet he brings in a lot of business from people tired of “woke” restrictions.
Now, we’ve entered the danger zone. What will the far left be willing to do to save their precious accomplishments? WWIII? Afterall, we are pulling the strings in Ukraine. Or perhaps CWII. Or perhaps DOJ oversight of Twitter, Tesla, …?
See todays featured article in Seattle Times: ‘You sweep, we strike’: Seattle Parks building vandalized in apparent response to encampment removals”
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/you-sweep-we-strike-seattle-parks-building-vandalized-in-apparent-response-to-encampment-removals/
First and always, remember that this is a global war, having nothing to do, per se, with the United States. In the Progressive, globalist mind, there is no place for national sovereignty, or even recognized borders, separate economies, or any of that. It all has to go.
”I told you guys a few months ago that we’d hit Peak Woke.”
Meh. There is no such thing, as we’ve seen over and over and over again throughout history. On the other hand, I suppose “peak woke” would be when everyone is dead. It literally can’t get any more “woke” than that! What Correia means by “peak woke” is nothing but wishful thinking. It’s the wishful thinking of the Jews in Europe in the 1930s, which said, “Those Nazis just like to talk big. They’d never be able to pull it off, even if they really wanted to. Let them strut for now. They could never get away with it.”
”They pushed too hard. Regular people are sick of this shit. The tides are changing in the culture war.”
Really? Apparently, we still have no idea, whatsoever, of how Progressivism works then, do we? Shall I remind you? OK;
They push and push and push, right up close to some breaking point, and then they simply pause. today’s news, and the reaction to it, is a classic, textbook example. They pause for today. We then get accustomed enough to their shenanigans that we go on with life, a little more cynical, a little more irritated, taxed a little more, but we go on. And that which irritates you controls you. Meanwhile the upcoming generation knows of no time when (in this specific case) free speech existed in the constitutional sense. And so they’re more pliable in this sense.
We’re busy, too, and have things to do other than kidnap, and tar and feather Progressives. So they wait, and plan, and organize, and gather their resources, and when the time is right, which is always soon, they simply resume where they left off.
We laugh at their “stupidity” and “inability to reason” and get mad and so on, as always, believing “it can never happen here” although all evidence screams to us from all of history saying otherwise. We think they cannot possibly be planning the actual destruction of the free world (now the “formerly free world”). Surely they’re not smart enough to do THAT. We rationalize it away, convincing ourselves that the (Jesuitical) Progressives fail to understand what they themselves have been planning and organizing for the last 120+ years. Even when we say it, we still cannot comprehend the degree of organized evil that’s at work in the world, even though the same mistake has been made over and over and over again, throughout the world, right in front of our faces. We point it out, we talk about it, and we keep making that mistake while we’re talking about others having made it somewhere else, in some other time, because we cannot comprehend evil. We don’t want to. Call it normalcy bias. It always happens this way. It always has.
(Jesuitical) (Romish) Progressivism is political, cultural, economic, moral, and spiritual ratcheting. It only goes in one direction over the broader timeframes. Progressives are never purged from a society, and their ideologies are never extinguished. THEY do purges. We do not.
This current war (the modern phase of it) has been raging since the Reformation. It will, for sure and for certain, continue, globally, until the Romish authoritarian, church-state system of total power is finally accomplished, the “god-kings” once again call the shots, putting to death the heretics who get too loud, and all the rest. They’ll have their anti-Christ system, just as in the Dark Ages, but this time with all the high tech available; the surveillance, the AI, the social credit scores, their own currency, and so on. None of that is being curtailed whatsoever by the fact that one rich guy has bought one silly platform and is making “Trumpy” noises and crowing like a rooster.
So have your fun for a day. Laugh at the enemy for a week. Get your endorphin levels up for a season. Post some clever Tweets. It won’t make any difference.
I figure that if our attention is being diverted toward one direction, then we’d best be looking instead in all the other directions. In a world which runs on deception, nearly everything is a ruse. And besides;
“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.” Isaiah 8:20
Musk is a HUGE Us government contractor. Twitter is in no way profitable on on its own without some form of large government indirect subsidies. Now that he has made the offer, and he’s been nominally accepted, he enters the “Due Diligence” period where he gets to look through the books and code and internals. ALL of the books and code and internals. It will be fascinating to see what comes to light, and I would not be the least bit surprised if, after shedding a whole bunch of light on a lot of very shady stuff, he walks away saying in effect “that isn’t worth anything to me, it’s nothing but a government narrative echo chamber and propaganda factory.”
He can make it profitable. It can be changed into the new ID system that runs your life.
It can be the app that you get your rations on. Or when, where, how much you buy or own. Or the app that the government excepts as positive ID. And rates your credit score. Both for money and social.
The only one that contacts up securely to his global satellite internet system. For to keep track/control of all us global serfs. No matter where we are, or what were doing. Were going to need Elon’s new twitter app. to do it.
When your the richest man in the world, money don’t mean that much.
To run the new version clown-world. You need all the things that Elon has put in place and controls.
Think it’s all coincidence?
Notice one of the first things to do is separate the bots and the humans?
‘Obama favors free speech only if it does not include disinformation, including what he considers to be “lies, conspiracy theories, junk science, quackery, racist tracts and misogynist screeds.”’
And yet, the MSM continues to do so….