Eric Abbenante
@EricAbbenante
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Elon Musk with Bill Maher tonight:

"You have talked about this Woke mind virus. In really apocalyptic terms. You should explain why you don't think it's hyperbole to say it's pushing civilization towards suicide. First of all what is the woke mind virus?"

10:27 PM · Apr 28, 2023

“I think we need to be very cautious about anything which is anti-meritocratic,” Musk said. “And anything that results in the suppression of free speech.” Those are the things that are dangerous about the woke mind virus, and the fact that “you can’t question things, even the questioning is bad.”

Maher agreed and said he thought that wokeness wasn’t building on liberalism (classical liberalism), that it was the “opposite” of that, including when it comes to free speech.

Eric Abbenante
@EricAbbenante
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Elon Musk on Bill Maher:

"Free speech is extremely important. It's bizarre that we've come to the point where: Free speech used to be a left or liberal value. We've seen from the 'left' a desire to actually censor. That seems crazy."

10:46 PM · Apr 28, 2023 //

But he had a warning for anyone pushing censorship who wants to so damage society, “The thing about censorship is that – for those who would advocate it – Just remember: at some point, that will be turned on you”

Elon Musk @elonmusk
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If you were unfairly treated by your employer due to posting or liking something on this platform, we will fund your legal bill.

No limit.

Please let us know.
11:00 PM · Aug 5, 2023

Elon Musk @elonmusk

And we won’t just sue, it will be extremely loud and we will go after the boards of directors of the companies too
12:56 AM · Aug 6, 2023

According to data from the MRC’s Free Speech America’s CensorTrack.org database, there have been 293 cases of documented censorship since Musk took over from Nov. 4, 2022, through Mar. 4, 2023. This is 67 more cases than the 226 instances reported by CensorTrack.org from pre-Musk Twitter during the same time last year.

The spurious case against an Alaska lawmaker’s eligibility to hold elected office represents a threat to free speech and free elections.

I've been banging this drum a while now. Prognosis still negative..

The First Amendment isn’t dying because state actors and a political party colluded with giant tech platforms and media outlets to censor speech and sabotage elections. All of that is just a byproduct of a corrosive trend. It’s clear to me that many Americans have stopped idealizing free expression. They don’t view it as a neutral value or societal good. Not even a platitude. They definitely don’t believe in counterspeech doctrine. Some people, in fact, are fine with compelling their fellow citizens to say things. //

The First Amendment doesn’t work because guys in powdered wigs wrote down words — as Scalia once said, every “banana republic in the world has a bill of rights” — but because society embraces its underlying values, as they did due process or property rights. The spirit of the thing matters. //

The illiberal ideologues being churned out by j-schools these days aren’t nervous about consumer blowback. I suspect reporters and producers at ABC, CBS, and NBC are not refusing to cover the “Twitter Files” because they’re trying to hide the truth, but because they can’t comprehend why social media colluding with the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the White House to quash stories in the preservation of “democracy” is newsworthy to begin with. //

Throughout history, authoritarians have claimed that liberty must be subdued because of some perilous historical moment. That moment is now every time Democrats don’t get their way. If these people have no problem with the state and corporations that control the public square working together to dictate appropriate speech, how long is it before the idea of curbing “dangerous” “disinformation” through legislation is normalized?

For a genius, Elon Musk sure got it wrong. He fell for the okey-doke. He took seriously what he was told when he arrived in America. That was a grave error because the story he was told – and the story those of us outside the ruling caste are told – is not the same story that the ruling caste tells itself. It should be, but it isn’t. All that stuff about hard work and free speech – that’s great stuff. But the hard truth is that those who would rule us do not believe a word of it. The hard work part applies only to us; the free speech only to them. And they were understandably baffled when Elon showed up and demonstrated that he fell for their scam. //

Making Teslas was one thing, but Twitter, well, that’s another thing entirely. Twitter operated with mediocre functionality – nothing detonated when Twitter went down except blue check’s heads. It operated while run by a bunch of spoiled brats living in San Francisco presuming to decide what the rest of us can see and hear. And they worked, sort of, three-hour days, often in their footie PJs, often at home or sometimes at an office that seems more like a playground for awkwardly adulting 20-somethings. But Elon did not get that reality. He thought Twitter was a business instead of a framework of sinecures for the sons, daughters, and non-binary otherkin of the ruling caste to act as cultural curators. Disgorged from overpriced colleges, these unaccomplished yet smug twits imagined their worthless credentials gave them some sort of divine right to rule, and also a free pass from actually working hard. //

But we should save our greatest gratitude for how his naïveté and innocence – for which he should be applauded for stubbornly clinging to – have revealed the rotten core of our ruling caste. Politicians were outraged that conservatives would be allowed to speak freely and threatened his businesses and even his freedom – notice how all these “investigations” suddenly happened the minute he challenged the liberal Borg? Under leftist pressure, other corporations withdrew advertising to try to kill off Twitter – such is their terror at one outlet not under their Birkenstocks’ heels. And the regime media melted down at the thought of “unmoderated” content escaping to circulate among the proles.

Guess who they think should be the moderators? //

Elon Musk’s crime is that he believed the lies that the ruling caste told him, but he went one step further and dared hold the ruling caste to its lies. That’s why they hate him That’s why they want to destroy him. And that’s why we should not only thank him but also have his back.

The slippery slope is how the left imprints their agenda into our culture. They know many on the right have little stomach for a fight about the ridiculousness of separate marriage beds. They know once they get momentum you’ll one day have to explain to your six-year-old what “dominatrix” means.

The federal income tax was established in 1913. (The government has not always stolen a cut of your paycheck before you get it.) There were warnings then about where that kind of sticky-fingers governing would end. The rates were 1 percent. Today the rates are almost 40 percent. In the 1930s, President Roosevelt was pushing for Social Security and folks on the right were warning of socialism. Social Security was then intended to be a temporary relief program. Today it’s a permanent retirement program for many and it’s also 14 percent of our $21,000,000,000,000 debt. Yesterday conservatives were warning about the left’s takeover of public schools and where it would lead. Today students are taught the evil of Trump’s immigration policies and football coaches lose their jobs if they pray on the field with their teams.

Many on the left and the right gave a loud cheer last week when Alex Jones was banished from Facebook. Twitter later suspended him. While it is not surprising to see the jackals on the left cheer at the burning of books, one would hope folks on the right would look in the mirror and realize their time is coming soon. The leftists will not stop (and did not stop) at nutty Alex Jones, because they do not think you are much different from him. You rightly think your belief in immigration enforcement is much different than his disgusting conspiracy theory about Sandy Hook. But you must understand the left thinks you are both equally vile. They just knew Jones was the weak member of the herd. They could pick him off as a test run. Next they’re coming for you. //

“It’s only Alex Jones” is a comforting blanket. It’s the child who closes his eyes and covers his ears in the naïve hope that the monster disappears if you can’t see or hear him. But the monster does NOT disappear. And it is most definitely NOT just Jones. Yesterday it was Jones. Today, YouTube censored human vanilla Dennis Prager. Tomorrow, there may be a knock on YOUR door.

Freedom is not something you acquire by practicing it. You don’t one day wake up and decide you are free. Freedom is something tangible and it requires the cooperation of others. If others will not give you that cooperation, you have to take it from them. We need to stop whistling past the graveyard and realize the left is seeking total victory. They do not want to compete in a marketplace of ideas. Their goal is to silence dissenting voices.

There was a time not long ago when liberals at least pretended to support free speech. Those days are gone, and never coming back. //

None of the people who now claim Musk’s ownership of Twitter is a huge problem saw any problem at all with Twitter’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story ahead of the 2020 presidential election — a major case of actual misinformation that arguably affected the outcome of the election.

You cannot get them to admit this, though, in part because they will not admit it to themselves. Epistemic closure on the left makes it impossible for someone like The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, for example, to understand the Musk takeover of Twitter as a potential victory for authentic free speech. For Serwer, the entire debate about free speech on Twitter is a canard, “a disingenuous attempt to frame what is ultimately a political conflict over Twitter’s usage as a neutral question about civil liberties, but the outcome conservatives are hoping for is one in which conservative speech on the platform is favored and liberal speech disfavored.”

That pretty much sums up what the left is telling itself about all this. Allowing conservatives to speak their minds on Twitter about, say, transgenderism or abortion or critical race theory, can’t possibly be considered “free speech.” To them, it’s just “hateful conduct” conservatives engage in as part of a power dynamic, which in turn warrants censorship.

In fact, all of this worry and panic is at the heart of the left’s newfound love and redefinition of democracy.

For years, they have told us that corporations don’t have First Amendment rights. They have trashed the Citizens United case pretty thoroughly since the decision was handed down. But the moment a corporation goes fully woke in (a falsely framed) opposition to a law passed by Republicans, they suddenly deserve all those rights, and how dare the Republicans push back against it?! //

A major corporation goes woke and stands in major, vocal opposition to the Republican Party. Free speech comes with consequences. Whether or not a court will uphold those consequences remains to be seen, but it happened. And the left is crying foul.

Of course, if there were a Twitter account called “Cons of TikTok” that focused on the crazy things conservatives say on social media, the left would be apoplectic that someone would dare to expose them for simply posting what conservatives are out there saying. In fact, the left was apoplectic about one of their own getting exposed on social media: Hunter Biden. They shot the original story down over and over until after Joe Biden’s election, then waited two years to bring it up again in their own reporting to verify it.

What happened to it being a misinformation campaign by Russia? Incidentally, Lorenz suggested the same thing when she explained why she went after the Libs of TikTok account. You just never know — it could be the Russians. Gotta protect democracy from those crafty Russians. //

But that brings us to Elon Musk and Twitter. The left has lost their ever-loving minds over this deal. They truly believe it’s the end of democracy. I’m sorry, but if Twitter is the last great bastion of democracy, then democracy deserves to fail. It’s a cesspool disguised as a public square.

But, while a woke Twitter board and woke Twitter staffers can control the flow of information on the site, it’s fine. Democracy is saved. But the moment that you expose what they’re doing or saying on social media, the moment you are a threat to their public perception, you are deemed an enemy of the aforementioned democracy and need to be shut down. And that’s why they are terrified of Musk. He threatens their ability to control the narratives at any given moment //

But the left is losing their minds over the idea that more voices can be heard. The point of democracy is for the voice of the people to be heard so that everyone is informed from all sides and able to make an educated choice. That this idea is so outright rejected by the left that they have to shut down the voices that run counter to them, and that they have to lament their inability to do so in the future, well… it makes me think that perhaps “democracy” was never really the point at all.

And gee, who could have seen that coming?