Elon vs. Obama – Tablet Magazine
Twitter, the social media platform that led the charge in censoring reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop, was reluctantly forced to approve Elon Musk s $44 billion leveraged buyout Monday after running out of options to block the deal. With that move, the richest man in the world, with a day job running electric car manufacturer Tesla, instantly promoted himself to five-star general of a free speech army fighting to liberate the internet from top-down political control. Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated, Musk tweeted in his first statement announcing the deal, where he also pledged to make the platform s algorithms open source to increase trust, defeat the site s spam bots, and authenticate its human users. The Berlin Wall of censorship fell yesterday, internet entrepreneur David Sacks tweeted on Tuesday.
If Sacks had wanted to use a different metaphor, he might have said that Musk had captured a key foothold a defensible initial position from which to build up forces in an effort to gradually expand the territories in which it s possible to dissent from the party line on issues like COVID-19 or U.S. policy in Ukraine where discourse has been most tightly regulated. Because, with this latest move, Musk and a merry band of fellow billionaires that includes Sacks and the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen seem to be coalescing into an American counterelite committed to breaking the monopoly on public discourse held by our current ruling class.
On the other side of the skirmish line we have the forces of the bipartisan political establishment under the command of General Barack Obama. The members of this faction are easy to identify because they have been engaged in an unhinged freakout for weeks. Ever since news first broke indicating that Musk was trying to acquire a controlling share of Twitter, his critics have been apoplectic about the dangers to democracy that will be unleashed by allowing users to more freely share and view information. Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich captured the shrill zeitgeist of apocalyptic liberal technocrats everywhere when he warned that Musk s libertarian vision of an uncontrolled internet [is] also the dream of every dictator, strongman, and demagogue. Uh, sure, what linked Idi Amin, Suharto, and Adolf Hitler, James Kirchick recently noted in The Scroll, was their belief in unfettered freedom of speech.
This is how it looks to me.