By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April
19, 2022
Musk presents a clear and present danger
to the use of Twitter as a one-sided instrument to impose progressive rules on
the public debate.
Ayear after being named Time magazine’s
person of the year, Elon Musk is attempting to acquire Twitter.
To listen to Musk’s critics, you’d believe
it’s an act almost on par with Hitler invading Poland not long after being
named Time’s man of the year in 1938.
A writer for the left-wing website Salon worried
that a Musk takeover of Twitter would enable fascism in America. A New York
University journalism professor lamented that posting on Twitter with the
threat of Musk looming feels like partying at a Berlin nightclub “at the
twilight of Weimar Germany.” Former labor secretary Robert Reich warned, “This
is what oligarchy looks like.” And so on.
A report for the news site Axios compared
Musk to “a movie super-villain,” and related — accurately — that journalists
who break news and opine on Twitter “really don’t want to be
working in Elon Musk’s private playpen.”
No, they much prefer to be working in a
playpen whose ever-shifting rules — constantly changing to keep up with the
latest progressive priorities — are written by the kind of people who thought
the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop should have been suppressed.
In their eyes, Elon Musk is guilty of a
thought crime — namely, believing that thought should be free, and should be
freely expressed on a social-media platform with outsize influence on the
nation’s public life.
Not too long ago, this would have been
considered a core American belief, especially welcome to journalists whose work
depends on the First Amendment. That was before content moderation, weaponized
against one side of the political spectrum, supposedly became the thin line
protecting American democracy from the onset of misinformation-driven
dictatorship.
Who knew that so much could depend on
policing what pronouns apply to trans people or cracking down on users who
believed in the lab-leak theory early in the pandemic?
Musk presents a clear and present danger
to the use of Twitter as a one-sided instrument to impose progressive rules on
the public debate.
From one point of view, Twitter should be
beneath him. In contrast to many other Silicon Valley giants, Musk has focused
on creating revolutionary physical products in the real world, whether electric
cars or rockets. Transforming the American space program makes figuring out a
better way for people to share their opinions 280 characters at a time seem
quite puny in comparison.
Musk is firmly in the tradition of great
American entrepreneurs whose audacious vision, business acumen, and showmanship
have made them larger-than-life celebrities. Think Thomas Edison.
They have usually been willing to think
for themselves, a quality now in short supply.
In today’s America, world-famous
entrepreneurs and the companies that they’ve created, which are supposed to be
all about innovation and disruption, happily let themselves get pulled along in
the slipstream of progressive group think.
Companies built on great risks are deathly
afraid that they might have to weather a critical hashtag or a tantrum by their
woke Millennial employees.
People who would presumably object to the
government telling them what to say and think are too willing to let
free-floating social-media mobs effectively dictate to them.
Musk, a kind of libertarian who has a
puckish sense of humor and willingness to defy authority (just ask the SEC),
rejects this thoughtless and often cowardly conformity.
Like podcaster Joe Rogan, another recent
target of progressive ire, his fundamental offense is being uncategorizable and
willing to question conventional wisdom. Like Dave Chappelle and J. K. Rowling,
he is too rich and famous to be canceled or cowed — to be more precise, he’s
the richest man in the world, who enjoys a public fight and genuinely disdains
the censors and scolds.
All of this makes him a very dangerous man
indeed, and perhaps just the guy to make the statement against intimidation and
in favor of free speech that this moment so desperately needs.
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