Buckaroo Musk
Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition effort has entered the realm of corporate esoterica, where poison pills, hostile takeovers, creative financing, and other machinations play out in a high stakes game of chess. Or poker, if we factor in the human element. Meanwhile, the existential dread felt by those used to dominating the culture remains.
Their fear? Loss of information control, as I recently discussed.
The root of that fear? Not Musks billions, oh no. They have no issue whatsoever with billionaires slinging their wealth around. After all, they've had few quibbles with Bezos, or Soros, or Zuckerberg, or Gates, or Bloomberg, or Buffett, or Steyer, or any of the dozens of others who fund Democratic and progressive endeavors, or man the helms of companies with outsize influence on politics and political speech.
In the endlessly watchable Hunt for Red October, Captain Marko Ramius is explaining to Captain Vasili Borodin that their concern is not the Soviet Navy, whose tactics he knows well:
The worry is the Americans. If we meet the right sort, this will work. We get some buckaroo...
Later, when Ramius and his officers meet the Americans, and notices that the captain of the USS Dallas, Bart Mancuso, is carrying a pistol, he whispers "buckaroo" to Borodin.
Therein lies the Left's problem. They are upset that Musk is the wrong sort of billionaire. That he's a "buckaroo" who values free speech over the "responsible moderation" or whatever other euphemism for politically-flavored censorship they've been trotting out.
Musk isn't one of them, at least not any more. Despite the greens' adoration for his electric cars, he's a 'filthy capitalist' who is threatening to upset their favorite apple cart.
Twitter has been dubbed today's digital town square, and for its users, it deserves that moniker. However, its users aren't the whole town, or even a sizable chunk of it. The vast majority of politically-flavored tweets are written by a mere 2% of the American populace. It's a passel of political wonks, whether they be mainstream press, activists, politicians, opinion writers, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, influencers, or troglodytic hyenas, talking to each other. And trying to one-up each other in the frenzied scrum for eyeballs and followers that is Twitter's essence.
That scrum is what has taught them to hyperbolize, exaggerate, and often flat-out lie. Outrage sells, and in a crowded field, only the tallest get noticed. Twitter is an outlet for the id, for the visceral, in-the-moment reactions people constantly have to what they see, or hear, or read, or otherwise encounter in the course of their daily lives. Its format and immediacy subvert higher cognitive aspects, and its permanence traps its users into their blurted opinions. This spills out into the wider world, which is one reason that outrage and excess litter news and other social media platforms.
None of these people's tweets will be adversely affected under Musk's ownership, not if he's true to his word about free speech. Their endless efforts to medal in the Outrage Olympics will not be Tonya Hardinged. Their only losses will be in opinion exclusivity and curation of problematic news (see: Hunter Biden's laptop). The cancel antics of the aforementioned hyenas may lose their effectiveness, people may feel less fearful of tweeting unsanctioned viewpoints, and the town square won't be as dominated by the views of one small segment of the populace. All of these are Good Things.
It is certain that Musk’s Twitter would continue to moderate against things it should: incitement to violence, criminality, and the like. Beware those who argue that this will suddenly be permitted. They're engaging in an offensive conflation of such overtly bad things with "wrongthink" opinions in their insistence that Twitter continue to censor as it has. In other words, they're lying to you.
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Yours in liberty,
Peter.
Another good piece!