Making Speech Free Again
Making Speech Free Again
All current events eventually become history, and with that transition comes a perspective shift. The emotional turmoils ebb, the transient speculations fade, and that thinning of the trees helps us see the forest better.
It's often hard to know which current events become historical inflection points, and which become footnotes, but sometimes the clarity comes sooner rather than later. When the dust settles, I believe that the future us will look back at the present era and conclude that Elon Musk's liberation of Twitter from the stranglehold of leftist censoriousness was one of those inflection points.
I've often joked that Musk went from darling to persona non grata the moment he 'broke' the Left's favorite sandbox, and allowed the unwashed masses to have their voices heard. Musk's purchase and purge of 80% of Twitter's workforce and opening of the "Twitter Files" to journalists such as Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss was hugely instrumental in the restoration of our society's marketplace of ideas.
For his troubles, and for the $44B he spent on Twitter-now-X, he has been called every dirty name in the book by the Best-and-Brightest (who used to adore him), including the quite amusing "Director of Misinformation" moniker bestowed by historian Allan Lichtman. Lichtman, one of those Best-and-Brightest, was briefly feted for predicting a Harris victory after having called 9 of the last 10 elections correctly. He directly blamed Musk for Trump's victory.
He has a point.
Not in arguing that "misinformation" won the election for Trump, however. Lichtman and the rest of the Best-and-Brightest have it exactly backwards in their finger-pointing. Musk's liberation of Twitter exposed the massive misinformation and disinformation imposed by what Dave Rubin (IIRC) dubbed the "Blue Blob" on the American voters.
That Blue Blob, which I previously dubbed The Machine, is the alliance between the left-leaning legacy media, the Big Tech Big Money folks in Silicon Valley, the faculty and student bodies in our elite universities, the Democratic Party's apparatchiks, and the entrenched bureaucracies across government high and low. They are the perpetrators of mis- and disinformation on the public. That reality will not be drowned out by the Best-and-Brightest's screams of 'racism,' 'misogyny,' and 'xenophobia.'
The ineffectiveness of those accusations is telling. A decade ago, such epithets were so effective, they pre-empted people's voicing of unsanctioned opinions. We would self-censor. Cancel Culture, the label placed on the soft coercion imposed on us by a handful of societal taste-makers, reached a peak in the late 2010s before crashing against the wall of "uncancellable" names such as JK Rowling and Joe Rogan. Twitter's liberation helped make unsanctioned opinions safe again, and Trump's victory allowed what used to be whispered in the Woke Era to be voiced freely again.
Those whose voice dominated social media are Not Happy, of course. When you're used to an echo chamber where the rare dissenters get quashed by your mob, actual free speech is a strange and foreboding frontier. So, rather than commingle with those who might disagree with them on Point A or Point B, and possibly try to win them over via discourse, many are rage-quitting, and some are aggregating at Twitter-now-X competitors like Bluesky.
Hey, whatever makes you happy, of course. Trump's loyalists joined the Truth Social echo chamber, after all.
But, don't expect the rest of us to buy into the "Director of Misinformation" folderol. If you run away from contrary viewpoints rather than accepting the challenge of championing your own in the marketplace of ideas, you give us no reason to listen to what you have to say. If your go-to response to contrary viewpoints is to call others names, you delete yourself from our sensorium.
Are there going to be bigoted, benighted, and counterfactual viewpoints voiced in a free speech zone? Of course. Always have been, always will be. Quashing them doesn’t make them go away, or “cure” the bigots of their bigotry.
The remedy, as has been said many times, is more speech. And indeed, Twitter-now-X's "community notes" serve as that "more speech." Rather than arbiters of truth deciding what should be propagated, the community itself gets to respond in a non-censorious way.
Facebook and Google have picked up on that, after a fashion, with AI addenda appearing here and there. However, those are still Big Brother and The Ministry of Truth proclaiming from on high rather than actual marketplace of ideas, and show us that the Tech Bros at the top of those ecosystems still don't get it.
As further proof of that, I typed "Trump FCC pick" into a Google search, and was offered these headlines:
CNN: Brendan Carr wrote the FCC chapter in 'Project 2025.' Now he's Trump's pick for...
Fortune: Trump's pick for FCC chair wants to eliminate the law shielding social media...
Mother Jones: Trump's FCC Pick Wants to Intimidate Broadcasters and Enrich Trump Allies
Forbes: How Elon Musk Could Benefit From Trump's FCC Nominee Brendan Carr
A neutral query produced, above everything else, four ominous headlines.
Trump offered this about Carr:
Commissioner Carr is a warrior for Free Speech, and has fought against the regulatory Lawfare that stifled Americans’ Freedoms and held back our economy. He will end the regulatory onslaught that has been crippling America’s Job Creators and Innovators, and ensure that the FCC delivers for rural America.
While I hope this comes true, as with all things Trump-2025, I will wait and see. See what he does, and judge based on actions, not words or person. That said, I do hope that Trump's cabinet picks blow a few things up (figuratively, of course). More-of-the-same, tinged red rather than blue, would be quite the disappointment.
I have been bingeing the TV series Elementary, a retelling of the Sherlock Holmes story in present-day New York City. Coincidentally, the episode I watched last night involved a DARPA research project into shifting people's political perspectives via targeted sharing of information. Mild spoiler - the project was a total bust, and the early suspicions that the research was stolen by the Chinese gave way to a much more pedestrian villain. This episode aired in 2015, when woke was still on an upward climb and before Trump's shock victory threw the mainstream press into conspiracy melt-down, so despite the show having the usual network-TV imprints, it was refreshing to see them give credit humanity with the ability to override inculcation.
Likewise, the Best-and-Brightest have failed to inculcate average Americans into thinking as they do. This is in no small part because their thoughts and ideas have increasingly flown in the face of common sense and of traditional American values of liberty, self-determination, individualism, and limited government.
No matter whether Musk's liberation of Twitter proves seismic or footnote, it's a good time for free speech in America. The screams of outrage from the people who have long opposed free speech is proof enough.
A footnote. Brazil banned Twitter-now-X for a couple months this year, and First Lady Janja Lula da Silva just aimed an F-bomb at Elon Musk during a panel on “disinformation and regulating social media” at the current G20 summit. Brazil ranks 124th on the Heritage Foundation’s Economic Freedom scale - as in “mostly unfree” - and the recent Twitter-now-X ban echoes that lack of liberty on the speech front.
Yet another example of a member of the governing class forgetting that they are public servants, not rulers.