Elon Musk’s Battle For Twitter Is A Proxy War For Americans Against The Ruling Class
It should be seen as a contest over who controls the public discourse, and with it, who rules
Elon Musk’s Battle For Twitter Is A Proxy War For Americans Against The Ruling Class
Whatever you think of Elon Musk, his battle for Twitter has become a smoldering proxy war between the ruling class and a free and sovereign people, a war that transcends the four corners of his offer letter. It is a contest over who controls the public discourse, and with it, who rules.
Our elites self-evidently believe that, to retain power, they must dominate the digital public square. A monopoly on The Narrative is integral to a monopoly on power.
That Musk threatens to return that power to us — restoring our right to speech in one of the digital public square’s most important forums, and perhaps most importantly creating a safe space for speech critical of our would-be rulers — is intolerable to them.
America’s commanding heights — Silicon Valley, corporate media, and a slew of institutions represented by a veritable blue checkmark brigade — aren’t even bashful about the fact their aversion to Musk’s bid is rooted in a regressive ideology demanding censorship and suppression aimed at achieving power.
They care not whether Twitter maximizes shareholder value. What hysterical Twitter employees, the fearmongers at Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post, and melodramatics like Max Boot apparently find most objectionable are the liberal grounds on which Musk claims to have made his offer.
I write about this saga in a new piece at The Federalist, concluding in part that the:
powerful and influential figures targeted by the ruling class [messrs Musk, Rogan, and Trump] have become stand-ins for us. But we are not spared either, with the ruling regime pursuing everyday Americans who dare to question the regime’s narrative on a million issues from election integrity to the Chinese coronavirus, critical race theory, and human biology — through platforms including Twitter.
Our betters are loathe to relinquish the power to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story while propagating an American information operation claiming it was Russian disinformation, or to prohibit people from sharing information deemed damaging to the regime.
They now seek to legitimize and augment that power by invoking national security, which only further imperils the republic, classifying wrongthink as dangerous misinformation or disinformation, those who engage in it as dangers, and siccing the public sector and its private-sector auxiliaries on them in a brutal War on Wrongthink.
It was reported that the feds were probing Musk soon after he disclosed his Twitter offer, which only further contributes to the Third World vibes. For Twitter and like-minded Silicon Valley leaders, the corporate media, and the feds all to be targeting Musk concurrently may well parallel the collusion seen with respect to Hunter Biden’s laptop, the anti-Rogan jihad, and the myriad coordinated campaigns to topple Trump.
It is a shame the depths our republic has plumbed. It is a shame that we no longer have an elite in America dedicated to protecting and preserving the foundational principles that have enabled themselves and the country to thrive. It is a shame the best we can hope for to restore some semblance of balance is to back one Big Tech titan — whatever pause his heterodox views might give us, including his apparent acquiescence towards the Chinese Communist Party — over others.
But this is what time it is.
By the mere act of seeking to effectuate change at Twitter, Musk, like Trump before him, has elicited a deranged response, exposing the hypocrisy, fraudulence, and fragility of our supposed democracy-defending keepers of the liberal, rules-based international order in our ruling class — to our benefit. That is a significant contribution.
Read the whole thing here.