https://twitter.com/FDRLST/status/1516774938971197440?s=20&t=qnls7ow-8nSuJfyj_ixW2A
Elon Musk’s Battle For Twitter Is A Proxy War For Americans Against The Ruling Class
Ben Weingarten @bhweingarten More Articles
April 20, 2022
Elon Musk’s 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.
Musk’s Intent
The bid would almost seem to be an afterthought. When Musk proffered it — at a significant premium to its recent trading price — he said he did so because he “believe[s] in its [Twitter’s] potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe,” and that “free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy.”
In a TED Talk, Musk elaborated on his view, stating:
Twitter has become…a de facto town square. It’s just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they are able to speak freely within the bounds of the law…and so one of the things that I believe Twitter should do is open source the algorithm and [if Twitter] make[s] any changes to people’s tweets – if they’re emphasized or de-emphasized, that action should be made apparent so anyone can see that action’s been taken so there’s no sort of behind-the-scenes manipulation either algorithmically or manually.
Musk added that “this is not a way to make money… My strong intuitive sense is that having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization… I don’t care about the economics at all.”
So Musk says his effort to take over Twitter flows from his belief in free speech. Were he to prevail, he says he would aim to ensure due process, transparency, and inclusiveness; and that he is driven by a modern sense of noblesse oblige over avarice.
Isn’t this the kind of move our “democracy-defending” ruling class would typically award someone a Nobel Prize for? Well, no, because for all the ruling class’s anti-authoritarian rhetoric, it consists of those who seek total economic, political, and social control — projecting its pathologies onto its opponents, whom it works to crush using every lever of its power.
Hence its opposition to Musk, who threatens to break the ruling class’s stranglehold on the communications platforms it controls — enabling it to propagate narratives conducive to its rule while suppressing conflicting ones; cowing Joe Rogan, who threatens the narratives of the ruling class communications arm in the corporate media, as well as the legitimacy of that media; and de-platforming a Donald Trump who threatens the power and privilege of the political establishment and all of the institutions reliant on it. In so doing, the ruling class exposes their rot and corruption, showing the lengths to which they will go to destroy Musk.
Elon Musk Fights for Us by Proxy
These powerful and influential figures targeted by the ruling class 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…
https://thefederalist.com/2022/04/20/elon-musks-battle-for-twitter-is-a-proxy-war-for-americans-against-the-ruling-class/