The Hero We Never Called
Elon Musk is not our free speech savior, and he never was
So Elon Musk took over Twitter. Step into the way-back machine to when he first said he wanted to take over Twitter. A healthy portion of your most censorious, snitchiest, hall monitor, employer-tagger tattletales on Twitter were apoplectic with fear and anxiety. What if he lets Trump back onto the platform?! What about Milo?! Sargon of Akkad?! Meghan Murphy?! Eeek.
One of the most brilliant moves performed by Musk (and to be fair he hasn’t made many) was exposing, Borat-style, just how comfortable these “progressive” content moderators had gotten with assuming power and control over the things you could and couldn’t say on Twitter without losing your account or your job, or both. It was interesting watching them scramble while simultaneously denying that Twitter had a left-leaning bias, or that left-leaning folks had become policemen of the site, reporting people left and right, forcing the hand of Twitter’s actual, employed, content moderators on the other end of the phone.
‘Twitter doesn’t have a left-wing bias; you’re all crazy. But also, Elon Musk can’t be allowed to buy Twitter, he’ll re-platform all these right wing people we managed to get expelled.’
Everyone from the moderate left, to the deep red conservative, enjoyed watching Toto peel back what we all knew was behind the curtain. And yes, some of us welcomed the possibility of Elon Musk taking over Twitter. Hell, he couldn’t do any worse than what Twitter had already become: a public square where the stakes for expressing an honest (maybe even misguided) opinion was so high it could cost you your livelihood.
We welcomed Elon Musk. But that’s far from saying he was our “free speech” hero. And now that Musk has exposed his own hypocrisy on that score, the twitchy, nervous hall monitors of Twitter are all trying to make Musk out to be like the rest of us concerned about the principles of free speech and honest expression: full of it. We shouldn’t let them do it.
Elon was not our hero. We didn’t call him to our rescue. The line on Musk over the past few weeks is that ‘he doesn’t care about free speech,’ and that certainly seems to be the case. He’s banned accounts that have made fun of him. He’s suspended journalists and parody accounts. As far as I’m concerned it’s meet the new boss/same as the old boss.
But we’re still over here, caring very much about free speech and open expression. We’re still over here, caring very much about a culture on Twitter where you can lose your job if you set off the wrong murder of social justice crows. We may have hoped that Elon would have curbed some of that behavior, simply by ignoring these fainting-couch control freaks and letting people speak their mind and suffer what should be the consequences of their expression: getting ignored, getting mocked, losing followers. As it turns out, Elon’s boundaries on acceptable speech are oddly not even political, they seem to be personal to him and him alone. Apparently he’s very sensitive, very touchy.
But that’s not a reflection on us. And Elon’s weird hypocrisy is not our hypocrisy. Naturally (because really all they want to do is win, not have a fair discussion that might lead to compromise) progressive intellectuals on Twitter and elsewhere want to make Elon’s failings as a boss, our failings. They want to discredit those of us who have been screaming about the chilling effect of their behavior on public discourse since, oh, about 2015. So now, Elon is our “free speech hero” and, would you look at that, we’re just as censorious as they are!
For a crowd so often preoccupied with gaslighting, this is gaslighting. This is nothing more than a strategy to make those of us who have been concerned about the way staunch progressives have made it incredibly difficult for anyone to:
create art
tell jokes
ask questions
run opinions up the flagpole
be clumsy in our approach to topics
be critical of progressive narratives
challenge new wisdoms
spitball
low-ball
break balls
seem like hypocrites who are only interested in enforcing our own set of rules on speech. We’re not. There are plenty of us still abiding by that old idiom that many progressives now mock: “I disapprove of what you say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it.”
That phrase has gone out of style with progressives: a group of people with whom I share almost all the same values, save for this one. The phrase has been characterized as a phrase of “privilege” because it ignores the “harms” of speech, especially on marginalized communities. Now the phrase goes something like: ‘I disapprove of what you say because it causes harm to people, and I will fight to make sure you suffer for saying it.”
They also like to narrowly focus on the word “right,” in “your right to say it.” A group that continuously wishes to expand the definition of words (harm, racism, hate speech) suddenly will only allow the word “right” to mean the 1st Amendment. That way, they can sit back and claim that there is no threat to free speech because the government isn’t coming to arrest you. They know, and we know, the government isn’t the only apparatus that can stifle or suppress speech.
Years ago it was spineless corporate lawyers and advertisers that worked in tandem to basically ruin radio. A handful of humorless hall monitors (just like the ones on Twitter) would complain about some content they heard on the air. They’d contact the advertisers, the advertisers would reach out to the station’s legal department, and the program director would come down on the jocks to knock it off. Bits became monitored before they reached the air, prank phone calls became pre-scripted, and before long, jocks (most of whom are NOT Howard Stern or Opie & Anthony) just decided it wasn’t worth risking their mortgage payments and got in line.
None of this involved the government. The government was only concerned with FCC violations, such as cursing. This was all done through private entities: humorless “activists,” nervous corporate advertisers, and cowardly program directors. And it ruined radio. Turn on any morning zoo radio show right now. It’s terrible. Unlistenable. ‘Is your refrigerator running?’
So yes, some of us were hoping Elon would bring back that wild west, shoot-from-the-hip culture that made radio in the 80s and 90s so great. Contrarians and trolls and shock-value posters would do their thing and either build an audience or get ignored.
That’s not what seems to have happened. Elon took over and the contrarians who irritate the Buzzfeed left were welcomed back. But the contrarians who irritate Elon have been kicked out. That’s not what anyone on this side of the free-speech/cancel culture debate asked for. He’s not our chief. He’s not even in our camp. He’s just another control freak who wants to take hold of the cultural narrative. Considering this, he’s actually more suited for the other side than ours.