At my elementary school back in the day, we once got a "cool" and "funny" new teacher. In his introductory chat with us, he said very clearly: "I demand that you not be afraid to ask tough questions, even those you think might be out of line." A friend of mine jumped at the opportunity: "Can we make our recesses longer?" he asked. Lo and behold, as promised, this principled, cool, and funny teacher didn't flinch, and promptly kicked the student from the classroom. "Wait," another student asked, "didn't you say a minute ago that we can ask anything?" "That's what I said," the teacher responded, "but that? That's too much already," and he kicked that student out as well. We never asked any more tough questions.
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Eccentric billionaire Elon Musk recently became fed up with Twitter – which has consistently threatened him with fines, sanctions, and general disapproval for some of his many "aggressive" tweets – so he simply bought the social media behemoth with some of his spare pocket change ($44 billion, or 5% of his entire net worth). In practical terms, this should be welcome news for Twitter users: The elitist, opinion-forming platform, which has also been hemorrhaging money for years, is finally getting a financially stable owner. With that, the lamentations and howling from the Left on Twitter could be heard from one of Musk's rocket ships in outer space. Their excuses? Terrible. As usual. In a nutshell: He's too rich, too eccentric, is addicted to attention, has too much power, and numerous other utterly irrelevant arguments.
But the real reason, which anyone who has spent any amount of time on Twitter over the past decade knows, is deeper and yet, simpler: Musk said from the outset that he bought Twitter for one reason, and one reason only – to maximize freedom of speech for all. On paper, this is wonderful news for anyone who considers himself a liberty-loving liberal. Just on paper, though: Twitter has become the largest propaganda and gossip tool for the progressive left and "woke" movement in recent years. Through the platform, this camp established a new, "proper" cultural jargon, and it wasn't just used to expel anyone "from the wrong camp," but also those who dared ask questions.
The breaking point came when former US President Donald Trump was permanently barred from the platform and essentially any information that could directly or indirectly support him was tagged with an asterisk. Twitter unabashedly censored news reports about corruption in the Biden camp (which proved to be correct) and worked on behalf of the "right camp."
Twitter's semi-official excuse? "Trump is nuts," and later on, his "violent coup attempt on Capitol Hill," which, as expected, eventually emerged as a spin that actually involved odd, fringe elements. You don't need to be Albert Einstein to know that if Trump and the nutjobs who charged Capitol Hill were from the blue camp – the entire event would have been received with understanding, if not appreciation.
The real reason is that the progressive left realized, as usual, that it would simply lose by using the regular democratic tools, including freedom of expression, and nothing frightens a progressive more than freedom of expression. In one fell swoop, Musk took away the only effective tool they had left: silencing others. And let's not be mistaken – countless antisemitic tweets with explicit calls for the murder of Jews and extermination of Israel were roundly accepted by Twitter as falling under the category of "freedom of expression." Trump the lunatic, however, and the whole negligible minority of people who don't find him reprehensible? As my old elementary school teacher once said: That's too much already.
Too much or not, now they won't be able to kick anyone out of class anymore.
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