We need a stronger wealth tax. This is straight white male privilege. This is White Power. The return of the Apartheid. This is the crux of the leftist meltdown ever since Twitter agreed to be bought out by the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, for $44 billion.
It has been an emotional week for the 436 million users of Twitter. To those deeply invested in the day-to-day ideological mudslinging on the micro-blogging platform, either partaking in it or just spectating, Elon Musk buying Twitter has been nothing less than Donald Trump winning the US election in 2016. While the right cheers, the left is going through an insufferable meltdown. It is all rooted in their understanding of free speech— something that Elon Musk has vowed to restore on the platform just months before the mid-term elections in the US. Soon after the deal was announced, it was found that the Biden administration was planning to create a ‘Disinformation Governance Board’ which many likened to the Orwellian ministry of truth. Musk’s timing is ruthless indeed.
Twitter has been accused repeatedly of shadow-banning conservative voices and arbitrarily suspending them. It was the first to deplatform the then sitting President of the US, Donald Trump in January 2020. In October 2020, Twitter censored a fresh story about Hunter Biden and the “laptop from hell” raising ethical questions about Joe Biden’s tenure as VP right before the election. The New York Post was silenced for days and the link to their Hunter Biden story was censored on Twitter. Users could not link the story to their tweets even if they wanted to. Twitter then walked back on this overbearing move after facing sharp criticism. The top lawyer behind these policies, Vijaya Gadde, reportedly cried in a team meeting with distraught Twitter employees after the deal with Elon Musk, who has been a critic of the same decisions. That almost 99% of Twitter employees are supporters of Democrat candidates, reveals just how little diversity of thought exists within the company and the results of that are evident and in line with the greater leftist political agendas running in the West but not limited to it.
While the left pushes on with its agenda with little to no debate, using censorship and cancel culture to trample all those who disagree, the right is writhing to strike back in a moment of fair play. And now, they think they have it. A level-playing field. And this is why this is a huge coup in the political arenas of the world, and especially in the United States. But billionaire Elon Musk can hardly be seen as a right-wing ideologue in the traditional sense. He just does not fit the bill— he’s hardly been involved in politics and until now, seemed to live more for the technological future of the world and well, memes. But things got political when like any other proponent of free speech, he agreed with the right of the right to express itself without an overt danger of being arbitrarily censored. Free speech is a simple ideal which was once rooted in morality until the morally depraved took over the reins to define morality itself and enjoyed protection and patronage under the policies of an iron-fisted, discriminatory and left-leaning Big Tech platform.
Naturally, when all this was challenged by a powerful billionaire, a massive meltdown erupted. Suddenly, billionaires were not supposed to own media companies anymore and social media policies could affect election results. But billionaires have been here for a while now, and election results have always been influenced by social media policies. Founder of Amazon and the second richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, owns the Washington Post. Billionaire Marc Benioff owns Time Magazine. And the list goes on. The only problem for the left is that the wrong guy grabbed Twitter and upstaged the rest in a spectacular way.
China, hypocrisy and Jeff Bezos
One among the upstaged, Jeff Bezos too did not take this very well. He wondered in a tweet whether the Chinese government gained a little bit of leverage over the world’s town square. In the next tweet he added, “My own answer to this question is probably not. The more likely outcome in this regard is complexity in China for Tesla, rather than censorship at Twitter.” While this is a legitimate concern, it’s a bit rich coming from the Bezos for his businesses are far from having a clean record when it comes to dealing with the authoritarian Chinese government. Amazon removed all ratings and customer reviews on a book by Xi Jinping on its Chinese websites so as to comply with angry officials. It also created a separate section on its US website called ‘China Books’ which markets over 90,000 books, all to win favour with the Chinese government by disseminating its propaganda. The Washington Post, on the other hand, has its own share in the chequered history of Bezos’s businesses. When Chinese state media China Daily admitted in 2020 to paying $19 million to American newspapers, The Washington Post was found to have received about $4.6 million since 2016 for publishing “China Watch” — a shiny section dedicated solely to the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda.
Tying up with the propaganda arm of the Chinese government should have kept Jeff Bezos a mile away from commenting on Musk’s interests in China, but the perils of being bested by Elon Musk would not be a first for the billionaire, and perhaps that’s why their rivalry which started some 17 years ago has continued. While Musk has accused Bezos of being a “copycat” and even trolled his space company Blue Origin’s “blue moon” lander with a “blue balls” edit, the two have fought over things like a NASA launchpad which SpaceX eventually won the right to take over, and the contents of a patent claimed by Blue Origin which was later shot down in favour of SpaceX.
Is calling for Free Speech a crime?
The Washington Post, like all other left-dominated media portals, has been attacking Musk for his latest commitment to free speech on Twitter. The general editorial line for all of them is to play up the dangers of free speech like it never existed before in the USA with its usual checks and balances and a functional democracy capable of creating laws based on needs and healthy political debates. According to the left, white supremacists will now run riot on the platform and in the country. Many have believed this and have taken to Chinese Communist Party-linked Tik Tok to express their heartbreak and announce their decision to quit Twitter, not once stumbling upon the irony of it all.
In a nutshell, the western left has moved so far left that it does not believe in the liberties and normal existence of those even slightly right of centre, or just at the centre. The western left has harnessed political power to suppress debate and cancel people to shut them up for good and crush the will of those who would have dared to challenge this ideological monopoly.
Because this disruptive development favours the long-held argument by conservatives that they are being targeted by the platform, mainstreams the choice to fearlessly disagree with the left and most importantly, blows the cover of the left which has co-opted Big Tech and gaslighted everyone to believe otherwise, the ongoing meltdown is indeed one for posterity to take note of.
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