Reflect for a moment on the remarkable turn of events at Twitter. Elon Musk is the world’s richest man, but he happens to have a moral conscience, which seems rather rare. He became interested in Twitter not as a money-making project but in the interest of free speech.
He had some intuition that something had gone very wrong at the company. It was neglecting its customers and stockholders in favor of political narratives.
This was his intuition. The more he looked, the more suspicious he became and the more dedicated he was to just taking over the company. After some months of wrangling, it was a done deal. In the weeks that followed, he discovered that his worst fears were correct. Rather than a platform for the free exchange of ideas, empowering citizen journalism, it had become a venue for state propaganda, which ironically, Musk reports, was neglecting to police the platform for actual crimes, such as child porn.
Since Musk’s takeover, the revelations have been pouring out at a furious pace. It turns out that the highest level executives were deciding day-by-day which ideas and accounts to ban and throttle and which to let through. It wasn’t just about Trump. The whole platform had become a “woke” pastiche—a digital Potemkin village of enlightened wokeism—and vast numbers of employees there believed their job was to keep it that way. They cooperated daily with the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies to get their marching orders and paint a false view of reality.
All of this was taking place in the most momentous moment in U.S. history, a time when Constitutional rights were scrapped from coast to coast, hospitals were throttled, church doors were slammed shut, and even schools were closed to all kids, for some as long as two years. Was all of this really necessary? Many serious professionals joined millions of citizens in opposition. The whole episode felt like The Twilight Zone. And yet those who were calling it out were treated like insane radicals who had no business commenting on public life.
Twitter was there from the beginning, we now know. They crafted a narrative that said that these controls were just normal public health measures, that Dr. Anthony Fauci is a responsible public health expert, that scientists who object are merely fringe figures, and that anyone daring to ask for freedom was probably some kind of dangerously seditious radical. This is the impression that Twitter presented to the world, and the social media platform did it with deliberation, fancy tools, outright bans, and all-day monitoring and chatting.
As a result, millions lost their jobs. Businesses were shuttered. Religious rights were denied. People missed cancer screenings. Kids lost up to two years of education. The elderly died alone. Children and grandchildren were forbidden from attending funerals. In virtually every city in the country, citizens were forced into masks and engaged in a mandatory new dance called Social Distancing, and even homes weren’t permitted to be gathering spaces for more than 10 people.
It was the most aggressive and universal denial of basic human rights this country has ever experienced. And yet we were being told by once-free platforms that this is all fine. Then, the vaccines came and mandates along with them. Take your shot or else you’re a public enemy. Those who disagreed were banned by Twitter, thousands of them. And many accounts were tagged internally at Twitter to not trend, to not be searchable, and to not have reach.
We intuited at the time that all of this was happening. And yet Twitter employees and even the CEO at the time testified under oath that it wasn’t happening. They clearly lied. Maybe they felt like they could and should lie because they were working so closely with government officials and intelligence agencies, presumably defending national security or something. It made them feel important, clearly, and so their lies were like Fauci’s own: noble efforts to defend the state in times of crisis.
What we’re learning about these days is completely mind-blowing, the scandal of a century. And yet you'll notice that it’s hardly being covered at all by The New York Times or any other mainstream venue. You can always count on The Epoch Times to highlight what’s happening, and the Wall Street Journal hasn’t been entirely shabby either. But the rest of them are continuing to play the lying game so long as they can get away with it.
Have no doubt about it: What was happening at Twitter also happened at Google, Facebook, and all the rest. It was the whole of Big Tech cooperating with the government to forge a narrative that was explicitly political, not only defending lockdowns and vaccine mandates but also burying any information that could help former President Donald Trump before the 2020 elections and the Republicans before the 2022 midterms. We have the technology for free speech, but the government went in and effectively nationalized these venues for openly partisan reasons.
Twitter is now the outlier among all the platforms of this size, and it seems remarkable that we even have this one. It feels almost like a historical accident. As for the others, the censorship and partisan skewing continue daily. And now we see a huge ruling class attack on Musk himself, as major and once-revered figures such as Elton John are protesting the opening of the venue to a balance of voices. As for Musk, he surely must have nerves of steel to get through this, because he’s now the No. 1 enemy of the state.
We’re now at a turning point. Musk’s activities at Twitter are allowing some truth to emerge from the huge thicket of lies. It’s just the beginning. Based on what I’m seeing, the conspiracy to silence voices in complete disregard of the First Amendment goes to the very top and stretches through the administrative bureaucracy of the federal government and all its tentacles at the state and local levels. This has led to unprecedented spying and information sharing by Big Tech, Big Government, and Big Media in an effort to silence critics and intensify control of the population.
Keep in mind, too, that what we’re seeing in the United States pertains all over the world, for most governments in the world followed the China model of virus control and enacted the same totalitarian template for managing their populations while silencing, disenfranchising, and even locking up critics. This is the terrible reality, and at this point, my sense is that we know about 1 percent of it. The problem now is that people all over the world are furious. Meanwhile, their governments are guilty, paranoid, and working to hold on to their fake narrative for as long as possible.
This situation is truly unsustainable. In the broadest terms, it really is a struggle between truth and lies and between freedom and control. In my fantasy imagination, there would be a decisive moment in which the despots would just give up and admit what they did and beg forgiveness, and we would reclaim the rights and freedoms that we lost. But the reality is that it isn’t that easy. They won’t admit it, won’t apologize, and won’t give up. They have too much at stake.
What Musk is doing at Twitter must be just the beginning. There’s so much more to know, and much reform is needed in light of what we know. The struggle has barely begun, and there will be many tough days, months, and years ahead. What choice do we have but to engage in this battle of ideas and the battle for the future against the hegemon?
We can’t just allow civilization as we knew it to permanently recede into memory and acquiesce to a new order of things. That’s simply not an option.
Friends Read Free