In the end, mega-billionaire Elon Musk’s most important contribution to the world won’t be rocketships, or electric cars, or pioneering digital payments. It won’t even be sending a human to Mars or back to the moon, as meaningful as those accomplishments would be to humanity. No, I believe Musk’s most important and lasting contribution to the world will be acquiring Twitter and restoring some meaningful semblance of free speech on the world’s most important social media platform. Imagine how the Overton Window has shifted over the past three years. Imagine the things we can discuss openly that we couldn't discuss before. None of that would have been possible without Elon, and those of us who cherish freedom will forever be in his debt.
If you’re a bit fuzzy on what things were like before 2022, allow me to refresh your memory. Sure, conservatives had Twitter accounts and used them to express some semblance of conservative opinions, but those opinions had to be pretty milquetoast or we risked being shadowbanned, suspended, or even permanently banned and losing the followers we had worked super hard for years to earn. Anything and everything right of center could be punishment worthy, from posts they considered ‘hateful’ all the way to Covid opinions that have since been proven correct but at the time went against the medical establishment’s narrative. And you never knew when the hammer would drop, except that when it did it would always drop on some hapless conservative and almost never a leftist, no matter how noxious and murderous their opinions were.
All that had the dampening effect of conservatives self-censoring their opinions, most of which, though ‘politically incorrect,’ were true nonetheless. It also removed some of the most prominent right-wing voices from the public square entirely. People like Alex Jones, Stefan Molyneux, Nick Fuentes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Jordan Peterson, Richard Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos, Laura Loomer, and even the President of the United States himself along with countless others were ‘disappeared’ from the platform for years for various ‘transgressions.’
That list represents quite the massive range of opinions on the right, from full-on white nationalists to mainstream right-wing commentators to the leader of the free world, but all ran afoul of the thought police at the wrong time in history and were punished for it. I included them all, however, to make a point: No matter how noxious their opinions are to you or anyone else, NONE of them should have ever lost their voice in what has become the public square. Not Fuentes, not Loomer, not Trump, not any of them. Because, to paraphrase an old saying, free speech means allowing speech you don’t like, from the mildly offensive to the downright hateful and everything in between.
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“If we don’t have FREE SPEECH, then we just don’t have a FREE COUNTRY,” Trump said in a campaign video from 2022 that included a list of specific steps his administration would take to restore and solidify free speech in this country. If implemented, all of them would be great and much needed.
However, as CNN - not exactly the usual torch carrier for the concept of free speech - put it: “[L]ess than nine months into his second term, [Trump] was explaining his administration’s stance this this way: ‘We took the freedom of speech away,’ he said at a White House event Wednesday as he tried to explain his call to put people who burn the American flag behind bars for years despite a very clear Supreme Court decision that lists flag burning as free speech.”
In criticizing the president’s seeming “complete turnabout on speech,” CNNcited several more examples, including trying to link federal funding to colleges and universities being willing to “clamp down on campus speech,” applauding the chairman of the FCC for his failed effort to get Jimmy Kimmel’s show cancelled, “targeting and deporting pro-Palestinian academics” (something a Reagan-appointed judge called a “full-throated assault on the First Amendment”), and, perhaps most disturbingly despite her later attempted clarification, Attorney General Pam Bondi’s promise to target “hate speech” in the wake of the left’s disturbing and psychotic responses to the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
“While Trump came to office promising to restore free speech, particularly on college campuses and on social media, he’s now engaged in a multi-front war over what people can say in the US,” CNN’s Zachary Wolf opined.
Obviously, CNN commentators would likely never come to the aid of conservatives censored by the left. In fact, they’ve even defended it in the past. But that doesn’t mean that Wolf doesn’t have a point here. The inconsistency on what has long been a standard-bearer issue for the right is mind-boggling.
The sad irony is that the Trump administration’s steps toward censorship have not only not worked, they’ve done nothing whatsoever to help conservatives. Quite the contrary. Kimmel’s popularity, once headed for the dumps, skyrocketed after he became a symbol of Trump’s attempted but ultimately unsuccessful censorship. And young leftists hellbent on Intifada and burning the American flag have only been emboldened. But worst of all, conservatives have forever lost the high ground on free speech. We’d better not elect a Democratic president again in our lifetimes, because if we do you can bet they’ll use this new paradigm against us with extreme prejudice.
I’ve always argued that the reason powerful people attempt to censor is because the opinions being censored are a threat to them and can’t be effectively countered by open debate. That’s either true or it’s not, and if it is, what is our side so afraid of?
There is no middle ground, no exceptions based on where you stand on the political spectrum. You’re either for free speech, or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, what are you trying to hide?
Editor’s Note: The Schumer Shutdown is here. Rather than put the American people first, Chuck Schumer and the radical Democrats forced a government shutdown for healthcare for illegals. They own this.
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