Musk: Cometh the hour, cometh the man?
After telling people for years that “Twitter’s a private company”, the totalitarian left find themselves suddenly strapped to a rocket of REEEE travelling faster than a SpaceX contraption.
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The rivers overfloweth with the saline tears of the triggered. The planet’s orbit is disrupted by those liderally shaking with fear. The lives of the many-pronouned may never be the same again.
That’s right, Elon Musk has bought Twitter. After telling people for years that “Twitter’s a private company”, the totalitarian left find themselves suddenly strapped to a rocket of REEEE travelling faster than a SpaceX contraption.
Buying out Twitter at $54.20 a share – an apparent reference to April 20th which is, for reasons I do not understand, the day chosen to celebrate marijuana – Musk will take control of the company for a mere $44billion.
For the world’s richest man, buying the platform has proven more feasible than creating an alternative, belying the arrogant and insincere line that you should just “make your own Twitter”, should you be irked by the fact that anyone slightly to the right of Bernie Sanders runs the constant risk of being shunted out of the public square in perpetuity.
Attempts were made to make alternatives, naturally. They suffered various fates. Parler, the most hopeful of the recent contenders, had the rug pulled out from under its feet as it gained traction, with Amazon, who hosted its servers, effectively removing it from the internet. More broadly, Twitter-rivals suffered from being low in prestige. The big-hitters, the movers and the shakers never migrated to competitor platforms.
Thankfully, as the mental contortionists of the insincere online left have reminded us incessantly, Twitter is a private company, so if they don’t like the new management, they can sling their collective hook. “If Musk buys Twitter I’m moving to Tumblr” has become the new “if Trump wins I’m moving to Canada”.
After all, Musk’s acquisition has led to reactions that are in equal parts hysterical as hilarious. NPC pundits have decried Musk’s desire to ensure that freedom of speech is maintained in the de facto public square as being the same goal as all totalitarians across the world. Clearly, as history teaches us, totalitarianism is a common friend of free expression.
Others think the platform too important to be left in the hands of an individual. Insincere and deceitful to the last, few advanced such arguments when the company was in the hands of a small cadre of California wokeists and Saudi princes.
They should, though, not be too concerned. Musk has stated from the start that he hopes his detractors stay on the platform, such is his commitment to free speech. Naturally, what the shriekers are really bemoaning is not the levelling of the playing field, but their loss of tyrannical control over who is allowed access and who is permitted a voice.
After all, never forget that then-incumbent President of the United States was banned from Twitter, and the active participation the site has played in suppressing stories damaging to the Democratic Party of the United States, most notably the silencing of reporting about the sordid and allegedly criminal contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Of course, that was just ‘fake news’ – that useful linguistic term which negates any need to debate the holder of a different view (‘sexist’, ‘racist’, ‘transphobe’ are similarly weaponised).
It is sad that we must look to the world’s richest man to fight for our freedom of speech. Musk is not perfect, but he is much better than anything else on offer. His willingness to cut his ideological opponents and defenders of the orthodoxy down to size with irreverent humour is refreshing as it is necessary.
His posting a photo of a paunched Bill Gates next to the Apple emoji of a ‘pregnant man’, with the tagline “in case u need to lose a boner fast”, was not just entertainingly offensive, but also a reminder of two things. Firstly, the utter dearth of humour in the modern world, where everything has become utterly earnest and robbed of joviality. Secondly, of Musk’s status as an interrupter.
We live in a world stifled by a sclerotic gerontocracy, to which Musk as a youthful innovator serves as an unmistakable contrast. The West has entered a period of continuous decline, where systems no longer fit for purpose and worldviews decades out of date are desperately maintained by a caste of politicians and their acolytes who have shown themselves bereft of both ideas and imagination.
Mr Musk may not have the answer to everything, and many remain unconvincing as to the viability of some of the technology he is at the forefront of. Nevertheless, he is a rare sign of dynamism amid a landscape of ossification, and his innovations are many more magnitudes greater in ambitiousness than what we have lauded in recent years.
Cometh the hour, cometh the man, or so they say. It might be tempting to read too much into Musk’s acquisition; after all, there is much work left to do to remedy the perilous state we find ourselves in. But it nevertheless represents a significant battle won.
Twitter’s logo is, of course, a bird. Like the canary in the coal mine, the goings-on on that platform were an indication of how badly wrong things were going in our society. Musk’s buyout, at the very least, gives us the chance of giving the public forum the oxygen it so badly needs.
