{"id":87173,"date":"2022-10-30T11:41:12","date_gmt":"2022-10-30T16:41:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=87173"},"modified":"2022-10-30T11:41:12","modified_gmt":"2022-10-30T16:41:12","slug":"87173","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=87173","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Free Bird<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Everything about Elon Musk insults the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cThe Bird is Freed!\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what Elon Musk\u00a0tweeted<\/a>\u00a0upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. \u2019Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be \u201clegal on Twitter<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s acquisition of Twitter for more money than you or I can really contemplate ($44 billion<\/a>) lit the punditocracy ablaze. On the Left there was, as St. Matthew (13:42<\/a>) put it in another context, abundant \u201cfletus et stridor dentium<\/i>,\u201d \u201cwailing and gnashing of teeth.\u201d On the Right, there were cheers and not a little \u201cSchadenfreude<\/i>,\u201d which is German for \u201cserves you right, knucklehead.\u201d The Right also went in for some\u00a0creative trolling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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The dominant narrative, on the Left anyway, is that Musk\u2019s acquisition of Twitter represents a conservative takeover of the social media giant. Twitter had been a brash and scrappy upstart, you see, and now it has been \u201ccolonized\u201d by the rich and powerful. . . .<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

That\u2019s the idea, anyway. You can practically hear the Nabobs of the Narrative holding their breath while they wait to see if the public buys it.<\/p>\n

Their<\/i>\u00a0public will, of course. But how about the rest of us?<\/p>\n

The\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0gave fastidious expression to this canard in a story headlined \u201cTwitter, Once a Threat to Titans, Now Belongs to One<\/a>.\u201d A \u201cthreat to titans,\u201d eh? What do you suppose that means? The\u00a0Times<\/i> explains in its subhead. \u201cA decade ago, the social media platform was a tool for rebels and those challenging authority. But over time, the powerful learned how to use it for their own goals.\u201d<\/p>\n

In order to appreciate how funny this is, you can start with\u00a0CNN\u2019s story<\/a>\u00a0about the pile of money paid to the executives that Musk, in his first order of business, fired on Thursday. It is a large pile. According to CNN, Parag Agrawal, Twitter\u2019s former CEO, Ned Segal (former CFO), and Vijaya Gadde (former Chief Legal Officer) will walk away with nearly $200 million. (I pause so that you, along with\u00a0many others<\/a>, can savor the word \u201cformer.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Gadde, by the way, was not only paid many millions of dollars a year but was also instrumental in\u00a0engineering the expulsion of Donald Trump<\/a>, then the president of the United States, from the platform.<\/p>\n

The idea that Twitter was a challenge to the establishment before the advent of Musk is almost as wrong as the idea that Musk is conservative and that he aims to transform Twitter into a a bastion of Trumpesque MAGA (or, to quote Joe Biden\u2019s focus group, \u201cultra-MAGA<\/a>\u201d) sentiment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

As Musk has repeatedly stressed, his aim is to open Twitter to a wide range of political viewpoints, Left as well Right, \u201cprogressive\u201d as well as conservative. By removing the top executives, Musk merely removed a hose spewing intolerance camouflaged as inarguable virtue. Marinated in that sentiment, many of Twitter\u2019s 7,500 employees doubtless have absorbed the mantra that \u201cfree speech\u201d means \u201cspeech I agree with.\u201d In the run up to Musk\u2019s takeover of Twitter, rumors were rife that he planned to fire \u201c75 percent\u201d of the workforce. Musk later\u00a0denied<\/a>\u00a0that, but everyone expects him to put the company on a serious diet.<\/p>\n

Everyone also expects him to make big changes in the way the company oversees \u201ccontent\u201d on Twitter. Musk is the very incarnation of a man in a hurry. His firing of Agrawal, Sega, and Gadde happened before his name could be painted on the door to his office. So did his\u00a0immediate deployment<\/a>\u00a0of software engineers from Tesla to review Twitter source code.<\/p>\n

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But on issues of general policy he seems to be moving more deliberately. Twitter distinguished itself by its intolerance of views that challenged the dominant progressive narrative on everything from the presidency of Donald Trump, Hunter Biden\u2019s laptop (really, a subset of Twitter\u2019s Trump allergy), \u201cclimate change,\u201d BLM, and various approved forms of \u201cprogressive\u201d sexual pathology. Trespassing upon any of those orthodoxies could get you suspended, \u201cshadow banned,\u201d or banned outright.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

That will change, but not all at once. Soon after taking over,\u00a0Musk announced<\/a>\u00a0(on Twitter,\u00a0bien sur<\/i>) that the company would be \u201cforming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are, I think, two major things to bear in mind about Musk\u2019s takeover of Twitter. One is that, although he is not himself a conservative, the fact that he supports a robust view of free speech in which a wide variety of opinions are not only tolerated but encouraged means that he will be regarded as an existential threat by the progressive establishment.<\/p>\n

That establishment is right to regard him as a threat. For its guardians require strict conformity in dispensing their twisted gospel of \u201cdiversity\u201d if they are to maintain their power and perquisites. Open the door just a little, let just a little sunlight in, and pow! The magic spell that made it seem OK to say that men are women, that \u201cclimate change\u201d is a threat to humanity, that COVID is a peril on the same plane as the Black Death, or that BLM and Antifa were justified in burning down our cities\u2014suddenly that spell is broken, and so is the hold over the narrative that these new guardians of conformity had enforced.<\/p>\n

The second thing to bear in mind is that the establishment will not sit idly by as Elon Musk challenges their narrative. Everything about Musk is an insult to the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that even as Musk pushes ahead with his reformation of Twitter, the coercive busybodies of the state have begun making minatory noises about \u201cinvestigating\u201d Musk. Thus we read that\u00a0Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims.<\/a><\/p>\n

Expect more of that. Beatings will continue until morale improves. As\u00a0Glenn Reynolds put it\u00a0at Instapundit, \u201cThe Bureaucracy Mobilizes Against A Threat.\u201d Were the midterms not just around the corner, I might be worried about this coalescing threat against Elon Musk. But come November 9, the clock will be ticking against that sclerotic, freedom-hating consensus. The bird is freed, and we will be too.\u00a0Fiat\u00a0<\/i>Musk!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Free Bird. Everything about Elon Musk insults the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda. \u201cThe Bird is Freed!\u201d That\u2019s what Elon Musk\u00a0tweeted\u00a0upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. \u2019Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87174,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87173\/revisions\/87174"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}