Not long ago, a Victorianised acquaintance (something strange seems to afflict the minds of formerly reasonable people who move to Melbourne) was pooh-poohing Elon Musk’s moves to restore free(-ish) speech on X. “He’s just another businessman trying to make money,” he sneered.
“Quite likely,” I responded. “But we still have freer speech on one of the world’s biggest social-media platforms.”
I’m not one to sign up to the Cult of Elon, but, one way or another, he’s revolutionised industries from banking to space travel.
Whether you like him or not, he is certainly an argument for the great man theory of history. Rather than the human story just being just a series of social forces pushing us like waves, a single individual can steer events in a totally different direction.
Before Musk’s takeover of Twitter, the social media site was driving the English-speaking world towards more progressive social norms, and it’s unlikely that the Great Awokening would have happened without it.
It did so because the platform, from the top down, was dominated by the radical left. Its moderation system kept it that way, with censorious zeal. The platform famously banned a slew of prominent figures from the centre right, from President Trump to Tommy Robinson. Candace Owen famously showed that simply changing the subject of prominent racial activist tweets from “White People” to any other race drew an instant ban. Most especially, stating simple biological facts was strictly verboten.
That issue is what provoked Elon Musk to buy the site. Musk is opposed to what he calls the ‘woke mind virus’ and was animated by the case of his own transgender child. His purchase changed the nature of Twitter dramatically, and with it the direction of politics; he introduced a free-speech policy that encouraged far more right-wing users to join and even amnestied many who had previously been banned, as well as reversing the shadow-banning rumoured to suppress some users. He has also tweeted several conservative or at least anti-woke talking points, his most recent being on the global history of slavery.
Proving the adage that, if you’re drawing heavy flak you must be over the target, Musk is under co-ordinated attack from the forces of censorship. A livestreamed interview with Donald Trump was disrupted by a massive cyberattack (it went ahead anyway, drawing millions of viewers). Censorship-minded governments are also on the attack (Musk’s response to a threatening letter from EU commissioner Thierry Breton was brutally epic).
None more so than the Orwellian Starmer regime in Britain.
Musk is at war with the British government over free speech, repeatedly tweeting about ‘two-tier Kier’ and some of the harsh sentences handed out after the riots. He seems to be having a good time and, if I’m honest, if I was one of the world’s richest men I’d probably use the money to launch my own one-man war against the British establishment.
The Poms are making right prats of themselves. A “prominent human rights lawyer” screeches that X should be closed down. Fatuous journalists whine that Musk should be banned from Britain.
But the crowning idiocy was the gormless senior MET copper threatening to extradite Americans over their X posts. American, between belly laughs, reminded Mr Plod that they haven’t had to give a shit about what the British say since 1776.
I happen to agree with Musk that Britain’s free speech laws are troubling, even if comparisons with the Soviet Union are silly (the USSR imprisoned 200,000 people just for telling jokes).
And Britain jails people for putting bacon on a mosque door, arrests them for calling police horses ‘gay’ and kicks down their doors over ‘non-criminal hate incidents’. Still think the comparison is “silly”?
The great hypocrisy of the mainstream media and the political class is that, for all their whining about ‘misinformation’ and ‘hate’, they are the worst offenders at both. Watch any given MSM coverage of the recent riots and listen to the absolute venom directed at the white working class. We know for a fact that both media and government spread knowing lies during the Covid pandemic.
After all, most newspapers regularly run articles about women committing sex crimes which are clearly carried out by men. Is that fake news? Misinformation? What about the 120,000 killed by austerity, much repeated but untrue? What about Brexit being orchestrated by the Russians? What about misinformation spread by groups exaggerating threats and violence to minorities, such as Hope Not Hate, whose spokesman claimed that a Muslim woman had been attacked with acid – the same Hope Not Hate which Freedland quoted as experts?
The entire BLM movement was spurred by misinformation about specific incidents involving police brutality and misinformation about statistics. The catchphrase ‘Hands up don’t shoot’, spread across the media and by protesters, was never uttered. There has been no reckoning for this, there were no calls to shut down Twitter, and yet the Floyd protests were lethal […]
Similarly, dozens of churches in Canada were attacked, some burned down, over misinformation in the press about indigenous children being killed and buried in Christian schools, among the newspapers promoting this story being the Guardian in a number of articles. That entire story turned out to be a fabrication. The only difference between that sort of fake news, and the bad kind, is that journalists don’t feel uncomfortable repeating it.
And, very often, social media and independent media are more accurate than the mainstream media. The Good Oil’s predecessor, for instance, accurately reported that Covid lockdowns were proving ineffectual, as early as April 2020. The war in Gaza is yet another case where the MSM spout spin and lies that are corrected by social media, such as when the BBC falsely reported that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza. Or the BBC not reporting the decades-long, systematic mass-rape of non-Muslim girls in many UK cities.
Now, the MSM is turning a deliberate blind eye to roving mobs of Muslim men, armed with hammers, machetes, knives and acid, randomly attacking white people in UK cities. Just as they did – and still do – the carloads of Lebanese men who prowled the streets of Sydney the night of the Cronulla riots, beating and stabbing any ‘Aussies’ they found.
If not for X and independent media, all of that would simply vanish into the MSM’s memory hole.
