TWITTER AND THE WAR OF OLIGARCHS:

Those fretting about the world’s wealthiest man gaining control over their favorite site have scarcely objected to the fact that the media outlets, think tanks, NGOs, and universities they work for comprise a patronage network bankrolled by a handful of other billionaires like eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Musk has done a service by exposing the function Twitter performs for this alliance of oligarchs and the professional classes, which Michael Lind terms “Progressivism, Inc.”

Plus:

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich elaborated this position more fully at The Guardian. Musk’s free-speech agenda, he argued, would fulfill “the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue, and modern-day robber baron on earth.” This is because relaxation of controls over expression would allow the internet to be “dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science, or the common good.”

What Reich left unstated is to whom Musk and the like are accountable under the current censorious dispensation. The implicit answer is “experts” like himself, who have managed to claw back a certain amount of power over the internet in the past half-decade by prevailing upon major digital platforms to censor and ban. Reich is partly telling the truth when he states, “This is not about freedom. It’s about power.”

“We are fighting over which billionaire is more beneficial to our common life.”

Musk’s promise to end Twitter’s heavy-handed speech regime directly threatens the power of Reich’s own class of educated professionals, which depends on being able to silence dissenters and suppress narratives that conflict with their own.

Which is ultimately what the chattering class’s meltdown is all about:

As Glenn Greenwald tweeted, Thursday “was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it. Even if Musk doesn’t buy Twitter, never forget what [Thursday] revealed.”