BEN SHAPIRO: Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Reveals the Left For What It Is.
All of these seem like worthwhile and anodyne goals. More speech, not less. More transparency, not less.
And yet the political Left went utterly insane. Charles Blow of The New York Times vowed to leave the service; in fact, #LeavingTwitter trended on the service. The American Civil Liberties Union, while noting that Musk is a card-carrying member, fretted, “there’s a lot of danger having so much power in the hands of any one individual.” Meanwhile, powerful individual with consolidated power Jeff Bezos worried over the possibility of Chinese influence on Twitter: “Interesting question. Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the deal “dangerous for our democracy.” MSNBC’s Ari Melber hilariously agonized, “You could secretly ban one party’s candidate, or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the elections.”
Yes, Ari, we know. That was the concern for tens of millions of us when social media decided to silence the Hunter Biden story, lock accounts of prominent Trump-associated officials who shared the story, and then finally to throw former President Donald Trump off of all services simultaneously following Jan. 6. That was one of Musk’s concerns, presumably, in purchasing the service.
The Left’s outsized panic over Musk’s takeover is revealing for two reasons. First, it shows that the Left always understood Twitter to be a key part of its ecosystem, a Left-biased platform designed to obscure its own leanings while propagandistically pushing a particular political agenda. For years, the Left claimed that conservative concerns about Twitter bias were simple paranoia. Now, upon Musk’s takeover, the Left has broken into spasms of apoplexy. That wouldn’t happen if they thought Twitter wasn’t their sole property.
Not that we didn’t already know how illiberal the American left are, but even so, it’s been quite an instructive month. QED:
