Free Speech Threatens the Entire West's Power Structure
Free Speech Threatens the Entire West's Power Structure
Expect a Big Fight and Uncertain Outcome over Musk's plans for Twitter
I support free speech. This means that I support having as few boundaries on who can say or repeat any idea, as possible. I have been online for decades, moderated some forums, own a popular website serving millions of users, and believe in maximum laxity of moderation. As the owner of this substack, I have not once deleted a message for its content, other than commercial spams — despite seeing tens of thousands of comments, few of which I disliked greatly, but never deleted.
I cannot help but notice that people get overly excited about Elon Musk buying Twitter, and think that at the flip of a button, we can have an inclusive worldwide conversation of tens of millions of important people, where “free speech” is actually realized and almost no one is muzzled. I hope that we all understand just how much of a threat true free speech is to Covid criminals seeking to avoid responsibility, to many important institutions, and to the entire edifice of “behind the scenes” shadow power structures.
They understand the threat better than us. They will not give up without a fight, as their lives, relevance and livelihoods are literally at stake, and require elaborate suppression mechanisms to fend off threats.
SEC got very busy bringing newly invented charges against Musk, hours after his Twitter announcement.
EU bureaucrats also woke up and are literally tweaking their new “misinformation law” to address Elon Musk buying Twitter:
Why are they rushing to start new prosecutions and write new rules all of a sudden? What’s the rush?
Are the powers to be overreacting? Not at all. They are scared for a reason.
Before we go further: this post will be intentionally light on substantiation of underlying assumptions, and will omit very many relevant angles of the free speech story. The reason for it is that its Covid related part is a culmination of many Covid posts that I shared here, and my readers generally would agree with many Covid-related underlying assumptions of this post. I am not writing this to change minds of people cheering for censorship or to recruit anyone into any cause. If I tried to substantiate those generally shared assumptions, or touch every topic, this post would be an unmanageable encyclopedia of life, which is obviously impractical.
Covid Criminals
The entirety of the last two years was dominated by the Covid pandemic. This pandemic also brought to us an unprecedented amount of officially propagated lies and manipulation, and all-reaching censorship needed to sustain these lies. The purpose of these lies was to make us take a radically novel “Covid vaccine”, based on mRNA technology that had no successful product in its 20+ year history, developed for a novel coronavirus, although no vaccine of any kind ever worked for any coronavirus.
We were supposed to believe that this vaccine “took brilliant scientists just two days to develop”, although we now see that vaccines against “variants” cannot even take off the ground despite months of efforts. We were supposed to believe that Sars-Cov-2 virus had a natural origin, despite HIV gp120 gene inserts and genetic code from a 2017 Moderna patent, with the same health authorities eager to hide their own reckless involvement in creating Sars-Cov-2 in a lab.
As I explained in my previous post, none of that would ever have a chance of succeeding, without blocking dissent from reaching most people. Silencing of people like Steve Kirsch and many others, was essential to produce vaccine “compliance”.
This campaign of lies and censorship ended badly: the pandemic was only amplified by vaccination, and the number of people injured by vaccines or having endless or chronic Covids due to vaccination, is in many millions. The problem that “health authorities” are having now, is having to face responsibility for the result. Acting fraudulently and thus in bad faith makes them responsible for the outcome.
The mainstream media, who willingly produced thousands of dishonest articles and TV reports, also bears grave responsibility. Their lies, and bad faith as opposed to honest mistakes, makes the press responsible, and the press knows this. Similarly, the giants of the so called “social media” were indispensable when it came to in promulgating lies and shutting off the truth.
All of those players will inevitably face increasingly hostile questioning from millions of sick people and their relatives, as soon as their narrative implodes. That is why they are so desperate to sustain that narrative. Apologizing and stepping aside is not an option to them. They need censorship to literally survive.
Outcome of 2020 US Election was Due to Media Control
No matter which political party you like, the outcome of the last election occurred only because the media, and social media, was controlled and their opposition suppressed. Remember the Hunter Biden laptop story? It was successfully suppressed by the social media and news media, and falsely declared to be “misinformation”, to give Joe Biden an unfair election advantage. Thus, the current US President is forever indebted to, and needs, the suppression machine that gave him the victory.
There is plenty of other beneficiaries of lies and speech control: the greedy vaccine manufacturers Pfizer and Moderna, the superbillionaires who benefited from destruction of small business, and so on. This post does not aim to list all of them. All I do here, is show that very powerful interests have reasons to be very afraid of the consequences of imploding Covid narrative and fracturing media control. They will not give up easily.
There are many more kinds of actors who are threatened by removal of censorship; you can give us some examples in comments. I do not want to make a comprehensive list of them. I am just pointing out that there are groups of people who feel very threatened.
Free Speech vs Limited Reach
The United States has “the First Amendment”, barring the government from prior restraint on speech.
Despite having a constitutional guarantee that the right to speak in the US is nearly absolute, there never was any guarantee that such free speech would reach anybody in particular.
For centuries, most media was owned by, and owed favors to, rich owners and corporate advertisers. This is extensively discussed in Noam Chomsky’s book “Manufacturing Consent”. The press acted as a gatekeeper of what is shown to the majority of newspaper-reading people. It is up to you to decide whether it was a good or a bad thing.
This seemingly changed, briefly, with appearance of the Internet. Anyone could write anything and have as many subscribers as they could keep interested. The final result of this was electing of Donald Trump President in 2016. After that, frantic efforts by social media giants, shadowy committees, etc culminated in a giant edifice of “misinformation control”, that acted strangely coordinated and very effectively.
That gave us the situation where we are now. Mind you, we can still say almost anything. (witness this post). The problem is that the people who would enjoy and want to read unapproved opinions, are prevented from finding them by the censorship machine. For example, my Twitter account is presently blocked because a nameless censor decided that this tweet is misinformation:
This is what Elon Musk is, supposedly, planning to change: any opinion that is not illegal to state, would reach as many followers as the author can get, on one of the top three social websites in the world.
I already explained that despite being a great idea, this:
is contrary to hundreds of years of our social experience of limiting “reach” of undesirable thoughts
threatens “covid authorities”
upends the current political order
Future Fight Ahead
Elon Musk is a brilliant man, a visionary, the richest person in the world, so he might think that he can accomplish anything. But upending the entire edifice of lies and grift, that exists because of forced silence, is a hugely challenging goal. Historically, many oligarchs failed when they tried to barge into politics. Elon might, also.
In his Twitter endeavors, Elon may or may not succeed.
He may get run over by a truck
FTC may refuse to approve this transaction
He may be convicted over ridiculous “insider trading” accusations or something else
EU, following Russia, may ban Twitter based on the above misinformation law
Twitter (which is using cloud computing and Google and Apple’s app stores) may get deplatformed, to unknown consequence
Twitter may get hacked by unknown actors, deleting its data or code
All of the above could happen, which I sort of expect. What do you think?
What I guarantee will NOT happen without a huge fight, is allowing truly free discourse on Twitter to flourish and reach regular people. Putting a car in space was easier.
It is possible that Elon is less than 100% sincere with his plans. What I was saying is that if he is sincere, his plans might easily be opposed and many attempts to thwart them will be made.
Let us know what you think!
EDIT: The totally unexpected (cough cough) happened!
The elephant in the room is that Elon Musk says he will stop spam by making users identify themselves. Presumably with a digital identity. I don't think anyone will want to use their free speech once the social credit systems are in place.
I am hesitant to rejoice in Elon's acquisition of Twitter, even though civil liberties are the primary value for me, because Elon is entwined with the WEF and the major hedge funds who own all publicly traded companies. This could be a back door psy op.