The future of the free press, citizen journalism, and the public voice hangs in the balance. Elon Musk has made this clear with a bombardment of tweets.
After declaring, ‘This platform [X] is the top source of news on Earth!’ Musk said, ‘Legacy media sits upon a throne of lies!’ He further accused it of ‘relentlessly spreading hate and division’.
‘The legacy media is the propaganda arm of the radical leftists, so [it] will immediately go after anyone who merely wants centrist policies and fairness for all … the reason the public no longer trusts the legacy media is that the media has been exposed as lying too many times to count. Legacy media absolutely deserves the lack of respect and ridicule it gets.’
Musk has also made comments that this election ‘is a verdict on civilisation’ and he may be right. The way in which a government interprets freedom is the foundation of its laws. If freedom means freedom to agree with the government and everything else is dangerous misinformation and disinformation, then Western Civilisation is kindle for the communist fires.
During an interview earlier this year, Elon Musk explained exactly why he believes citizen journalism, which is being heavily promoted by X, is vastly superior to conventional journalism.
‘This is really going to be the new model of news, which is to gather information from people who are at the scene … you’ve got real-time aggregation of the collective wisdom of tens of millions of people. Although something may be said that is incorrect, it is very quickly corrected. Whereas a newspaper that is publishing, what happened yesterday, when you read the article, that article could be wrong, often is wrong, but there’s no rebuttal to the article.’
What Elon Musk says is true, there is a war against free speech. Unpopular governments are obsessed with controlling the press because they perceive criticism as a threat. If government is wrong about something, their God-like status is diminished. The closer a government is to a dictatorship, the more it fears the whispering of its people amplified in print. While Xi Jinping spent Halloween rounding up people dressed as Donald Trump, imagine how terrified our governments are of the day climate change is proven false. The public will want more than a pound of flesh to account for trillions of dollars in missing public money.
It is also true that protecting speech is a business concern for Elon Musk. He has decided to monetise freedom and his business model cannot survive in a world of tyrants and mentally fragile socialist parties.
There are worse things for rich people to do than make a business out of liberating human speech.
Saying that Elon Musk’s business goals align with the fundamental rights of the West is not to pick fault. If capitalism can save democracy, what better proof will we have that free markets are superior to interfering governments who, when appointing themselves to the task of ‘citizen safety’ choose ‘citizen slavery’ as their solution?
Earlier this week, President Joe Biden turned a PR stunt into a disaster for the Democrats when he re-hashed Clinton’s ‘deplorables’ line by calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’. The mainstream media, which Elon Musk calls the ‘disinformation press’, came out and laundered the headlines to say, Biden appears to insult Trump supporters as “garbage”. Or, as a direct quote, ‘The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters…’
While the use of ‘appears’ appears to aid the President by softening an insult, a fight has erupted over the use of apostrophes.
The original transcript mentioned ‘supporters’, implying that the President was calling Trump supporters ‘garbage’ – and that is how the live video plays. Well, as much as you can rely on a Biden speech for clarity. Panicking, the White House decided to change ‘supporters’ to ‘supporter’s’. The point made, rather inelegantly in grammar, is that Biden’s rambling mind was referring to Hinchcliffe instead of Trump supporters.
The change was made after the press office “conferred with the President”, according to an internal email from the head of the stenographers’ office that was obtained by The AP. The authenticity of the email was confirmed by two government officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal matters. The supervisor, in the email, called the Press Office’s handling of the matter “a breach of protocol and spoliation of transcript integrity between the Stenography and Press Offices”.
The email goes on to say:
‘If there is a difference of interpretation, the Press Office may choose to withhold the transcript but cannot edit it independently,’ the supervisor wrote, adding. ‘Our Stenography Office transcript – released to our distro, which includes the National Archives – is now different than the version edited and released to the public by Press Office staff.’
Such is the power of Donald Trump’s election marketing that an apostrophe here and there from the irrelevant President Biden doesn’t matter. Trump hopped off his private plane and into a garbage truck, then gave his rally speech in a high-vis vest which he described as ‘slimming’ to a crowd that erupted into cheers.
If nothing else, Trump is a master at using the sneering nature of both the Democrats and the press against them.
The theatre is reminiscent of the ‘dogs and the cats’ comment where the press were certain they had a ‘racist gotcha moment’ against Donald Trump, which turned into a catchy theme song for the opening of rallies. ‘The Left can’t meme’ isn’t an innocent criticism. In a world where social media has become the press – an inability to crack jokes could sink the Left’s authoritarianism. They are headed to the bottom of the swamp, weighed down by ego.
Bill Ackman tweeted:
The election is fundamentally about what kind of world do we want to live in… Do we want free speech, common sense immigration policies, safe streets, peace in Europe and the Middle East, sensible and appropriately limited regulation, a stronger and faster-growing economy, merit-based employment, reduced waste in government, and a healthier populace. Or… Do we want the opposite? In other words, a continuation of the last four years. Please vote accordingly.
Normally the US election is a curiosity to the rest of the world – certainly it has always been a security concern where nations dependent on the ships, planes, and guns of the US hold their breath to see if the lumbering policeman of the world will keep his post.
This time it is different.
The ideology of the Democrats and Republicans has been torn apart. They are separate continents – entirely different countries.
In one world we have the Californian Utopia – a US consumed by drugs, debauchery, and dystopia where the Obama legacy can rule peacefully over a nation of serfs. The other is a frightening world of freedom where the big problems created by politicians have to be addressed. Free speech hurts. Free speech is going to lead to the restructuring of government. It will strip out the layers of corruption and shine spotlights into the darkest crannies of corporate backrooms. Free speech scares the hell of out the powerful, but the prize is the restoration of our civilisation. It is the re-orienting of the board and the correcting of the list that has seen ordinary people slide off the edge.
While our government in Australia is busy in bed with Silicon Valley tech giants to create technology designed to enslave us and oppress us, Elon Musk has insisted that ‘the goal of any given technology that’s developed should be to help humanity and bring joy to people and help people’. We have to wait and see which future America leans toward.