Remember when Elon Musk was the darling of the Left for his stylish electric cars and his devil-may-care attitude? It was less than a year ago, but in Joe Biden’s dystopian America it seems like an eternity.
If you happen to have been on Twitter lately, you’ve seen startling news: Prominent attorneys are investigating the platform’s new owner and CEO over his U.S. citizenship application from years ago after he emigrated from South Africa. Tweets about it were hard to miss, as is the fact that such tweets all used the same wording to describe the so-called investigation. Here are a few:
The identities of the “prominent attorneys” are never mentioned. The tweets insinuate but never define any wrongdoing. Oh, and one of the aforementioned tweets hails from a former Biden campaign employee. If it all feels a bit oily and from the shadows, that’s because it is.
The left-wing dumpster divers are on the move.
Either Elon Musk still hasn’t quite succeeded in killing off Twitter’s rampant spambot problem, or someone is sending out talking points with marching orders to wage war against him. Why would that be? Why would actress Alyssa Milano—who tweeted praise for Musk as recently as a couple of years ago—give up her Tesla for a car that’s the product of a company founded by Nazis?
Elon Musk is under attack now by the same people who used to fawn over him and promote his cars because he is no longer their man. Musk has declared his independence, and in so doing has brought down the wrath of the media, the Left, and before long the Democratic Party and the White House.
Even my old friend Matt Drudge, or whoever is now sitting behind the terminal now, is after Musk.
Musk did even more than what Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) just did when she distanced herself from the increasingly deranged Democratic Party. Musk has been doing that incrementally over the past couple of years. He moved Tesla to Texas from California, explicitly blaming the Democrats’ hostility to business on his way out. But he’s one of many CEOs to have moved from blue to red states over the past several years. In 2022, he went further and declared that at this point he’s voting Republican and supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2024. None of those are unforgivable sins, though. CEOs can move from blue states to red states and even support a Republican from time to time. As long as they say woke things their lawyers and HR departments write for them, they will stay out of the Left’s crosshairs.
Musk, however, bought Twitter. This more than anything before has made him an object of hate on the Left. In buying the social media giant, Musk poses a threat to those such as MeidasTouch, who use the platform to engage in cancel campaigns against anyone it decides to attack.
Cancel culture—the threat of destroying someone’s life for stepping out of line with the far Left in any way, at any time—creates a climate of fear the Left cannot win without. A non-leftist buying Twitter—it didn’t have to be Musk, but few can raise the billions needed to complete the sale—poses an existential threat to how the Left in America and around the world operates. What they cannot win at the ballot box, and what they cannot win through lawfare and malicious prosecutions in court, they seek to win through the raw force of intimidation and silencing of anyone who stands in their way. Before Musk, Twitter was silencing anyone who objected to the trans pronoun issue and a host of other deeply divisive discussions.
But Musk went even further than just buying one of the Left’s shiniest toys. He has opened up the vaults to show what was really going on inside the company when it morphed from a software platform to a publisher with an extreme leftist and activist point of view.
The Twitter Files, published by Bari Weiss, Matt Taibbi, and Michael Schellenberger—also once darlings of the Left, but now targets of leftist ire for having the gall to think for themselves—prove what millions suspected: Twitter was a hive of left-wing activism and deliberately changed its internal processes and policies to justify censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in the crucial weeks leading up to the 2020 elections. The files on that laptop show how the younger Biden traded his father’s influential positions in government for foreign cash and that Joe Biden profited and was fully aware of what his son was doing. It’s all there.
But Twitter (and Facebook) blocked the story and suspended the New York Post’s account for reporting it. These platforms are where Americans tend to get their news. The censorship undoubtedly had consequences, as it was designed to do. Why would Twitter’s activists have blocked the story if they didn’t expect that to affect the world outside their lavish San Francisco headquarters?
Americans across the political spectrum should be alarmed at the prospect that a sitting president may be compromised by undisclosed foreign deals about which the evidence in his son’s possession says he has lied to us.
But for disclosing Twitter’s machinations in this and in deplatforming former President Trump, Musk isn’t being universally applauded or thanked. He’s being attacked relentlessly even on the platform he owns. And that’s by people who know the truth but despise it. Most of the media outside of Fox, NewsmaxTV and other conservative outlets aren’t even reporting on the Twitter Files. So most of America presumably isn’t being shown enough to even know that it’s a serious story. That’s one way censorship works. It may not block the story entirely, but declining to cover it signals that it’s not worth the audience’s time.
Musk wasn’t born an American but he’s proven that he lives by American principles more strongly than millions of people who were born here do. He believes so strongly in freedom of speech that he leveraged himself to buy Twitter and restore the bedrock rights that had been so badly damaged on the platform. He believes so strongly in the rule of law that he’s made himself subject to Twitter’s new fact-check system, and has prioritized getting predators who used Twitter to exploit children off the platform permanently. He has also gone after the bots that swarm and distort the public conversation.
For all these things he’s being attacked, but the immigrant who dreams of restoring America’s space dominance and occupying Mars deserves to be feted with a title. Time magazine chooses its “Person of the Year” based on a number of factors, and Musk was one of the nominees but didn’t get the nod this time. He’s actually something better and more profound.
He emigrated legally from Africa. He built businesses and created thousands of jobs. He has restored free speech, and with that, the hope of a free tomorrow.
Elon Musk is the African American of the year.