Why the woke left can’t handle Musk’s buyout
There have been nonstop yowls of fury from Twitter’s woke left since Elon Musk’s successful $44billion bid for the site. So visceral is the PC brigade’s revulsion at the prospect of a politically neutral platform with a policy of free speech that last week Twitter’s own staff threatened to sabotage the network in protest.
Musk, who has been consistent in his commitment to free speech, makes many absurd and wild comments himself, but last week issued one that was bang on: that in the strength of their aversion, Twitter’s so-called progressives were showing “an extreme antibody reaction” and a great “fear [of ] free speech”. This, according to Musk, “says it all”.
Quite. But no wonder they’re having a meltdown. The woke left thought they had won, and rightly so: the entire Western ecosystem – institutions, theatres, schools, government entities, Silicon Valley tech and corporates more widely – has been utterly dominated by their credo.
So when someone comes along and says that from now on Twitter won’t downgrade or ban accounts because the politics are distasteful they throw their toys out of the pram and act as though a literal fascist has seized control.
Neutrality doesn’t mean hate speech, which contravenes the law, as Musk has made clear, but the armies of little Jacobins that have reigned over the site until now think that a commitment to free speech must be a commitment to hate speech.
And so, as Musk rightly diagnosed, they are actually baying for censorship, thereby showing their authoritarian true colours. Jameela Jamil, the British actress and presenter, tweeted that Musk’s “free speech bid is going to help this hell platform reach its final form of totally lawless hate, bigotry and misogyny”.
It is one of the sinister features of our time that free speech has become a dirty word among millions of so-called progressives. The truth, as the Musk buyout has exposed, is that progressivism today is actually darkly regressive – it craves censorship and control, and hates the plurality of opinions that make up any truly liberal democracy.