Here's a thought experiment for you. If you wanted to turn a free country into a dictatorship, not that anyone would want to do that, but let's say you did want to do that, how would you do it? What's the first freedom you would curtail?
Hmm. Well, it turns out the founders of this country thought very deeply about that question. They were making a new country, and they wanted to avoid dictatorship. They concluded that it wasn't even close. The freedom that matters is the freedom to speak your mind, the freedom of speech. That's the most basic and essential of all the freedoms, and that's why it's enshrined in the very First Amendment to the Bill of Rights.
It's central not simply to freedom, but to humanity. It's not opposable thumbs that separate us from the animals. It's words. We can speak. That's our power — words. "In the beginning was the Word," declares John at the opening of the fourth gospel. The word. The word is the most important thing that we have. Take away our ability to choose our own words, and we are no longer fully human. We are subjects. We're chattel.
Authoritarians understand this above all. That's why they hate freedom of speech. In fact, if you gave them a choice, they'd let you have a fully automatic, 50 caliber machine gun before they allowed you to say exactly what you want. With the gun, you might be able to kill people, but with words, you can expose them.
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With words, you can change the world. In fact, there has never been a change, a deep change to the way people live and think, that didn't begin with words. Not with might, not with violence, but with words. That's why they're so obsessively focused on what you can say, on the words you can use, because they understand the power of words.
And Elon Musk, whatever his faults may be, understands this too and that's why he's trying to buy Twitter, not because he needs another company. No. Elon Musk purchasing Twitter is more than just a potential change to the media landscape. It is a true existential threat to the hegemony of the people currently in charge.
Allowing freedom of speech means the possibility of a revolution from below against the forces destroying this country and the West. Everything rides on this. They know it. You may not, but they do. So, they've got to do everything they can to destroy Elon Musk, who was just the other day, a hero to them. He's the electric car guy, remember? They don't even mention his electric cars anymore because he's doing the one thing you're not allowed to do, which is giving voice to people.
Since April, they've been trying to destroy Elon Musk. First, they called him a racist. He's from South Africa. He must be a racist. Well, it turns out he was too rich to care. They moved on to new tactics so that NGOs funded by George Soros commanded companies to pull their ad money away from Twitter. We’ll starve him out. Then some Saudi prince tried to argue that Elon Musk was somehow underpaying for Twitter when it's very obvious, look at the markets, that he's overpaying and then the Washington Post's Max Boot got involved because this was another war he could support.
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In order to save democracy, Max Boot informed us, we need more content moderation on Twitter. No free speech allowed. Of course, content moderation is a euphemism for "censorship" and who does censorship help? Always and everywhere, the powerful. Who does it hurt? The weak. Words are all they have. Take their ability to say what they think away from them, and they have no power at all.
Tonight, after roughly six months of watching this drama, which has gone in and out of the news cycle, it looks like they have failed to stop Elon Musk from buying Twitter. All indications that we have as of right now are that the deal will go through. Twitter is just locked its employee stocks and that indicates some kind of transaction is imminent, and then a source tells the show that there is a very high probability, 90% probability, that within the next two weeks, Elon Musk will own Twitter. And he has said repeatedly and we can't guess the future, but he has said he is doing this in order to give voice to people who have no voice.
All of us have forgotten that Twitter banned a sitting president of the United States from speaking, thereby making it really clear who's got the real power. No, not the U.S. government. Transnational corporations like Twitter, which control speech.
They did everything they could to stop this from happening, but they failed, so now they're attempting to destroy Elon Musk the man and again, to be clear, we don't know Elon Musk. We're not carrying water for Elon Musk. He may have weird agendas we don't know about, but it's only about speech. That's it. And that's why the Justice Department is now investigating Elon Musk for reasons that no one can explain, but that's what the DOJ does now, tries to terrify people with criminal investigations into obeying.
Then David Frum naturally got involved because there's no level to which he will not stoop in defense of the people in charge, and he is now calling for the Biden administration to seize Elon Musk's satellites, the ones that he's given for free to the government of Ukraine for use in their war effort against Russia.
"The U.S. should have a plan ready to nationalize StarLink (the satellite company) fast, if Musk cuts off Ukraine's connections to advance his political agenda," wrote David Frum. His political agenda? In other words, if you don't like his politics, just seize his stuff. And of course, at the core of his politics, all that matters is the call for ordinary Americans to be able to say what they really think. Just take his stuff by force. CNN, meanwhile, is calling Musk an agent of Russia because he will continue to provide access to his satellites to Ukraine free of charge. Watch.
ALEX MARQUARDT: Without StarLink, Ukraine says it can't fight. Last week, reports emerged of widespread sudden StarLink outages on the front line as troops fought to take back territory.
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DIMITRI ALPERVITCH: They are puzzled about why that's going on. Is that something that SpaceX is doing intentionally? Is that coming from Elon? No one is quite sure.
REPORTER: The outages and news of the funding request to the Pentagon come as Musk's support of Ukraine is also questioned after he proposed a peace deal suggesting that Ukraine relinquish Crimea to Russia and hold U.N. backed referenda for parts of eastern Ukraine. That peace plan was so widely seen in Ukraine as being pro-Russian that one Ukrainian diplomat told Elon Musk to bluntly, "Foff."
OK, says the guy with his eyes too close together. Oh, really? It's about Russia and Ukraine. It has nothing to do with Russia and Ukraine. You think they care about Russia and Ukraine? Of course not. If they did, they would be pushing a peace deal to save Russian and Ukrainian lives. They don't care. It's about domestic politics. It's about the United States and Elon Musk committing the one unforgivable sin, which is trying to allow you to say what you really think about the people in charge to make the contest a little less asymmetrical, to give you a little power and they're terrified that he will succeed.
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What we're seeing is the desperation of a regime, not just a political regime, but a cultural regime, a class of people running the country who feel like they are losing power, and they're panicked. You can feel it in their hysteria. The hectoring lifestyle, liberals, the one who work to crush the American spirit, freedom and independence of mind, masculinity, those people, the ones who've been yelling at you on television for the past five years, feel like, "Holy smokes, it's all slipping away. If the proles get to talk, we're in deep trouble. Ready the helicopters from the roof of the embassy. We got to get out of here," but it's interesting.
Unlike previous regimes, these are not people in uniforms. These are chirpy, middle-aged women who are telling you, you better obey for your own good. Brandy Zadrozny of NBC News, for example, we showed a clip of her the other day talking in her singsong voice about how we're going to need a lot more censorship in this country and yeah, just for your own good. No, you can't go to the bathroom. Shut up and obey. Right. Right.
Okay. This is the face of soul-crushing fascist liberalism. This is not what we've had before. This is what we have now and people like Brandy Zadrozny are its stormtroopers. She literally wrote a guide for how to reveal where people live, how to dox them if they are guilty of wrongthink. This is a person who targets anonymous posters online if they disagree with he, and then sits back and watches what happens. In a lot of cases, their lives are destroyed and for that, for that service, that dutiful service to the people in charge, corporate media celebrates her as a hero. They have her on constantly to call for even (can you guess?) even more censorship.
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BRANDY ZADROZNY ON MISINFORMATION: We're at the tail end of the rally right now and, you know, you hear a lot about this is an anti-mandate rally. That's what a lot of people told us coming in. A lot of the people who are here parroted that language, but all of the speakers that we've seen today have been, it's been a misinformation fest. We've seen misinformation about the so-called dangers of vaccines. This is a very extreme message and we may not see harm out on the streets like we saw on January 6, but health experts say that this causes harm just the same.
ZADROZNY ON MANDATES: Mandates do seem to work to get people, the majority of people, even people who are prone to conspiracy thinking to say, "I don't want to lose my job or, you know, I want to fly on that plane" or whatever the mandate, whatever the mandates ruling and so like that, that is some good news and, you know, we have... the First Amendment and we have, like specific things in our country that make it a little more difficult to regulate speech on the Internet and I just think that it's a very hard problem.
Oh, there are people out there who don't want to lose their jobs. They want to fly an airplane, but they can't for their own good. Shut up. Stop talking.
The problem for people like Brandy and the literally hundreds of people just like her in corporate media, all of whom wake up every morning trying to figure out how to serve power as efficiently as they can is that no one believes them anymore. No one takes them seriously anymore. They've been caught lying one too many times so people really no longer care if they're called names.
Oh, you're trafficking in misinformation. You're a conspiracy nut. You're a racist. Yeah, okay. I don't care what you say. You're totally discredited. You're a joke and that suggests that there is a change coming. We may have a country very soon where people can say what they actually think and when they do that, they will be able to live with dignity again, like free people and you're seeing indications of this. You're seeing people run for office who will not be controlled by unfair, in fact, ludicrous attacks from their opponents. They've unshackled themselves. They've taken off the leash.
JD Vance is one of them. He's running for Senate in Ohio. He's running against a guy called Tim Ryan. Tim Ryan is worried he's going to lose. In fact, he is going to lose. We're going to celebrate when he does, but Tim Ryan just said, Well, I got to stop J.D. Vance and I don’t want to argue with him on any of the issues because I actually don't have a better argument, so you know what I am going to do? I'm going to call him a racist. That'll stop him. You're racist.
Watch how JD Vance responded last night from the Ohio Senate debate.
TIM RYAN: This great replacement theory was the motivator for the shooting in Buffalo, where that shooter had all these great replacement theory writings that J.D. Vance agrees with. Some sicko got this information that he's peddling with, again, those extremists that he runs around with, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Ted Cruz, all these guys, they just want to stoke this racial violence. We're tired of it, JD.
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JD VANCE: This is disgusting. This is exactly what happens when the media and people like Tim Ryan accuse me of engaging with the great replacement theory. I'll tell you exactly what happens, Tim. What happens is that my own children, my biracial children, get attacked by scumbags online and in person because you are so desperate for political power that you'll excuse me, the father of three beautiful biracial babies, of engaging in racism. We are sick of it. You can believe in a border without being a racist. You can believe in the country without being a racist and this just shows how desperate this guy is for political power.
Yeah, we're sick of it. And it's not just JD Vance who's sick of it. It's virtually every normal person who lives here, of all colors and all political backgrounds. Just sick of it.
"Shut up!" they explain. No, we're not going to shut up. How's that? We're going to keep talking.
