An Epic Joke

I don’t really know how to summarize it. But to great fanfare this evening Elon Musk announced the release of “The Twitter Files,” basically an exposé of the purportedly corrupt decision of Twitter’s former management to suppress links to the NYPost’s story on the Hunter Biden laptop in the final days of the 2020 campaign. He pulled back the curtain and it was none other than Matt Taibbi, now apparently another of Musk’s hirelings, laying it out in one massive Twitter thread.

I was frankly shocked at how underwhelming it was.

I really thought they’d come up with more. Any big organization has a large number of idiots within it. I figured you could cherry pick some embarrassing asides from junior employees, at least since they have access to everyone’s emails and chats. Basically it was the responsible executives discussing whether to invoke their post-2016 rule against publishing hacked material. They decided to do so, said they needed to be cautious and most of all find out more information.

Again, people taking their responsibilities seriously, trying to make the right decisions. Shocking stuff.

You might agree or disagree but there was nothing underhanded or dishonest about it. In fact, to me it was clearly the right decision. But that’s a topic for another day. The highlight from Musk and Taibbi’s perspective, it seems, was an email that came in that day from a GOP lobbyist in D.C. saying Republicans were going to be super mad. Which of course they would be.

The whole thing was an underwhelming joke. There are various more details. But that’s the gist.