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I recognize that this post is somewhat preaching to the choir. But I wanted to discuss Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Media Matters for America. If you haven’t followed this closely a brief recap: Since purchasing Twitter, Musk has been in a battle both to make the platform a free-fire zone for racists, Nazis and other violent and bad actors and keep advertisers, who don’t want to be associated with those people, on the platform. He has made the matter more coherent by, incrementally over the last year, himself becoming the most prominent of those racists and Nazis. This is not hyperbole. He now routinely promotes and explicitly agrees with the most ghastly and dangerous forms of antisemitism and racism.
The pattern is consistent and clear: 1) Musk either promotes or parrots racist or anti-semitic speech. 2) Activist groups catalogue the prevalence of such speech on the platform and in some cases records advertisements appearing immediately adjacent to those posts and speech. 3) Advertisers get upset and pull their ads. 4) Elon Musk gets upset and sues (or threatens to sue) the activist group. It has the fixed pattern and regularity of cellular respiration, only with money and bad people.
Reactionary “free speech” advocates do have some points on the margins. Our collective ability to define and act on “misinformation” or dangerous ideas is overrated, at least in the abstract if not always in practice. These are important questions and equities even in privately-owned speech venues operating without government restriction. But that cycle I note above makes clear that none of this is about free speech. Or it’s not about civic free speech, by which I mean both an ethic and a legal regime of untrammeled speech even for speech we strongly disagree with or find harmful. It’s something like the concept of ‘freedom’ in the gun culture: the freedom to have the most firepower.
What we see with Musk is freedom of speech for the powerful. The whole multiyear public debate we’ve had in this country over free speech has, at the most generous view, been about areas where private actors may impinge on free speech even without government support. But here Musk, totally predictably, is happily ready to invoke state power … and not to punish damaging falsehoods or speech that might reasonably trigger violence but just to prevent his company from losing money. Like most megalomaniacs he can easily see his P&L as a matter of high principle and world historical import.
He’s Mr. Free Speech until annoying (to him) people (Media Matters) tell other people (advertisers) what he’s doing. He’s a joke, socially-maladjusted likely always reactionary, racist and anti-semitic freak who is also fabulously rich and mostly able to do anything his whim suggests.
There are two additional issues that merit attention.
We don’t know how the current courts may pervert speech law in this country in coming years. But under current law, Musk’s claims are frivolous. But that doesn’t matter. When you’re worth more than $100 billion you can bleed anyone dry even with frivolous arguments. Much as Donald Trump rails against the ‘third world’ political persecution and weaponization he faces while happily threatening to lock up all his foes, the top guns of ‘free speech’ politics have been almost to a man the self-same guys pushing hardest to blacklist student activist for saying things they don’t like. You can’t even quite call it hypocrisy because there’s not much pretense that one set of rules should apply to everyone. It’s power not freedom. Or rather, freedom for the powerful, with increments of the former allotted by measures of the latter.
Also pay attention to the state Attorneys General rushing in in Musk’s wake. Recently exonerated Texas AG Ken Paxton has announced an “investigation” and a group of others have come forward over the last 24 hours. This isn’t merely opportunistic. Of all the “ideas” and “policies” backfilled into the fetid carcass of Trumpism this one stands out. That is the belief that the marketplace of ideas or the literal marketplace can no longer be relied on to keep America pure and right. The ‘culture’ is slipping away. What is necessary is to gain state power and use that power to coerce culture and society back in a conservative direction. With all the Trumpite ‘think tanks’ and organizations popping up to support a second Trump term, this is the one overriding idea and aim: state power to change the direction of society and culture.
Certainly conservative principles to the contrary were as often as not in the past honored in the breach. But the change is real. It means new kinds of state action and a much more antagonistic relationship with major elements, though by no means all, of the business community. But most important. and underlying all the rest, it is premised on a basic belief that conservatism is not popular. Cultural and social change left to their own devices are running against it. State intervention is required to change it.
We’ll see that in abundance if Trump retakes the presidency next year. We’ll continue to see it at the state level even if he doesn’t.