Tag: Elon Musk

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First Amendment rights ideological culture international affairs

EU to Axe X?

Elon Musk, EU, European Union, censorship

Sandro Gozi, European Union parliament member, wants Elon Musk’s Twitter operation gone. Out of the European Union.

Not no matter what. Only if Twitter — “X” — keeps flouting the EU’s censorship rules.

Gozi says: “If Elon Musk does not comply with the European rules on digital services, the EU Commission will ask the continental operators to block X or, in the most extreme case, force them to completely dismantle the platform in the territory of the Union.”

Oh dear.

This threat comes right after EU official Thierry Breton’s threatening letter to Musk about his impending Twitter interview with Donald Trump. Musk told Breton to “[obscenity deleted]” and proceeded with the interview. Other EU arbiters of speech quickly dissociated themselves from Breton’s threat.

So maybe Gozi’s confidence about what fellow EU commissars will do if Musk does not play ball is misplaced. Perhaps the others will think about how Twitter users throughout Europe would react if their X accounts became “ex-” accounts.

Various Italian officials, Gozi’s countrymen, roundly repudiated his gabble.

“Silencing the voice of millions of people in order to strike out at those who think differently from them?” challenged Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini. “Unacceptable and disturbing.”

The political party of Giorgia Meloni issued a statement saying that the “contemporary left [are] allergic to opinions that are not aligned with their mainstream, and inquisitors of anyone who does not submit to their suffocating cloak of conformism.”

Elon Musk likely sees the truth: this fight is winnable.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Elon Musk’s Right Answer

Elon Musk, censorship, EU, free speech, democracy

“By the rules of the complicated pretense which all those people played for one another’s benefit, they should have considered his stand as incomprehensible folly; there should have been rustles of astonishment and derision; there were none; they sat still; they understood.”

These words are from a scene in Atlas Shrugged in which beleaguered industrialist Hank Rearden rejects “this court’s right to try me” and refuses to put on a defense. Thereby giving the best defense of all.

Elon Musk didn’t give a speech.

Instead, when an EU muck-​a-​muck, Thierry Breton, sent him a letter on the eve of Musk’s Twitter interview with presidential candidate Donald Trump, a letter babbling about dire consequences for Twitter if it were to “amplify potentially harmful content [i.e., any deviation from current government dogma] in connection with events with major audience around the world,” Musk responded with a quote and a clip from the movie Tropic Thunder.

Other EU officials are now rushing to disavow Breton’s letter, widely castigated as an attempt to interfere with the U.S. election.

I can’t repeat the line Musk quoted, because we don’t use cuss words here. If you don’t like to hear such words, don’t click into the video clip. Just don’t go there.

Mega-​magnate Elon Musk is often badly wrong about China. But when he’s right, he’s right. Even super right. 

And we need a million more CEOs to be thus willing to stand up to regulators foreign and domestic.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights national politics & policies partisanship

The Governor Who Parodied Himself

Political campaigns are hard. Presidential campaigns in which your Selected Candidate is mediocre at best are harder. So wouldn’t it be good to be able to outlaw all things that highlight this mediocrity?

Things like, say, effective parody?

This seems to be the thinking — I hope I’m channeling it accurately — of the governor of California, unhappy with a popular video available at the Mr Reagan YouTube channel.

The video’s maker may have thought he was covering every base by calling it a parody in the very title, an indignity of self-​labeling that Jonathan Swift would never have permitted. People consuming Swift’s satire were left to figure out for themselves that when he proposed that the children of poor people be eaten to render them “beneficial to the publick,” he was engaging in satire.

In contrast, the Kamela Harris campaign ad parody in question is called “Kamala Harris Campaign Ad Parody.” Clear. Unmistakable. 

Like the content.

Still, this video has not escaped the agenda of would-​be censors like Governor Gavin Newsom. The parody uses a “deepfake” AI-​generated voice that sounds like Harris. It’s even got the Harris Cackle. So Newsom wants to outlaw it.

“Manipulating a voice in an ‘ad’ like this one should be illegal,” he says. (Why?) “I’ll be signing a bill … to make sure it is.”

But as Reclaim the Net points out, California has already outlawed certain uses of deepfake media. 

These forbidden uses do not, however, include parody, which is constitutionally protected speech.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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crime and punishment insider corruption international affairs

Hunter’s Pseudo-​Crime

Hunter Biden has been found guilty of buying a gun while being a crack addict.

Yes, that’s a federal crime.

The jury “heard testimony from Hunter Biden’s ex-​wife and former girlfriends,” UK’s Mirror explained yesterday, “and were shown photos of him with drug paraphernalia and other salacious evidence to make the case that he had lied when he checked ‘no’ on the form at a gun shop asking whether he was ‘an unlawful user of, or addicted to’ drugs.”

While the U.S. President’s son is guilty as charged, the prosecution was almost as bogus as Trump’s.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R‑Ky.) put it best, on X: “Hunter might deserve to be in jail for something, but purchasing a gun is not it. There are millions of marijuana users who own guns in this country, and none of them should be in jail for purchasing or possessing a firearm against current laws.”

Elon Musk, who owns X (ex-​Twitter), concurred: “I agree. He (and others) should be in jail for impugning the integrity of the United States by taking bribes for political favors, but not for this pseudo-crime.”

But pseudo-​crimes are what the Department of Justice, and your local lawfare Democratic prosecutors, specialize in. 

“They picked the gun charge because it was the only one not attached to Joe Biden,” explained Natalie F. Danelishen. “They also convicted Hunter Biden because they needed a fall guy so that Trump’s 34 felonies look less like political prosecution. Now ‘Justice’ seems fair. It’s a chess game.”

Exactly. No matter what the president says, or Merrick Garland says, or the talking heads on cable news say, it’s a scam.

Set Hunter free — and prosecute him, his uncle and his father for their evident corruption.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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ideological culture Internet controversy social media

Die, Disney, Die!

Musk, Zombie Slayer

Disney is taking big financial losses, after a series of bombs on the silver screen and on its own channel, including a billion on last year’s four film fiascos.

Why?

The company went super-​woke. And could, therefore, go broke.

Or, says Patrick Ben David, become a “zombie company,” unable to make profits, kept alive only by low interest rates and the hope that Apple will buy it.

Nevertheless, Disney joined a group of major players pulling their advertising off Twitter, er, X.

Why?

Because X’s new owner, Elon Musk, favorably forwarded a tweet about anti-​white racism that was said, by many, to be antisemitic.

It’s the rage, now, not only to support Hamas’s terrorism but to excoriate Israel, Zionism, and even Jews in general, yet it was Musk’s forwarded tweet about how Jewish intellectuals and organizations too often support anti-​white rhetoric that panicked the big companies, including Bob Iger-​headed Disney.

Andrew Ross Sorkin, in an on-​stage New York Times interview, asked Mr. Musk to respond to all this. “I hope they stop,” Musk said. “Don’t advertise.”

Musk went on: “If somebody’s going to try to blackmail me, with advertising — blackmail me with money? — ‘go f**k yourself.’”

Then Musk repeated that command, using hand signals. 

“Is that clear? I hope it is.” Smiling, he added, “Hey Bob … if you’re in the audience.”

Mr. Sorkin pressed X’s owner on the consequences.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” said Musk, amidst his usual stutters. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company — and we will document it in great detail.”

“But those advertisers are going to say, ‘we didn’t kill the company.’”

“Oh, yeah? Tell it to Earth.”

Musk explained that both he and the boycotters will make their cases, “and we’ll see what the outcome is.”

The idea is to take the culture war outside educational institutions, the news media, and government bodies, and to shove it into boardrooms everywhere. It’s a great game of chicken, buck buck buck. And, unlike Gale Wynand in The Fountainhead, Musk appears more than willing to lose his investment in X just to prove the point.

An interesting place we’ve come to. The insider elites, and the ideological left, seek to advance woke ideology even if it ruins their own companies, such as Disney, and squelch free speech, even if it means betraying every last principle of American liberty.

So, in this war with other people’s fortunes, take sides: die, Disney, die — before X, let’s hope.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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First Amendment rights general freedom social media

Must Known Musk

Elon Musk, hate speech, free speech, X, Twitter

Enthusiasts for prohibiting political dissent must know that the First Amendment protects the right to utter controversial speech.

They must know that there’s no constitutional loophole for speech that they disagree with. 

Another “must know”? That calling the public statements of political opponents “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “hate speech,” etc. is no substitute for open discussion.

They just don’t care. 

They just know that if they keep plugging away, struggling to muzzle the badspeech, they’re more likely to get their way than playing by the rules of free speech and open debate.

Their determination is well shown in a new California law, AB587, passed about a year ago. The law compels social media companies to institute moderation policies to squelch “hate speech,” “extremism,” “disinformation,” “misinformation,” “radicalization,” etc.

Although AB587 is anti-​transparently called a “transparency measure,” main author Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel admits the point: to force social media companies to “moderate or remove hateful or incendiary content on their platforms,” like “hate speech and disinformation.”

Since Elon Musk’s Twitter is affected by the new law, Musk is suing to block it.

According to his lawsuit, AB587 “compels companies like X Corp. [Twitter] to engage in speech against their will, impermissibly interferes with [their] constitutionally protected editorial judgments” and “has both the purpose and likely effect of pressuring companies … to remove, demonetize, or deprioritize constitutionally protected speech that the State deems undesirable or harmful.”

Politically, Mr. Musk has emerged as one of the country’s most frustratingly contradictory figures, often doing great things, sometimes very bad ones. With this lawsuit, even his enemies must know he is in the right.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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