Corporate Press Says, Among Other Dumb Things, Free Speech is A White Man's "Obsession"
And then they wonder why we call them the "enemy of the people."
Last week a "national correspondent" for Time magazine published a column titled “Elon Musk and the Tech Bro Obsession With 'Free Speech.’”
The piece contained several flawed premises:
#1. Free speech is an "obsession" of "mostly white" men.
Jason Goldman, who was on the founding team at Twitter and served on the company’s board from 2007 to 2010 before joining the Obama Administration, says the tech rhetoric around free speech has become an obsession of the mostly white, male members of the tech elite, who made their billions in the decades before a rapidly diversifying workforce changed the culture at many of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley.
#2. The Founding Fathers would have understood that free speech doesn't include so-called "disinformation.”
“[F]ree speech” in the 21st century means something very different than it did in the 18th, when the Founders enshrined it in the Constitution. The right to say what you want without being imprisoned is not the same as the right to broadcast disinformation to millions of people on a corporate platform. This nuance seems to be lost on some techno-wizards who see any restriction as the enemy of innovation.
#3. Elon Musk intends to “allow for any type of abuse or harassment.”
Goldman says it’s “naive” to believe that Musk can throw out Twitter’s guardrails without degrading the platform. “To say you’re just going to allow for any type of abuse or harassment,” he says, “is an inherently anti-speech position, because you’re going to drive out a set of users who would use your product but no longer feel safe.”
Below are three corresponding rebuttals.
Rebuttal One via Nate Silver
Free speech is extremely popular among all Americans, except for “a tiny number of” ruling class elites.
“This article gets it entirely backward as a matter of public opinion. Free speech is a very popular idea with near-universal buy-in across the US political spectrum. The new trend to view it as cringey is confined to a tiny number of journos & academics."
Rebuttal Two via Jonathan Turley
Anti-free speech voices also existed during the days of the Founding Fathers. But Founding Fathers such as Benjamin Franklin warned of the consequences of listening to such fools, much like Elon Musk is doing now.
“[F]ree speech was a defining value for the framers. ... It was viewed as the very growth plate of democracy. As Benjamin Franklin stated in a letter on July 9, 1722: ‘Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such thing as Wisdom; and no such thing as public liberty, without Freedom of Speech.’”
“The same anti-free speech voices were heard back then as citizens were told to fear free speech. It was viewed as a Siren’s call for tyranny. Franklin stated: ‘In those wretched countries where a man cannot call his tongue his own, he can scarce call anything his own. Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing the freeness of speech; a thing terrible to publick traytors.’”
Rebuttal Three via Elon Musk Himself
Free speech has never included illegal rhetoric like direct threats of violence. Those pretending otherwise are fools, liars or likely both.
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The Time magazine piece is by no means the only example of the corporate press either ranting and raving against free speech (or, rather, what they claim is Musk’s “version” of free speech) or bringing on “experts” to do the same.
The examples literally go on for days.
Here are a couple, most of them recent, some of them from previous years:
You get the picture.
The linking factor between all these takes is their shared origin: the corporate press. This distinction matters because there’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what the phrase “enemy of the people” references.
It doesn’t reference real journalists who challenge establishment orthodoxy with dissenting reporting that, tellingly enough, is often falsely labeled ‘disinformation” by the ruling class elite. These men and women invariably work outside of the establishment and thus are often loathed by both the ruling class elite and the corporate press, but I repeat myself.
No, “enemy of the people” specifically references members of the corporate press who exist almost solely to serve the interests of the ruling class elite, which these days is comprised of members of the corporate press themselves, in addition to corporate bosses, “academics” and the big-government masters whom they all serve.
“Enemy of the people” references, more specifically, the corporate press that wines and dines with and serves the ruling class elite while purporting to serve the working class; that censors and silences dissident journalists on the grounds that their truthful reporting is “disinformation” or “misinformation”; and that claims free speech is a white man’s “obsession.” It references, more precisely, the Ruling Class itself. And they, I’m sorry to say, truly are the enemy of everyday, working-class Americans, particularly those who seek the genuine truth, not propaganda that’s been stamped for approval by the Ruling Class’s “🏰Ministry of Truth🏰.”