The Left is going absolutely nuts over Elon Musk's offer to buy Twitter for $43 billion. Julio highlighted a take from Axios earlier on Thursday, with Felix Salmon comparing Musk to a comic book villain. Our friends at Twitchy highlighted plenty of great takes on Thursday as well. The examples are endless. Also included in those crazy hot takes is Max Boot, a columnist for The Washington Post. The outlet, owned by the second-richest person in the world, Jeff Bezos, was trending on Twitter on Thursday, as many pointed out that fact about who is behind it. Then there's Robert Reich, who is also trending, and for good reason. These unhinged leftists are concerned with how Musk might make Twitter more open to free speech, and boy is Reich really doubling down on it.
Here's a sampling of what he tweeted about Musk, which includes retweeting Boot, and even himself.
I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
— Max Boot ???? (@MaxBoot) April 14, 2022
Trump must never be allowed back on Twitter.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 14, 2022
Call me a radical Lefty, but I don’t want any oligarch to control the internet.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 14, 2022
We are watching a hostile takeover of Twitter by the richest man in the world who regularly tries to silence critics.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 14, 2022
This is what oligarchy looks like.
Musk's hostile takeover of Twitter isn't about freedom.
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 14, 2022
It's about power: his power to determine what people can say, especially about him.
No oligarch should have this much power over our democracy.
Frighteningly enough, these people think that they are the ones protecting free speech and democracy.
The biggest threat to freedom of speech in America is billionaires suppressing the voices of working people.
— Max Berger (@maxberger) April 14, 2022
Elon has a history of retaliation against workers who dare to defy him. There is no reason to suspect he’ll tolerate free speech that threatens his material interests.
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And Musk claims he’s for free speech, but he clearly only wants to unleash speech he likes. https://t.co/vLF22o7oGY
— Walter Shaub (@waltshaub) April 14, 2022
Part of his incessant tweeting and retweeting involved sharing his opinion piece for The Guardian, "Elon Musk’s vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense." The piece was from Tuesday, before Musk announced his offer, but that Thursday offer appears to have only further emboldened Reich.
Musk calls himself a "free speech absolutist." He says Trump shouldn't be kicked off Twitter because tech companies shouldn't be the "arbiter of free speech."
— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 14, 2022
Yet he routinely silences critics -- both on Twitter and in the Tesla workplace.
Reich's op-ed begins by referencing Russia's Vladimir Putin and lamenting how Musk blocked him on Twitter, years ago. He's also worried that Musk will allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform. Here's more of his rantings:
Will Musk use his clout to let Trump back on? I fear he will.
Musk has long advocated a libertarian vision of an “uncontrolled” internet. That vision is dangerous rubbish. There’s no such animal, and there never will be.
Someone has to decide on the algorithms in every platform – how they’re designed, how they evolve, what they reveal and what they hide. Musk has enough power and money to quietly give himself this sort of control over Twitter.
Musk talks about freedom of speech but his real power is freedom of reach – reaching 80 million Twitter followers without accountability to anyone (including critics like me) – and enough money to buy himself a seat on Twitter’s board.
Reich ends his piece where he begins it, by ranting about Putin, except this time he even likens Musk to Putin:
Musk says he wants to “free” the internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now, when it’s often impossible to discover who is making the decisions about how algorithms are designed, who is filling social media with lies, who’s poisoning our minds with pseudo-science and propaganda, and who’s deciding which versions of events go viral and which stay under wraps.
Make no mistake: this is not about freedom. It’s about power.
In Musk’s vision of Twitter and the internet, he’d be the wizard behind the curtain – projecting on the world’s screen a fake image of a brave new world empowering everyone.
In reality, that world would be dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.
That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.
The op-ed was enough for Jonathan Turley to notice, who warned in a blog post about how "Freedom is Tyranny: Robert Reich Goes Full Orwellian in Anti-Free Speech Screed."
As Turley himself writes:
That nightmare, of course, is free speech. It is a nightmare that people like Reich and those at the “Disinformation conference” will lose control over media and social media.
Imagine a site where people are largely free to express themselves without supervision or approval. What a nightmare.
Musk acquiring Twitter may not only be worth it for the free speech opportunities, but also as the perfect opportunity to truly "own the libs."
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