One Month of Free Speech, and That’s It?

by David Sims

X, FORMERLY TWITTER, is returning to its pre-Elon-Musk censorship model and intends to go even further than before in the old, oppressive direction.

Elon Musk probably isn’t the driver of this ugly twist of events. He probably has been intimidated somehow and has decided to write off his free speech on Twitter project as a bad job, cutting his losses. Instead, the prime mover is Linda Yaccarino, the CEO that Musk hired to run the company for him.

Musk’s choices of executives is hit-and-miss. He did amazingly well for himself and for SpaceX when he hired Gwen Shotwell and made her the company’s president. But he did amazingly poorly by hiring Linda Yaccarino to be CEO of Twitter. She was, and is, opposed to free speech, and she has been reversing the gains in freedom that Twitter/X users enjoyed for, perhaps, a month.

So Twitter/X isn’t going to join Gab in the protection of free speech online, after all. Twitter/X appears to be implementing government ID verification with software and technical assistance from the (((Israeli))) company AU10TIX. Users of Twitter/X will be required to upload a selfie and a scan of their government ID.

I was permanently banned from X/Twitter for expressing the opinion that it should be legal for a driver to drive through a mob illegally demonstrating on a street, even if he kills some of the people he hits or runs over, because otherwise, if he stops, those rioters will pull him out of his vehicle and kill him. In my appeal of X’s decision, I said that, if someone is going to die, then it is better for the innocent (driver) to survive and for the guilty (rioters) to be the ones killed, than the reverse situation. X/Twitter told me that I had not convinced them and that my ban would remain.

However, I believe that my tweet might have been reported by someone in the ADL. I’d been mocking Jonathan Greenblatt and suggesting that he isn’t an objective judge of what is “objectionable” on behalf of all humankind. I’d also been saying that not all “anti-Semitic” statements are false; indeed, many of them are true. Rather than debate me in public on whether or not that is the case, the ADL has a habit of sifting through someone’s past tweets in order to find one they can report to get him banned.

(By the way, one of the funniest things I can imagine seeing in a movie is a bunch of leftist protesters, blocking a major highway, getting plowed at 70 miles per hour with an 18-wheel truck. When the survivors gather again in the road, along comes another 18-wheeler and splats them again. And no after-reckonings for the truck drivers. They get away with it.)

Nobody really needs Twitter/X. Elon Musk could make of it a true free speech platform, but he has not, and I doubt that he will. He’s hired a leftist CEO. He’s permitted that CEO to instantiate the old censorship policies under paper-thin justifications. Speech that the leftists deem to be “lawful but awful” will be put on Limited Visibility (i.e. shadow-banned), meaning that the speaker may write, but nobody will be able to read what he wrote. It is as if the speaker wrote his opinion on a piece of paper, then threw the paper into a fire.

The pretext that the leftists use is “freedom of speech but not freedom of reach.” But there is no free speech without the possibility of listeners. It is perfectly okay for people who don’t like what I say to block me, so they won’t be bothered by my opinions anymore. It is something else entirely when a third party decides that my opinions should not be seen by anyone else.

What is lawful and what isn’t is a matter of fact. What is “awful” is a matter of opinion. If something is illegal, then it is illegal for everyone. But what one person thinks is “awful” might be entirely acceptable to someone else.

The justifications used by X/Twitter don’t hold up to examination. They are nothing more than apologies for censorship that, in reality, is being carried out for political motives. The Left has become ascendant, once again, on the platform, and they are, again, back to their usual suppression of free speech.

Elon Musk’s promise to make Twitter a free speech platform has not been kept. He once stated that the only speech that would be censored from Twitter was speech that violated US laws. We cheered Elon Musk as he made this promise to us, but now it appears that he has bowed to pressure from the European Council and from the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith (ADL).

The US Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Tam v. Matel struck down parts of a federal law (the Lanham Act) that prohibited the registration of trademarks that disparage persons, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols. In other words, so-called “hate speech” does have First Amendment protection.

Or, to put it another way, there is no such thing, objectively, as “hate speech.” There’s just speech that someone hates. Other people might not hate it. And the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment says that you can’t let any particular group of citizens have more say in what is hateful than any other group has.

Just because, say, the Jews don’t like “anti-Semitic” speech does not mean that the federal government, or that of any state, may make laws prohibiting it. Any law that does prohibit “anti-Semitic” speech is unconstitutional, since that would give the Jews more say in what is hateful than certain other groups have. Ron DeSantis’s law, which was Florida House Bill 269, is unconstitutional, and I look forward to its speedy challenge and revocation by SCOTUS.

Elon Musk has allowed the anti-free speech forces to bully him into accepting policies that, if they were laws, would be similarly unconstitutional. He has forsaken his pledge to make Twitter, now X, a free speech platform whereupon only illegal speech (as defined by US law) would be censored or used as grounds for banishment.

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