Would Elon Musk be allowed on Twitter today if he didn’t also happen to own the company?
No.
There have been plenty of complaints ever since Musk announced his bid for the company last spring.
Right from the get-go, there was profound anxiety that Musk would circumvent Twitter’s habit of censoring opinions that ran counter to the regime narrative.
Once Musk actually took over in October, the anxiety ratcheted up to panic as Twitter workers confronted Musk’s awful demand that they actually, you know, work.
Musk hadn’t owned the company for a full day before he disburdened himself of the CEO, the chief financial officer, and the chief legal officer.
He followed that with an advisory that anyone not interested in “hardcore” devotion to the company should leave.
As I write this, roughly 50 percent of Twitter’s employees are on the way out.
But all that was as child’s play compared to Musk’s truly outrageous action on Nov. 18.
Catholic theology, although it stresses God’s infinite mercy, hold’s that there’s one unforgivable sin, the “sin against the Holy Ghost.”
Specifying exactly what that is has kept theologians in cakes and ale at least since St. Augustine of Hippo, and he shuffled off his mortal coil in 430 A.D.
Musk just committed the media equivalent of the unforgivable sin.
He reinstated Donald Trump on Twitter.
Yes, that’s right, the man the regime loves to hate, the bête orange of apparatchiks from Liz Cheney to Bill Kristol, from Nancy Pelosi to Rachel Maddow, not to mention globalists and corporatists everywhere, is once again officially a member in good standing of the “Twitter community.”
The anxiety there flipped suddenly into apoplexy.
It was one thing to reinstate Jordan Peterson or The Babylon Bee.
Doubtless they deserved to be banned, too.
But Donald Trump?
Anger, outrage, and hysteria followed Musk’s decision.
What changed Musk’s mind?
The people.
Roughly 15 million people voted.
About 52 percent voted yes, and roughly 48 percent voted no.
There were no mail-in ballots, no votes were “harvested.”
He ended with this boot to the backside of the regime consensus: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which is Latin for “Take that, you simpering sycophants.”
I thought that was odd. Of all the uncertainties in the world, Musk’s management of Twitter is one thing you can be quite certain about.
He means to make it a platform that encourages the dissemination of opinions from a wide range of political, moral, social, and religious perspectives.
That doesn’t mean he'll tolerate ad hominem abuse or incitement to violence or other illegal activity.
It does mean that he'll take a page from John Stuart Mill.
In “On Liberty,” Mill famously dilated on “the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion” that goes against the grain of popular sentiment.
If the opinion turns out to be right, we would be “deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth.”
If the opinion turns out to be wrong, we would benefit from “the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth produced by its collision with error.”
The early aftermath of Trump’s reinstatement has been noteworthy.
After the collapse of the vaunted “red wave” in the Nov. 8 midterms, everyone began shorting shares of Trump, Ltd.
Even many of his former supporters joined the stampede.
The egress wasn’t allayed by his announcement a few days later that he would again be running for the presidency in 2024.
But one needn’t have been a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing.
It was blowing against Donald Trump.
Until Nov. 18, that is, and Musk’s reinstatement of the former president.
I got the news in the early evening.
Yep, there it was “@realDonaldTrump” live and in virtual person on the blue bird’s eyrie.
When I first looked, his account had about 21,000 followers.
When I checked again, it was up to 165,000.
When I betook myself to the arms of Morpheus, he had more than a million followers.
The following morning at cock-crow, it was 62 million.
When I sat down to write this column it was more than 80 million.
Later, his account was up to 86.4 million followers.
That’s in less than 24 hours.
Joe Biden, by contrast, is held by many to be the lawfully elected president of the United States.
Yet we’re assured that he received 81 million votes in the 2020 election.
Maybe so. As Samuel Goldwyn once observed, we’ve passed a lot of water under the bridge since then. There’s no point in trying to rerun that contest.
It was an unattractive feature of Trump’s rhetoric since the election to try to do just that.
His demeanor and his message in announcing his run for the 2024 Republican nomination suggest that he may have learned that lesson.
I get the sense that the people who congregated on the Washington Mall in their pink hats in January 2017 may need to dust off their headgear for a repeat performance.
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