Well, here goes with my contrarian view about Elon Musk walking into Twitter Headquarters yesterday, as he nears closing the deal on buying Twitter. A lot of conservatives and people on the right have jumped into action becoming Elon Musk cheerleaders and buying into a belief that Musk is going to “save” free speech in America. It reminded me of all the people on the right who bought into Trump was going to “save” America and although Trump was a NY liberal/Hollywood gadfly, who hung out with the likes of Howard Stern and Bill Clinton, no worries, Trump was now a conservative and his “GOP Insurgency” was the ticket to Make America Great Again.
Trump was a mixed bag and while I give him huge credit for making America energy independent and not reliant on foreign oil, for the first time in my lifetime, he also brought a lot of bad things too. He sold right-wing America on moral relativism and “the end justify the means,” belief systems. We were lectured by his mouthpieces to ignore the so-called “mean tweets,” and just look at how Trump was owning the libs and hitting back at the liberal media. We were told it was a good thing that Trump doesn’t play by the rules, because that throws his enemies off-balance and that making America great again requires tossing out the old playbook. We were told embracing this new political world, where anything goes, as long as it scores points in the endless media spin war is “winning.”
The automatic response from people on the right who embraced Trump is to get defensive and start ranting about how awful Democrats are and how the country is on the fast-track to economic collapse and ruin with Biden’s policies. It’s true, the Biden presidency has been an unmitigated disaster and I feared the Obama crowd running a Biden WH, while keeping Biden “in the basement” as much as possible (like the campaign,) that I caved on my Never Trump position and voted for Trump in 2020.
However awful this Biden presidency is doesn’t negate all the very bad things Trump’s brand of politics brought into the GOP – like a complete abandonment of any principles or even a party platform, in lieu of waging non-stop spin war attacks on Dems and the liberal media. So many people on the right believe that destroying the liberal media is critical to defeating Dems and the left’s culture war. They’re as invested in winning the spin information war as Democrats have been for decades.
All the way back to the Clinton impeachment, where the Dem spin war went scorched earth on Ken Starr and using any means necessary to keep Bill Clinton in office, I’ve believed this spin war would grow into a malignant force in American politics by corrupting American culture and turning America into seething factions.
Trump learning how to become adept at using the same corrupt spin war tactics, always on the hunt for Trump-friendly media on the right, who would carry his spin crap without question, led to the American right now embracing any crazy conspiracy theories, from any right-wing sites, that get floated, as long as they’re floated by Trump-friendly sources. Trump can say just about anything, no matter how outrageous or crude and most of his supporters will believe it and not care how crude or dishonest the attack.
Here’s the thing – my point isn’t even about Trump, it’s a larger point about the spin information war, which evolved in the early 1990s. The spin information war was a shift in the larger left-wing culture war in America, which blossomed in the 1960s and 1970s. We’ve been on a road to cultural decline and erosion of our American system of government for decades now.
Trump was just a loud inflection point in the spin war, despite how desperately Democrats and the liberal media want to cast Trump as being the greatest threat to America. He’s not the greatest threat. Americans continuing to buy into this media-driven spin information war and buying into the Us vs. Them mind-set, this spin war feeds constantly is the greatest threat. A country, where the people split into raging factions is an ungovernable country and no republic can function or survive in that state. The other major threat to our country is the complete collapse of principles, rules or standards, that has permeated almost every institution in America, as more and more Americans embrace moral relativism. Trump sold the American right on moral relativism, even as he spouted fractured Bible verses and blabbed about Christians, in between petty name-calling…
Our Declaration of Independence and constitutional framework are based on concrete principles. If both sides of partisans in America abandon those concrete principles, where they buy into two separate sets of rules – one for their side and one for their political enemies, well, we will no longer have a constitutional republic.
We’re pretty much there, as the insane spin war drives partisans to redefine reality to feed their own side’s narratives.
So, what does any of this have to do with Elon Musk, you’re probably wondering. Elon Musk isn’t a conservative in any way, shape or form. He’s a very wealthy man, who had a falling out with his liberal friends and he now hangs out on Twitter. Sound familiar? He’s being cheered and praised by the Trump right. As soon as he started tweeting about free speech and floating the idea of buying Twitter, he became the new “savior” of the right-wing. Everywhere you turn, right-wing people are cheering Elon Musk and believing he’s singlehandedly going to save free speech in America by buying Twitter.
As someone who has written a lot about how Twitter is the main battlefield in the spin information war and where the spin cycle battles are fought, despite most Americans not even following Twitter politics, you’re probably wondering how I can think Musk buying Twitter isn’t a big win for free speech in America. After all, Twitter is where the politicos, pundits and journalists in America hang-out and engage in spin war 24/7 and the narratives that win there then get amplified across media in America.
It’s very likely that liberal media and pols, along with their powerful tech friends are already plotting to pick up their spin game and move it to another social media platform. I’ve watched the Dem online spin game move several times since the late 1990s. Trump has tried to do this very thing too, by creating a new social media platform to compete with Twitter and he’s failed so far. If Dems and liberal media, working with their liberal tech friends make a move like that, well, they still dominate most of the media in America and still wield a lot of power to influence American culture and politics. Elon Musk could own Twitter, but if the liberal spin war machine moves to another platform, the right-wing political crowd would end up just talking among themselves, Twitter would lose influence (and money) and here’s the thing that happens in online forums if there’s little or no moderation – the porn ads and other scammers, radicals fringe nuts, and crazies quickly dominate the space.
I just don’t see the powerful leftist crowd sitting idly by and allowing an Elon Musk-owned Twitter to succeed. And if the Dem spin war moves, does the right-wing political crowd stay on Twitter, where they’re unable to engage in their daily Twitter battles with their “enemies” and get their dopamine hits from owning the libs or do they go to where the liberal media spin action is? Dems and liberal media would be running their spin war machine with little direct challenge from the right – like the old days and the right would be sitting there fuming amongst themselves.
The Dems and liberal media have been at this spin information war operation for decades, while the right just caught on to how it really operates during the Trump years. Elon Musk isn’t going to save free speech in America. Americans completely rejecting spin information war is the only hope, but unfortunately Americans who consume news the most are also completely hooked on the daily spin war drama too. They ‘re invested completely in their side’s narratives and buy into participating in this corrupt spin war as the path to “saving” America.
There are no quick fixes or a man on a white horse coming to save America – it’s going to be a long, hard road to turn our country around and it will require millions of Americans to have a change of heart, not just some quirky, wealthy guy taking control of a powerful social media platform.
Only a people who care enough to learn about our constitutional republic and embrace those principles can save free speech… and all of our other liberties. That would take a dramatic change to sweep across America and for millions of Americans to care enough to put in the time and effort to start truly believing in some common American principles again. We’re a far way from the American people De Tocqueville wrote about in his 1835, Democracy in America.
Update: I made a lot of edits in this post this afternoon, mostly fixing typos and grammatical nightmares. While Trump supporters will likely assume this blog post is an attack on the right, it was intended to be a step back to look at the bigger spin war strategic picture.
The Dems and liberal media have been at this form of spin information war since the 1990s and even long before that, going back decades, they’ve been selling America on left-wing culture and politics. To believe the political left is just going to sit there and do nothing if Elon Musk takes ownership of Twitter and makes dramatic changes, seems rather near-sighted, I think. Besides picking up their toys and moving to another social media platform, the Dem/liberal media Twitter crowd could also wage a stealth effort to sabotage a Musk-owned Twitter, by various nefarious means – from flooding it with bots, creating hordes of fake accounts, creating fake right-wing extremist accounts to cause havoc and the list goes on and on. The havoc they create could then be used to demand action be taken by government to impose new rules to stop the “dangerous extremists” (this is a favorite Dem approach).
Dem/liberal media spin warriors aren’t going to just sit there and do nothing and they’re not going to quit their corrupt spin info war.
They’ll employ any means necessary to disrupt and destroy a Musk-owned Twitter. Of course, they’ll also whine about the “dangerous” right-wing extremists, even if they create fake ones, because dirty tricks and false flag operations are now par for the course with Dem spin war operations. These are people who have been using an any means necessary political operational approach for decades, while most of the the right only began catching onto all of this Dem/liberal media spin war corruption since Trump came onto the political scene. Whatever Musk does or doesn’t do with Twitter, is an unknown, but the Dem/liberal media playbook is pretty established. They will do whatever it takes to destroy Twitter, if liberals lose control of it.
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