Hunter. Biden. Laptop.
Just three words. We’ve been using them a lot here at The Western Journal. As have other media. Even The New York Times, sort of.
But television sitcom star Tim Allen used those three words April 25 in a heretofore all but forbidden place — Twitter.
He was celebrating the new ownership of the social media platform by entrepreneur Elon Musk.
“The little twitter bird has a new owner,” Allen tweeted. “Wonder how long it will take for the new shadow ban council to prevent me from saying things like Hunter Biden laptop.”
The little twitter bird has a new owner. Wonder how long it will take for the new shadow ban council to prevent me from saying stuff like: Hunter Biden laptop. Or even more provocative: Tesla in-car fart app? (Love it when driving my Mom.)
— Tim Allen (@ofctimallen) April 25, 2022
Allen obviously believes — or at least hopes — that a Musk-controlled Twitter will remove censorship and restore free speech.
In recent years, saying the wrong thing on Twitter meant your comments go down the memory hole. But Musk has promised reform.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said, as quoted in a Twitter news release about the $44 billion purchase. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.”
“Twitter has tremendous potential — I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it,” Musk added.
Musk fired a shot across the bow of big tech censors. And the leftist establishment is livid.
Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King harrumphed that the Musk purchase represented “white power,” the New York Post said.
“So for me, this isn’t about left vs right. Not at all. It’s about how the richest man in the world, a son of Apartheid, raised by a white nationalist, wants to be sure his speech, and that of other white men, isn’t censored” King said.
Right. Musk’s South African birth and the color of his skin are a problem.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren called the purchase “dangerous for our democracy,” the Post said.
Ah, yes — lifting censorship is dangerous to our democracy. Wasn’t it George Orwell who warned us about these people?
Accounting newsletter editor Francine McKenna, writing in Time, even claimed that regulators should have stopped Musk’s Twitter purchase.
“Everyone, including government regulators, should be on to his games,” she said, referring to an earlier attempt to take Twitter private that ran afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Regulators? Some hold to the idea that private social media companies are just that — private — and can allow or disallow whatever they wanted on their platforms.
Others argue that social media now function as common carriers like electric utilities or railroads and since they, as in the case of Facebook, have been weaponized to influence elections, they need to be regulated.
That regulation would presumably not only be based on the common carrier idea but also on anti-monopoly concepts embedded in things like the Sherman Antitrust Act.
But, of course, when leftists are in charge, McKenna would likely argue that only the platform owner should be in control.
So it goes. The left is in a meltdown over presumed removal of censorship on Twitter.
But this meltdown, years in the making, has been growing. It really blossomed with the candidacy of the hated Donald Trump — that caused leftists to really show who they are.
Now, even without Trump, any possibility of the resumption of the bedrock American principal of free speech pushed leftists into unveiling their true desires for power and control over your speech — and even thought.
Look at how they are going mad over the purchase of Twitter.
Don’t believe it?
Just voice these words to them: “Hunter Biden laptop.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
