CENTRAL VIEW for Monday, April 25, 2022

To Tweet freely or censored? That is the question

Ironically, it was on January 6, 1941 (yes, January 6th) that President Roosevelt told Americans that our most precious freedoms were: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.

Note how FDR listed Freedom of Speech and Expression first. For without Freedom of Speech and Expression, the other freedoms have died on the chopping blocks of dictators such Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Castro brothers, and Vladimir Putin et al.

Elon Musk, arguably the world’s richest man, says, "When someone I do not like is allowed to say something I do not like, that is freedom of speech." But when Musk began to question how Twitter uses algorithms to censor speech that does not conform to Twitter’s worldview, Musk went from hero to villain.

Prior to Musk’s definition of freedom of speech, Musk was the darling of the MSM. There was almost universal media praise for all-electric vehicles such as Musk’s Tesla EV. Moreover, Musk was saving the planet with his reusable space vehicles. No mention that Musk’s wealth came largely from the heavily government-subsidized Tesla EV.

Suddenly, the subsidies are bad. Suddenly, federal transportation safety inspectors want tons of data about how the Tesla is made. Suddenly dozens of retired members of the intelligence community wrote a letter to congress warning that any effort to break up Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Google, Microsoft, etc.) would be catastrophic for the national security system they created. Wait, it gets worse:

Furious with Elon Musk’s attempts to bring Twitter back into line with FDR’s Freedom of Speech, the former spooks say "... any attempt to break up the private side of the intel/tech arrangement will reduce the ability of the intelligence community to control public opinion."[bold mine]

The former spooks argue, "...If the modern system created by the partnership between the U.S. government and Big Tech is not retained, the national security of the United States is compromised." Folks, this sounds like George Orwell on steroids.

Suddenly, it is wrong for the world’s richest man (who is non-political) to buy Twitter. But it was okay when the highly political, left-wing Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, bought The Washington Post.

Meanwhile, the Democrat’s kangaroo-court investigation of the events of January 6, 2021 is designed to censor former President Donald Trump. Desperately afraid that President Trump might return to the White House and finish the task of uprooting the corrupt Deep State and bring the guilty to the Bar of Justice, the investigators are looking under every rock trying to find some kind of criminal behavior that might bar President Trump from future office.

While the Democrats might tie up President Trump in legal tangles, the Democrats may find even greater threats await them. For example, the GOP presidential hopeful bench features superstars such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Both men support the America-first agenda of President Trump; however, with a great deal more tact. Or, as Winston Churchill said, "Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip." Apparently, that excludes mean Tweets.

©2022. William Hamilton.

Dr. Hamilton can be contacted at:

Email: william@central-view.com