The Morning Briefing: Free Speech Now Has a Heavy Musk Scent

Top O’ the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. Competitive death yodeling is just one of the many reasons the Swiss are so interesting. That and their obsessive affinity for the Harlem Globetrotters.

Well, that escalated quickly.

Just three weeks after he first made his move on Twitter, Elon Musk acquired the social media powerhouse all for his own. The purchase seems to herald a stunning change in direction for a platform that once was truly a virtual town square where ideas could be exchanged freely but in recent years has become a heavy-handed leftist censorship machine, eagerly shutting down anyone who didn’t conform to approved progressive narratives.

Watching the liberals fall apart yesterday was one of the more epic examples of misplaced mass hysteria ever seen. The fragile dears were lamenting — I kid you not — too much freedom.

Keeping up a longstanding tradition of the American left, the psychological projection was overwhelming. There were dire warnings about Musk’s takeover signifying that Twitter would now become a hotbed of lies which, of course, is exactly what it’s been since the company’s woke executives decided to make it a full-time leftist false narrative machine.

In yesterday’s Briefing, we were discussing the woke crowd’s weakening grip on narratives and the flow of information. Just hours after that was published, that grip was forcibly pried from one of the crowd’s biggest cudgels.

If free speech lovers had to pick a Who’s Who list of people and organizations we’d like to see annoyed, we couldn’t do better than what Musk provided on Monday. Robert wrote about some of them:

There has been one salutary effect of the weeks-long efforts of Elon Musk to gain control of Twitter, and the debate over the freedom of speech that ensued: now the Left’s foremost individuals and institutions are out in the open about their hatred for the freedom of speech. The authoritarian heart of the Left has been exposed, as has their war against the foundational principle of any free society: the right to express oneself even if one’s opinions don’t coincide with those of the powerful and/or moneyed elites. Barack and Hillary hate the freedom of speech and want you to think it’s a dangerous toy, too dangerous for you to play with. And now three pillars of the unctuous and hypocritical Leftist “human rights” establishment, Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), have come out against it as well.

I could go on for days with schadenfreude-inducing examples of this tantrum. Twitter was fun again yesterday. The reaction was also a perfect snapshot of the divide in this country that may never heal. Musk’s vision for Twitter is full of positives, which Victoria covered yesterday. Objectively, there isn’t anything in there that reasonable people shouldn’t support.

They’re simply terrified because they’ve just lost one of their pillars of leftist disinformation. The one they used to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story before the 2020 election. The one they used to spread Chinese commie propaganda in the early days of the pandemic. The one they used to prop up everything that Fauci and Co. got wrong about the response to COVID.

Their misery is delicious and won’t be ending with just Twitter.

Everything Isn’t Awful

In Turkey, a woman walked into a restaurant and saw a stray cat sleeping on a chair.

She called the waitress and asked her to handle it.

This is how she handled it.

🐱❤️ pic.twitter.com/bamaOqhGPH

— Goodable (@Goodable) April 26, 2022

Smells Like Onion

Angry, Ranting Twitter User Really Needs To Move Out Of Parents’ Basement https://t.co/z7eaV9Y5nN pic.twitter.com/e7c36QvQYX

— The Onion (@TheOnion) April 26, 2022