We have now had over a week to process the news about Elon Musk buying Twitter and, to the surprise of no one, the leftist response has been over the top of over the top. Dire warnings about the perils of a billionaire owning a major media platform flowed like water over Niagra falls. My thoughts immediately went to the Jeff Bezos purchase of The Washington Post and the notable lack of caterwauling from the left about that.
I was working from memory at first and couldn’t come up with any extreme overreaction to Bezos when he bought WaPo. Sure, conservatives raised some eyebrows but we didn’t have nervous breakdowns. The general consensus was that WaPo was already so awful that it probably couldn’t devolve into an even bigger rag.
Oops.
The reporting when Bezos made his move to own the newspaper of record in our nation’s capital was almost all pretty straightforward and opinion free. There was no ranting about a “ZOMG BILLIONAIRRRRRRE!” controlling such an important source of information. If there was, it didn’t get much traction.
The New York Times, which I believe has run around 14,000 articles and Opinion pieces about Musk and Twitter since last week, even gave Bezos a platform to “defend” his purchase of the paper a few years later. Here’s a gem from that unfortunate mutual admiration society:
Mr. Bezos said he bought the newspaper because he wanted to make it into a more powerful national — and even global — publication, and that The Post was well situated to be a watchdog over the leaders of the world’s most powerful country. “If it had been a financially upside-down salty snack food company, I would not have bought it,” he said.
I’m still waiting for WaPo to be a watchdog over anything that the Democrats do. When you’re dealing with the Times writing about WaPo, there’s a very limited supply of honesty available.
Contrast the congeniality of how Bezos was treated in 2013 with the unhinged lunacy we’re seeing involving Musk. My Townhall colleague Julio Rosas wrote about one of the more recent meltdown episodes:
Billionaire Elon Musk blasted NBC in response to one of their hosts, Mehdi Hasan, going on a diatribe against Musk and the “Nazi” faction of the Republican party.
Hasan downplayed the extreme actions of the far-left by saying they just want “free healthcare and free childcare” while saying the far-right wants to give the country “white supremacy and no democracy.” Things are about to become worse with Musk buying Twitter, according to Hasan.
“We may look back on this…as a pivotal moment when a petulant and not-so-bright billionaire casually bought one of the most influential messaging machines and just handed it to the far-right,” he said.
This “not-so-bright billionaire” is probably going to be the guy to first put people on Mars but, hey, let’s let the commie cable mediocrity rant.
Or not:
When a clip of Hasan’s statements was posted to Twitter Musk replied, “NBC basically saying Republicans are Nazis” and “Same org that covered up Hunter Biden laptop story, had Harvey Weinstein story early & killed it & built Matt Lauer his rape office. Lovely people.”
The reason that the progressives are having fits about Musk’s purchase of Twitter is that Twitter had become one of (along with Facebook) the left’s primary drivers of false narratives. There are a lot more impressionable idiots on social media than there are reading The Washington Post every day. They’re terrified of Musk’s commitment to free speech because free speech is honest and they aren’t.
The leftists didn’t get mad when Bezos bought WaPo because they were reasonably assured that he was going to give the paper carte blanche to continue lying with impunity.
They’ll still be able to lie on Twitter, of course. The difference now will be that people who call them out won’t immediately be suspended or banned from the platform.
If there’s one thing we know that American leftists really struggle with, it’s the idea of their actions having consequences.
There are going to be a lot of honesty-induced ulcers on the left and, gosh, I wish I could feel bad about that.
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