I'm Starting to Think It's Not Actually About Democracy at All

Over the last 24 hours or so, we’ve gotten some pretty big news on the social media front as Twitter went from being interested in Elon Musk’s “best and final offer” to actually making the sell after stockholders informed the board that they sure as hell better take the deal.

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At the same time, we’re also still dealing with the fallout of Florida revoking the special tax status of Disney World in the wake of the company getting overly involved in the Parental Rights in Education debate. The move has received mixed reactions from the right, but beyond whether or not it was the right and proper thing to do, the deed is done.

You also had a brief interlude in all that drama when Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post stalked and doxxed the person behind the popular “Libs of Tiktok” account on Twitter. All in the name of “transparency” and “democracy.”

In fact, all of this worry and panic is at the heart of the left’s newfound love and redefinition of democracy.

For years, they have told us that corporations don’t have First Amendment rights. They have trashed the Citizens United case pretty thoroughly since the decision was handed down. But the moment a corporation goes fully woke in (a falsely framed) opposition to a law passed by Republicans, they suddenly deserve all those rights, and how dare the Republicans push back against it?!

I am, by the way, one of the conservatives who are generally opposed to Florida’s move against Disney, but I fully understand it and don’t actually mourn the result. A big corporation lost an unfair advantage it had in the marketplace. We can quibble over whether or not the government should be punishing corporations for their speech, but that’s a debate for another day.

A major corporation goes woke and stands in major, vocal opposition to the Republican Party. Free speech comes with consequences. Whether or not a court will uphold those consequences remains to be seen, but it happened. And the left is crying foul.

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Of course, if there were a Twitter account called “Cons of TikTok” that focused on the crazy things conservatives say on social media, the left would be apoplectic that someone would dare to expose them for simply posting what conservatives are out there saying. In fact, the left was apoplectic about one of their own getting exposed on social media: Hunter Biden. They shot the original story down over and over until after Joe Biden’s election, then waited two years to bring it up again in their own reporting to verify it.

What happened to it being a misinformation campaign by Russia? Incidentally, Lorenz suggested the same thing when she explained why she went after the Libs of TikTok account. You just never know — it could be the Russians. Gotta protect democracy from those crafty Russians.

Elon Musk, Destroyer of Democracy
Britta Pedersen/Pool via AP

But that brings us to Elon Musk and Twitter. The left has lost their ever-loving minds over this deal. They truly believe it’s the end of democracy. I’m sorry, but if Twitter is the last great bastion of democracy, then democracy deserves to fail. It’s a cesspool disguised as a public square.

But, while a woke Twitter board and woke Twitter staffers can control the flow of information on the site, it’s fine. Democracy is saved. But the moment that you expose what they’re doing or saying on social media, the moment you are a threat to their public perception, you are deemed an enemy of the aforementioned democracy and need to be shut down. And that’s why they are terrified of Musk. He threatens their ability to control the narratives at any given moment.

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And all of this is despite the fact that he never once said that’s what he intended to do. From the very beginning, all Musk has said is that he’s in it to return it to a place of discourse, not censorship. It’s a pleasant thought. It’s not like I’m expecting the site to actually get better, but I am expecting more voices to have more impact.

But the left is losing their minds over the idea that more voices can be heard. The point of democracy is for the voice of the people to be heard so that everyone is informed from all sides and able to make an educated choice. That this idea is so outright rejected by the left that they have to shut down the voices that run counter to them, and that they have to lament their inability to do so in the future, well… it makes me think that perhaps “democracy” was never really the point at all.

And gee, who could have seen that coming?

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