April 2022 may go down as the Gettysburg of the woke.
African-American billionaire success story Elon Musk bought Twitter in a blockbuster deal worth about $44 billion. He went into the deal announcing he intended to restore free speech to the platform that once embodied it.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy,” the world’s richest man tweeted on the platform he was about to own, “and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated.”
But as he and I and millions of others have noted and long lamented, Twitter was increasingly hostile to that debate. Current Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal showed his disdain for free speech in a 2020 interview when he said the company’s “role is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but our role is to serve a healthy public conversation and our moves are reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation.”
Who died and made a tech bureaucrat the king of who can say what?
Agrawal’s smug attitude led the platform to ban the New York Post’s reports on Hunter Biden’s laptop, and fostered the shadow banning and throttling of numerous conservative and other feeds that ran afoul of leftist pieties, and culminated with the banning of the Babylon Bee. With Musk taking control, all of that has blown back on Agrawal.
Musk is a free speech absolutist. The two—CEO Agrawal and owner Musk—do not agree on free speech. That much is clear. What’s less clear is who Twitter’s next CEO will be. How about a billionaire CEO and former president of the United States who was canceled from the site?
Twitter’s capture and presumed return to freedom is just one of the serious defeats the woke Left has suffered in the past month.
Disney decided to step up for adults who want to use public school classrooms to sexually groom kindergarteners. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis led the sensible charge against this. When Disney refused to see reason, the state legislature stripped the once family-friendly giant of its special governing status. The tax implications haven’t shaken out yet but presumably will hit the Mouse House like a block of moldy cheese. Disney lost billions in its stock value this month, a fact not even CNN could ignore.
Speaking of CNN, executives there had the bright idea that people would pay for a channel they refuse to watch for free, even when it’s the only thing on in the airport. So they poured about $300 million into something they called CNN+, which in about three weeks became CNN-. It crashed and burned faster than Disney stock. The reason? No one is buying what Don Lemon and his clown crew are selling. CNN’s ratings were already tanking. Are you going to fork over your hard-earned dollars to watch Brian Stelter do his Mr. Potato Head impression every night? Not if you value your dollars, your time, and your sanity. According to CNN, CNN+ died in less than a month.
Netflix is another company that may be suffering from the woke hangover. Credit where it’s due—Netflix does value free speech. It stood by Dave Chappelle when the wokes tried to cancel him. But it also dabbled in a little grooming with its controversial “Cuties,” and subscribers haven’t forgotten that. It’s losing big, but another Chappelle special may keep it from sinking.
The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and Spotify’s relationship with the Obamas are another matter. Spotify took on the woke mob when it tried mobbing Joe Rogan for speaking his mind and interviewing whoever he wanted. Spotify not only stuck by Rogan and his massive contract, but they also parted company with the Obamas—the king and queen of stealthy woke leftism and censorship. Score this a win for the First Amendment.
The Post’s Lorenz tried to get the enlightening LibsofTikTok Twitter feed canceled. She used a morsel of Jeff Bezos’ billions to out and doxx the woman who runs that feed and sicced Twitter’s woke hordes on her. But the backlash landed on Lorenz, not Libs. The wokes lost again, and LibsofTikTok gained more followers who will see what groomers are up to in our schools.
Now Twitter is free and soon we may even see behind the curtain and into the algorithms that many suspect were engineered by Twitter’s wokes to hurt everyone who had the audacity to tweet their minds.
The “woking dead” are losing. It’s time to make sure their cultural and political defeat is painful and permanent.