Musk’s Free Speech Schizophrenia
“Censor not, lest ye be censored,” Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of Twitter, tweeted recently. Since purchasing Twitter, Musk has been vilified by the far left and liberal activist community for pledging to restore free speech on the platform, ostensibly allowing more conservative and right-wing voices space on one of the world’s largest and most influential social media sites.
That very same day, Monday, April 24, several notable right-wing dissidents were unceremoniously deplatformed and banned on Twitter with no explanation given. Popular talk radio personality James Edwards, the longtime host of The Political Cesspool, Dr. Kevin MacDonald, one of the leading dissident intellectuals who edits The Occidental Observer, Dr. Tom Sunic, a Croatian-American former diplomat, academic, and author, along with countless others had their increasingly popular Twitter accounts permanently banned.
Edwards explained to this reporter:
I had been on Twitter since 2016 and never once received a prior warning or reprimand. This wasn’t my second or third strike. This was an online assassination that went straight to a permanent ban. No reason was given.
I conduct myself professionally and have always been sure to responsibly present our arguments. I don’t quarrel with individuals on social media and have never even used profanity or crude rhetoric.
Simply put, by no reasonable standard of measurement could it be argued that I violated even the most ambiguous terms of service. This was just another case of naked censorship.
Dr. Kevin MacDonald noted he simply received an email with a subject line that read: “Your account is permanently suspended.”
The email continued:
After careful review, we determined your account broke the Twitter Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t Tweet, Retweet, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.
No reason was provided for the permanent ban, and no explanation was provided detailing in what specific way any Twitter Rules were violated.
“No reason was given and that’s also the case with James,” MacDonald told this reporter referring to the permanent ban. “We have appealed, asking for reasons but I rather doubt anything good will happen.”
Sunic, meanwhile, noted that the Twitter ban didn’t surprise him at all, arguing “that the censorship in the U.S. is continuing where the Soviet Union left off.”
Sunic wrote following his ban:
I know what I am talking about. My family and I were all proscribed in communist ex-Yugoslavia for several decades. My father, an ex-lawyer, even served prison time for “hostile anti-communist literature.”
Now we are witnessing the same intellectual purges, albeit adorned with fancy and demonic euphemisms such as “hate speech” and “ethnic sensitivity training” in the U.S. and EU—akin to the ex-Soviet People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, i.e., the NKVD.
Several other dissident commentators were purged recently as well, including Andrew Anglin, editor and lead writer for The Daily Stormer, easily one of the most censored websites in the world. Paul Fromm, a Canadian free speech activist and occasional contributor to this newspaper, was also banned. It remains unclear what specific rules any of these activists, writers, and commentators broke, if any.
In addition to the recent censoring of popular dissidents, many other content creators and political activists have been permanently banned for months now. Mike Peinovich, Joseph Jordan, Warren Balogh, and others associated with the National Justice Party (NJP), a burgeoning political movement dedicated to advocating “for White civil rights, the working and middle class, and the traditional family against our corrupt and illegitimate institutions,” have been shut down and censored on Twitter. Links to the organization’s website are also banned from even being shared on the platform.
Patriotic Alternative, a similar right-wing political movement based in the UK, and its leadership and affiliated organizations are also permanently banned on Twitter. Additionally, Nick Fuentes, a leading political commentator and organizer based in Chicago, is also banned on the platform.
Laura Towler, a leader with Patriotic Alternative, recently pointed out:
Twitter censorship is worse under Elon Musk than it ever was before. Not only are most of our accounts suspended still/again, but so are URLs to websites like Patriotic Alternative and NJP. This makes it almost impossible to share any [public] activism, direct people to solutions, or even recruit people to sign up. People are able to lie about us and we have no ability to defend ourselves.
Warren Balogh also powerfully argued that censorship under Musk is even more extreme than it was previously, noting that Musk purchased “the most important social media platform in the world for political discourse, with the promise to restore free speech, then [has made] it more restrictive than it ever was for dissident individuals and parties in the West at the wishes of the ADL [Anti-Defamation League.—Ed.].”
Balogh explained:
This is what we get living under the arbitrary rule of an oligarchy of degenerate billionaires. This whole system has to go, including oligarchs like Musk who think they are gods, and the world and all our most fundamental freedoms are their playthings, that they can amuse themselves with or discard when they get bored.
Shortly after purchasing Twitter, which was a long, drawn-out process fraught with controversy and conflict, Musk openly stated that, under his watch, the platform would allow all speech that the First Amendment specifically protects.
“By ‘free speech,’ I simply mean that which matches the law,” Musk tweeted on April 26, 2022. “I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.”
Musk’s mixed messaging and outright schizophrenic thinking on free speech matters continues to grow. While denouncing censorship on his personal Twitter account, which receives millions of views, his underlings at the social media behemoth censor legitimate and responsible right-wing dissidents that have long been in the crosshairs of organized special interest groups like the ADL, who work overtime to cancel and shut down their opposition.
NB: This article was originally published by American Free Press on May 17, 2023. Subscribe to America’s last real newspaper today!
