Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Feels A Lot Like Trump’s 2016 Election

Remember the fall of 2016?

In the days and weeks leading up to the presidential election that year, there was an increasing sense that the public was disgusted with the political status quo but confidence that it could be changed was low. Then, almost miraculously, Donald Trump took out Hillary Clinton and it felt like everything changed.

But the euphoria at seeing the mighty ruling elite taking an uppercut to the jaw didn’t last. Trump’s election was great fun for those of us who had decided we couldn’t tolerate any more of the corruption of the ruling class in both parties, but in no time flat it was obvious that the elite weren’t going to take that loss sitting down.

One of the things the 2016 election and its aftermath did was to clarify just how rancid the status quo had become. No sooner was Trump elected but Hillary Clinton’s campaign was dragooning left-wing activists into making harassing phone calls, emails, text messages and other communications aimed at intimidating Trump-pledged electors to “go faithless” and deny him an Electoral College majority. Then we were treated to an utterly fraudulent set of allegations along the lines that Trump was a Russian espionage asset who had stolen the election with the help of the Putin regime in Moscow.

In other words, rather than accept the loss and learn from it, the Left and the ruling class dived into the gutter and kept fighting.

Ultimately, in the form of an irregular, if not hopelessly tainted 2020 electoral process justified by supposed COVID-19 exigencies, they managed to claw back what the 2016 election had taken from them.

The spectacle of Elon Musk buying Twitter is both related to, and reminiscent of, the 2016 election.

The relation is this: following 2016, a cabal of left-wing activists, including Twitter employees, engaged in active suppression of political speech on that and other social media platforms. Conservative publishers and influencers were suppressed not just on Twitter but on Facebook and other apps, there was shadowbanning and outright blocking from those platforms, algorithms were changed to prevent articles and posts from going viral, and “fact-checking,” a laughably partisan exercise in which political operatives working for left-funded nonprofits disguising themselves as “journalists” and “fact-checkers,” jumped onto social media with the endorsement of the platforms in question to impose their ideological views on controversial subjects.

None of those was much in force prior to the 2016 election. By the end of 2017 all of it was. And by 2020 things got so bad that when the New York Post accurately reported the scandal emerging from the data on a laptop computer Hunter Biden stupidly abandoned at a Delaware computer repair shop, the Post’s reporting was suppressed by all the major social media platforms and its Twitter account was shut down.

Twitter morphed from a welcoming social media platform which was highly useful for the dissemination of information and ideas in quick, usable morsels to a tightly-controlled one-way propaganda street. And after the 2020 election when it banned a sitting U.S. president with nearly 80 million followers, it became obvious that Twitter was nothing more than a tool of the ruling elite.

Very much like the entire federal government was seen in 2016.

And just like Trump came along to disrupt American politics at a time when it was badly needed, this month Elon Musk came along not just to disrupt Twitter but to buy it outright.

Now that he’s done so, the clarity of the moment has begun to emerge.

One effect of the changes appears to be that the suppression of conservative accounts on Twitter has lifted, and it’s like a dam breaking…

The Left, which has essentially rigged Twitter to become its main weapon in the information war, is in a state of utter panic over Musk’s purchase of the app.

Musk, like Trump no shrinking violet when it comes to answering his critics, is unfazed.

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You’ve probably heard about Twitter’s top lawyer, the woman who made the call to suppress the New York Post’s reporting, and her antics following Musk’s buying the app, but here’s a summary…

And then there was this – Project Veritas got hold of a recording of the all-hands meeting of Twitter’s employees which makes it very clear just how far Left the bias is, and which summons the prospect of sabotage…

And of course by now you’ve heard about the federal Department of Homeland Security which is now rolling out a Ministry of Truth in Orwellian fashion (probably not as a response to Musk’s purchase of Twitter, but the clarity of just how far they’re willing to go is quite timely)…

The Department of Homeland Security is setting up a new board designed to counter misinformation related to homeland security, with a focus specifically on Russia and irregular migration. The board will be called the “Disinformation Governance Board, and will be headed by executive director Nina Jankowicz.

Speaking with the House Appropriations DHS Subcommittee on Wednesday afternoon, DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said, “Our Undersecretary for Policy, Rob Silvers is co-chair with our Principal Deputy General Counsel, Jennifer Gaskell, in leading a just recently constituted misinformation disinformation governance board. So we’re bringing — the goal is to bring the resources of the department together to address this threat.”

This is correct…

Don’t forget that Amazon Web Services, which provided hosting services to both Twitter and Parler, nuked the latter following the Jan. 6 protests. Parler has never really recovered.

If Musk follows through on his promise to reopen Twitter and make it a true public square, he’d better make sure he has his own hosting backbone which can’t be shut down or canceled. Especially given that Amazon’s founder and former CEO is publicly accusing Musk of bringing Chinese influence into Twitter (which is rich given Jeff Bezos’ own considerable ties to China and his company’s role in embedding China at the center of the U.S. supply chain)…

Bezos later walked that back, but the shots across the bow are already being fired.

Musk is going to be villified and attacked just like Trump has been. The difference is that many more people have awakened to the rot which exists among our privileged elite and afford them far less credibility.

But the fight will continue. The ruling class has too much to lose to just give up. It’s going to get dirty from here.

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