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Stop me if you've heard this story before: An irreverent billionaire with elite credentials, yet who is shunned by the elite, takes over an enterprise he plans to transform filled with people shaken by and poised to sabotage him, while under public assault.
The parallels between Elon Musk's bid for Twitter and Donald Trump's bid for the White House are striking, and worth drawing out. The Trump presidency provides lessons Musk ought to heed if he is serious about restoring freedom to the digital public square. If he internalizes those lessons and applies them at Twitter, it will redound to the benefit of the republic.
The most important lesson is that it is imperative to know what time it is—to fully understand the stakes of the struggle in which one is engaged, and the lengths to which one's opponents will go to prevail.
As with Trump, most of the stated reasons that the political class and media decry Musk mask the underlying truth. Despite a slew of claims from detractors about how Musk's victory imperils democracy, raises questions about foreign influence or could fuel white supremacy, the reality is that our Ruling Class thinks he—like Trump—threatens its reign. Accordingly, it must eliminate those threats.
Why else would its leading mouthpieces feel the need to pursue pseudonymous Twitter accounts curating progressive absurdities? Answer: Because the Ruling Class wants to mainstream those absurdities, but for the public to see what it is mainstreaming in such unvarnished form is discrediting and delegitimizing. But would there be a @LibsofTikTok without a @realdonaldtrump?
Trump posed a threat to the Ruling Class by challenging its power, privilege and prerogatives at the governmental level. Musk poses a threat to the Ruling Class by challenging its power, privilege and prerogatives at the information level.
Trump threatened the monopoly on state power held by the bipartisan political establishment. Musk threatens the monopoly on The Narrative held by the bipartisan political establishment's tech adjuncts.
The core threat, in both instances, was/is that a swath of the public that the Ruling Class holds in contempt, and that it views as an impediment to its total control, might be permitted to express itself.
Hence the freakout over Musk akin to the freakout over Trump—replete with literal sob stories, a media offensive and political and legal blowback if not outright abuse.
Musk, for his part, seems to understand that he is under fire because his free speech philosophy, put into practice, would enable dissent dangerous to the regime.
Musk would also seem to understand the second major lesson: Personnel is policy. Musk may well face an onslaught from Twitter's own equivalent of the Deep State. Reports suggest Twitter locked its source code to protect itself from employees disgruntled over his acquisition. One would have to assume Musk at least partially influenced this effort, and that he therefore anticipated a potential mutiny. Will Musk face his own Russiagate/Spygate equivalent, and see his agenda subverted by staffers, as part of a coordinated campaign to topple him? Even if these possibilities might be perceived as extreme, has he considered them? Judging by the present state of play—setting aside the regulatory challenges he may well face—Musk ought to prepare for the worst.
The surest way for Musk to see his agenda implemented is to hire like-minded executives, who will then hire like-minded subordinates. Again, the Trump example may be extreme, but it is demonstrative of the challenge of executing when overseeing an organization staffed by people who loathe you and your agenda. Musk may not engender comparable hatred, but he will be trying to right the ship at a company, and in an industry, in hock to the progressive Left—and that seems to take responsibility for inadvertently creating what it perceives to be the horrors of Brexit and Trump.
A very early test for Musk will prove most telling, in this regard: Will he fire Twitter's CEO, whose stated view on Twitter and speech—that the platform "is not to be bound by the First Amendment, but...to serve a healthy public conversation"—would seem to be diametrically opposed to Musk's? Will he fire Twitter's general counsel, under whose command Twitter has become so censorious? Will he fire Twitter's deputy general counsel, the former FBI general counsel during the critical years in which Russiagate unfolded, and who apparently played a not-insignificant role in fomenting it? Musk would seem at least to be aware of the issues surrounding all three of these individuals, per his tweets. We will see if he addresses them. That they were brought in under Jack Dorsey, who appears to be a vocal Musk champion, at least raises some doubt.
Last but not least, it is imperative that Musk expose the size, scope and nature of Twitter's malfeasance in the way of viewpoint discrimination. Opening up Twitter's algorithms, as he has suggested, would seem to be a part of this process. It would be a great public service for Musk to investigate and reveal in detail Twitter's previous shadow-banning, banning and censorship practices, hold those to account who implemented and executed the policies, and to the extent possible give individuals unfairly targeted—without due process—some kind of redress. The effect of this effort would be three-fold: First, it could pressure social media competitors continuing to engage in this behavior to curtail it. Second, if that is too sanguine, then it might at least give future players pause about engaging in such behavior. Third, such a reckoning is imperative to prevent far worse conduct in the future. Otherwise, the rot will fester.
One of the major reasons the administrative state fought so viciously to kneecap Trump from before his inauguration was that it feared its most corrupt efforts would be exposed—particularly in the national security apparatus, including its targeting of Trump. By constantly putting Trump on defense—well beyond just Russiagate and two impeachments—it made it exceedingly difficult for his administration to find and reveal where the bodies were buried, let alone bring the henchmen to justice. Thus, the Ruling Class' brazen behavior only worsened over time.
If Musk can internalize these lessons and apply them, it could serve as a powerful model for non-progressive executives facing hostile bureaucracies to emulate. More important, it would be a boon to one of America's first freedoms: the right to free speech. In an ironic twist, the de-platforming of Donald Trump, including his banishment from Twitter, may well have been a catalyst for it.
Ben Weingarten is a senior fellow at the London Center for Policy Research, fellow at the Claremont Institute and senior contributor to The Federalist. He is the author of American Ingrate: Ilhan Omar and the Progressive-Islamist Takeover of the Democratic Party (Bombardier, 2020). Ben is the founder and CEO of ChangeUp Media LLC, a media consulting and production company. Subscribe to his newsletter at bit.ly/bhwnews, and follow him on Twitter: @bhweingarten.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
