The “world is not obliged to put up with [Elon] Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes just because he is rich.” So said Brazilian president and ex-convict Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva recently, referencing his nation’s attack on Musk’s X social media platform.
Only, he didn’t mention that “anything goes” doesn’t mean killing and stealing (which governments do frequently).
Rather, that’s what Lula da Silva calls allowing free speech and open debate: “anything goes.” Moreover, allowing “left-wing anything goes” from rich people and entities is apparently okay. Apropos to this, there’s no such thing as a big media outlet that isn’t “rich.”
In fact, 90 percent of our media is controlled by just six enormous conglomerates.
The Tag Team of Turpitude
Given this, perhaps it’s not surprising that these media are working to further strengthen this oligopoly — by joining socialist Lula da Silva in attacking a competitor, Musk’s X (formerly Twitter).
CNN — owned by one of those massive conglomerates, Warner Bros. Discovery — reported Wednesday on the Brazilian president’s pronouncement. To wit:
Lula da Silva made the remarks in an interview with CNN affiliate CNN Brasil published Monday, days after Musk’s social media site X was suspended in the country, making it inaccessible in a major market.
“The Brazilian justice system may have given an important signal that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes just because he is rich,” the president said.
Lula da Silva’s comments are the latest salvo in a long-running feud with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation in the country. Over the weekend, Brazilians, including the president, bid farewell to X, with some posting links to their profiles on other social media platforms.
Brazil is an important market for X, which has struggled with the loss of advertisers since Musk acquired Twitter and renamed the platform last year. Some 40 million Brazilians, roughly one-fifth of the population, access X at least once per month….
Free Speech’s Ever More Lonely Defenders?
In fairness to the mainstream media, the left-wing Washington Post’s editorial board did defend Musk and X. “The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is correct,” it wrote Wednesday, “when he says a Brazilian jurist’s move to unilaterally prohibit X, which he owns, from operating in the country is an assault on internet speech around the world.”
In fact, Brazil’s actions have been frighteningly despotic. As the Post informs, referencing Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes:
After X ignored the court’s orders to block more than 140 accounts, the justice warned he would arrest its legal representative in Brazil. That prompted Mr. Musk to remove X’s team from the country. That lack of a physical presence, in turn, led Mr. Moraes to instruct that X be blocked for all 220 million Brazilians — who, he said, could face fines of almost $9,000 a day if they tried to circumvent the restriction.
Double Standards
Now, a bit of perspective: Our media were apoplectic when Russia banned homosexual propaganda from its TV years back. Yet most of these news organs tacitly, if not explicitly, condone Brazil’s outright ban on a whole social media platform.
Ironically, too, Musk once was a sort of hero to the Left — when he was just the “electric car” guy. But then he did something unforgivable.
As Donald Trump did when running for office in 2016, he began expressing anti-establishment views and threatening the Left’s power. Worse still, he bought X and gave other people a large forum in which to express anti-establishment views.
So while Musk was previously wealthy and favored, now he’s wealthy and flayed. We thus now hear from the media that “the rich shouldn’t have that kind of power to spread ‘misinformation.’” But, question:
What large entity with the power to widely disseminate information isn’t “rich”?
And which one doesn’t spread misinformation (along with some Truth)?
The Washington Post is owned by the world’s third-richest person, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. And, as mentioned earlier, six leviathan conglomerates control 90 percent of our media. They are Walt Disney Company, Comcast, 21st Century Fox, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Corporation, and Viacom. These companies have net worths ranging from tens of billions to more than a hundred billion dollars, too.
Yet this pales in comparison to the richest (mis)information spreaders of all: governments. Even Brazil, a piker compared to the U.S. feds, had 2023 revenue of $829.49 billion. Moreover, that it can use force to extract this money brings us to another point.
Unlike corporations, government also has a military to impose its will.
Still think Elon Musk is the threat in the world?
Who’s the Real King of Lies?
As for misinformation, the government/mainstream media complex is the champ there, too. There was/is:
- the censorship of accurate Covid prescriptions during the “pandemic”;
- the lie that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinfo”;
- the Trump “fine people” hoax, which is still peddled to this day; and
- the cover-up of Joe Biden’s dementia.
The above is just a short list, too. An exhaustive one would perhaps make for a book the size of the tax code.
Aside from threatening establishment power, what Musk is also guilty of are honesty and authenticity. He doesn’t remain behind the scenes and quietly, like a puppeteer, undermine civilization with his wealth, as does George Soros. He doesn’t masquerade as nonpartisan while being the Democrats’ de facto public-relations team, as do the alphabet networks. He doesn’t preach “democracy” while silencing the unfashionable among the démos (the people), as does most of Big Tech. (In fact, X allows “community notes” in which users, democratically, can and do correct misinformation.)
So make no mistake: Statists the world over don’t despise Musk because he’s a spreader of misinformation. They despise him because he won’t spread and protect theirs.
