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If you needed proof that Trump’s “war on drugs” is pure theatrical bullshit designed to justify geopolitical adventurism and the transactional nature of how he views absolutely everything, look no further than the past two months of his foreign policy.
Two months ago, Donald Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who was convicted in a Manhattan federal court of facilitating the importation of at least 400 tons of cocaine into the United States. The conviction wasn’t based on hearsay or shaky evidence—it came after a three-week trial featuring multiple cooperating witnesses, business ledgers documenting drug transactions, undercover video recordings, and testimony detailing how Hernandez turned Honduras’ entire government apparatus into a cocaine superhighway.
As Bloomberg’s detailed investigation lays out, the evidence was quite strong. Hernandez’s brother, Tony (who was also an elected official), had been convicted earlier of basically running a massive drug smuggling campaign, and there were clear ties between Tony’s operation and his brother. And there’s this colorful story:
In 2021, during the trial of another trafficker Sandy Gonzalez had arrested, a former accountant for a Honduran agricultural company testified that he attended meetings with Hernández, who accepted bribes from the accountant’s boss and spoke openly of his connections to traffickers. Hernández, he said, bragged about fooling his American counterparts into thinking he was on their side in the drug war. “He then took a sip of drink,” the accountant said of Hernández, “and he said: ‘We are going to stuff drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.’” At that same trial, witnesses said that in return for protection, the trafficker paid bribes to Hernández to ensure his business enjoyed military protection. Data scraped from the trafficker’s phone—which included the president’s cellphone number in the contact list—showed that on two separate days when news broke about the president’s alleged involvement in Tony’s drug-smuggling activities, the trafficker downloaded driving directions to the presidential palace.
A judge sentenced him to 45 years in prison. Trump pardoned him anyway, claiming he’d been “treated very harshly and unfairly.”
So with that conviction and evidence in mind, let’s look at what Trump claims justifies launching an illegal war. Trump (without the required permission of Congress) ordered military strikes on Venezuela this weekend, and captured President Nicolas Maduro, claiming the operation was justified by… drug trafficking charges.
The charges against Maduro appear less direct and less clear than those against Hernandez.
It also details specific actions that Maduro allegedly took as part of the conspiracy. It says, for example, that between 2006 and 2008 when he served as foreign minister that Maduro sold Venezuelan diplomatic passports to known drug traffickers “in order to assist traffickers seeking to move drug proceeds form Mexico to Venezuela under diplomatic cover.”
He also allegedly facilitated the flights of private planes under diplomatic cover to bring drug proceeds back from Mexico to Venezuela.
Prosecutors allege that Maduro and Flores worked together for years to traffic cocaine that had previously been seized by Venezuelan law enforcement. They say the Maduros had their own state-sponsored gangs to protect their operation, and that they ordered “kidnappings, beating and murders against those who owed them drug money or otherwise undermined their drug trafficking operation.”
Notice what’s missing there: actual convictions, actual evidence of tons of cocaine moved, actual documentation like the ledgers and recordings that convicted Hernandez. And indeed, as The Guardian notes, many experts are deeply skeptical that Maduro is actually the drug kingpin Trump claims:
“It just shows that the entire counter-drug effort of Donald Trump is a charade – it’s based on lies, it’s based on hypocrisy,” said Mike Vigil, the former DEA chief for international operations. “He is giving a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández and then going after Nicolás Maduro … It’s all hypocritical.”
Contrary to Trump’s claim that Hernández, 57, had been the victim of a “Biden set up”, Vigil said there was overwhelming evidence that the Central American politician was “a big fish in the narco world”. Not only had Hernández helped turn Honduras into a major transit point for South American cocaine heading to the US, but Vigil said he had also transformed it into a cocaine-producing hub which was now home to coca plantations and makeshift labs for processing coca leaves.
[….]
Meanwhile, despite Trump’s claims that Maduro is the leader of a narco organization called the “Cartel of the Suns”, many experts doubt such a group even exists.
“Maduro is not a saint,” said Vigil, noting how he and several allies were indicted for trafficking cocaine in the US in 2020. “[But] they’re not a cartel, they don’t have an infrastructure,” he added, calling such allegations “nonsense”.
So to recap: Trump pardoned a president who was actually convicted in US court of moving 400 tons of cocaine, with overwhelming evidence including recordings, ledgers, and multiple witness testimony. Then, two months later, he launched military strikes—without Congressional authorization, in violation of both US and international law—and captured a different president based on an indictment that experts say lacks solid evidence that he’s running an actual drug cartel.
The main difference? Hernandez sucked up to Trump from the start. From Bloomberg:
President Hernández had enjoyed good relationships with President Obama and Vice President Biden, but he harbored a special affinity for President Trump, whose transactional style suited him well. Hernández had adopted the slogan “Honduras is open for Business.” During Trump’s first term, Hernández established Próspera, an economic development zone on the Honduran island of Roatán. Próspera offered investors a self-governed haven where they could set their own regulations and pay next to nothing in taxes. Libertarian-inclined Trump supporters invested in it.
Hernández had met with Trump in New York just before his brother’s trial, when they signed a series of bilateral agreements intended to encourage a Honduran crackdown on northbound migrants. “You’re doing a fantastic job,” Trump told Hernández. “My people work with you so well.”
He continued to court Trump’s favor even after his brother’s guilty verdict. The following spring, at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the US Food & Drug Administration publicly rebuked Trump’s , an anti-malarial medicine, could effectively treat the virus. Hernández seized an opportunity.
“Well, I never spoke to a scientist,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, “but I will tell you this: I did speak with the president of Honduras, just a little while ago. I didn’t bring it up—he brought it up. He said they use the hydroxychloroquine, and he said the results are just so incredible, with the hydroxychloroquine. Check with him. Call him. The president of Honduras. A really nice guy.”
For the rest of Trump’s term, even as his Justice Department was compiling more evidence of his ties to trafficking, members of the administration repeatedly praised Hernández for his commitment to battling migration and organized crime.
What’s really going on doesn’t take a very deep analysis: Hernandez was a right-wing ally who supported Trump’s policies and had publicly supported Trump. Maduro is a left-wing adversary. One gets pardoned despite a conviction based on overwhelming evidence. The other gets military strikes based on flimsier charges.
Even more absurd: Trump has been conducting all these “kinetic strikes” we’ve written about on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, killing approximately 80 people and destroying about 20 boats—most of which likely contained far less cocaine than Hernandez was convicted of moving, and many of which may have just been impoverished fishermen. Meanwhile, he’s letting the guy actually convicted of industrialized drug trafficking walk free.
Once again, this is all about political alignment and personal loyalty. Hernandez worked with the Trump administration, endorsed Trump’s preferred candidate in Honduras’ recent election, and had allies like Roger Stone lobbying for his pardon. Maduro is a geopolitical adversary Trump wants removed.
To everyone who can keep more than one thought in their head at the same time, the hypocrisy is clear: you can’t credibly claim your military action is justified by the need to combat drug trafficking when you just pardoned someone convicted of far more extensive drug trafficking. You can’t bomb boats supposedly carrying cocaine while freeing a man who moved 400 tons of it. You can’t invoke “law enforcement” as justification when you’re simultaneously undermining the very legal proceedings that proved another leader’s guilt.
This is nothing more than naked illegal geopolitical maneuvering dressed up in drug war rhetoric. And the fact that the administration thinks this narrative will fly shows how little they think of the public’s ability to notice the contradiction sitting right in front of us.
As one expert put it to The Guardian:
Orlando Pérez, a Latin America expert from the University of North Texas at Dallas, said Trump’s double standards on which drug-smuggling presidents to pursue revealed there was no consistent strategy to fight the region’s drug traffickers. “It’s all ad hoc and based on political considerations,” he said.
“One [Hernández] is a rightwing supporter of the US – and the other [Maduro] is not,” Pérez added. “It is ideological. It is political. It is self-interested in terms of advancing an ideological agenda – and it has nothing to do with effective anti-drug policies.”
When your “drug war” pardons the convicted trafficker and invades over the unproven allegation, you’ve pretty much admitted it was never about the drugs at all.
This is about way more than the hypocrisy, though the hypocrisy is staggering. We should be aghast at the complete erosion of any pretense that US foreign policy is guided by law, evidence, or principle rather than personal loyalty and political convenience. When the same action (drug trafficking) earns you a pardon or an invasion based solely on whether you’re useful to Trump, you’ve turned “law enforcement” into a pure protection racket. And when you can’t even maintain the fiction for two months, you’ve stopped pretending the rules matter at all.
Filed Under: donald trump, drug trade, honduras, hypocrisy, invasion, juan orlando hernandez, nicolas maduro, transactions, venezuela
This story was originally published by ProPublica. Republished under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.
For months, the Trump administration has been accusing its political enemies of mortgage fraud for claiming more than one primary residence.
President Donald Trump branded one foe who did so “deceitful and potentially criminal.” He called another “CROOKED” on Truth Social and pushed the attorney general to take action.
But years earlier, Trump did the very thing he’s accusing his enemies of, records show.
In 1993, Trump signed a mortgage for a “Bermuda style” home in Palm Beach, Florida, pledging that it would be his principal residence. Just seven weeks later, he got another mortgage for a seven-bedroom, marble-floored neighboring property, attesting that it too would be his principal residence.
In reality, Trump, then a New Yorker, does not appear to have ever lived in either home, let alone used them as a principal residence. Instead, the two houses, which are next to his historic Mar-a-Lago estate, were used as investment properties and rented out, according to contemporaneous news accounts and an interview with his longtime real estate agent — exactly the sort of scenario his administration has pointed to as evidence of fraud.
At the time of the purchases, Trump’s local real estate agent told the Miami Herald that the businessman had “hired an expensive New York design firm” to “dress them up to the nines and lease them out annually.” In an interview, Shirley Wyner, the late real estate agent’s wife and business partner who was herself later the rental agent for the two properties, told ProPublica: “They were rentals from the beginning.” Wyner, who has worked with the Trump family for years, added: “President Trump never lived there.”
Mortgage law experts who reviewed the records for ProPublica were struck by the irony of Trump’s dual mortgages. They said claiming primary residences on different mortgages at the same time, as Trump did, is often legal and rarely prosecuted. But Trump’s two loans, they said, exceed the low bar the Trump administration itself has set for mortgage fraud.
“Given Trump’s position on situations like this, he’s going to either need to fire himself or refer himself to the Department of Justice,” said Kathleen Engel, a Suffolk University law professor and leading expert on mortgage finance. “Trump has deemed that this type of misrepresentation is sufficient to preclude someone from serving the country.”
Mortgages for a person’s main home tend to receive more favorable terms, like lower interest rates, than mortgages for a second home or an investment rental property. Legal experts said that having more than one primary-residence mortgage can sometimes be legitimate, like when someone has to move for a new job, and other times can be caused by clerical error. Determining ill intent on the part of the borrower is key to proving fraud, and the experts said lenders have significant discretion in what loans they offer clients. (In this case, Trump used the same lender to buy the two Florida homes.)
But in recent months, the Trump administration has asserted that merely having two primary-residence mortgages is evidence of criminality.
Bill Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency director who has led the charge, said earlier this year: “If somebody is claiming two primary residences, that is not appropriate, and we will refer it for criminal investigation.”
Trump hung up on a ProPublica reporter after being asked whether his Florida mortgages were similar to those of others he had accused of fraud.
In response to questions, a White House spokesperson told ProPublica: “President Trump’s two mortgages you are referencing are from the same lender. There was no defraudation. It is illogical to believe that the same lender would agree to defraud itself.”
The spokesperson added, “this is yet another desperate attempt by the Left wing media to disparage President Trump with false allegations,” and said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
The White House did not respond to questions about any other documents related to the transactions, such as loan applications, that could shed light on what Trump told the lender or if the lender made any exceptions for him.
At the time Trump bought the two Florida properties, he was dealing with the wreckage of high-profile failures at his casinos and hotels in the early 1990s. (He famously recounted seeing a panhandler on Fifth Avenue around this time and telling his companion: “You know, right now that man is worth $900 million more than I am.”) In December 1993, he married the model Marla Maples in an opulent ceremony at The Plaza Hotel. And in Florida, he was pushing local authorities to let him turn Mar-a-Lago, then a residence, into a private club.
Trump bought the two homes, which both sit on Woodbridge Road directly north of Mar-a-Lago, and got mortgages in quick succession in December 1993 and January 1994. The lender on both mortgages, one for $525,000 and one for $1,200,000, was Merrill Lynch.
Each of the mortgage documents signed by Trump contain the standard occupancy requirement — that he must make the property his principal residence within 60 days and live there for at least a year, unless the lender agreed otherwise or there were extenuating circumstances.
But ProPublica could not find evidence Trump ever lived in either of the properties. Legal documents and federal election records from the period give his address as Trump Tower in Manhattan. (Trump would officially change his permanent residence to Florida only decades later, in 2019.) A Vanity Fair profile published in March 1994 describes Trump spending time in Manhattan and at Mar-a-Lago itself.
Trump’s real estate agent, who told the local press that the plan from the beginning was to rent out the two satellite homes, was quoted as saying, “Mr. Trump, in effect, is in a position to approve who his neighbors are.”
In the ensuing years, listings popped up in local newspapers advertising each of the homes for rent. At one point in 1997, the larger of the two homes, a 7-bedroom, 7-bathroom Mediterranean Revival mansion, was listed for $3,000 per day.
Even if Trump did violate the law with his two primary-residence mortgages in Florida, the loans have since been paid off and the mid-1990s is well outside the statute of limitations for mortgage fraud.
A spokesperson for Bank of America, which now owns Merrill Lynch, did not answer questions about the Trump mortgages.
“It’s highly unlikely we would have original documents for a 32-year-old transaction, but generally in private client mortgages the terms of the transactions are based on the overall relationship,” the spokesperson said in a statement, “and the mortgages are not backed by or sold to any government sponsored entity.”
Trump’s two mortgages in Palm Beach bear similarities to the loans taken out by political rivals whom his administration has accused of fraud.
In October, federal prosecutors charged New York Attorney General Letitia James over her mortgage. James has been one of Trump’s top targets since she brought a fraud lawsuit against the president and his company in 2022.
A central claim in the case the Trump Justice Department brought against her is that she purchased a house in Virginia, pledging to her lender that it would serve as her second home, then proceeded to use it as an investment property and rent it out. “This misrepresentation allowed James to obtain favorable loan terms not available for investment properties,” according to the indictment.
Trump’s Florida mortgage agreements appear to have made a more significant misrepresentation, as he claimed those homes would be his primary residence, not his secondary home as James did, before proceeding to rent them out.
James has denied the allegations against her, and the case was dismissed last month over procedural issues, though the Justice Department has been trying to reindict her.
The circumstances around Trump’s mortgages are also similar to the case his administration has made against Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.
Trump declared he was firing Cook earlier this year over her mortgages, as he has sought to bend the traditionally independent agency to his will and force it to lower interest rates. Cook, who denied wrongdoing, has sued to block the termination and continues to serve on the Fed board as that legal fight continues.
In a letter to Cook, Trump specifically noted that she signed two primary residence mortgages within weeks of each other — just as records show he did in Florida.
“You signed one document attesting that a property in Michigan would be your primary residence for the next year. Two weeks later, you signed another document for a property in Georgia stating that it would be your primary residence for the next year,” Trump wrote. “It is inconceivable that you were not aware of your first commitment when making the second.”
He called the loans potentially criminal and wrote, “at a minimum, the conduct at issue exhibits the sort of gross negligence in financial transactions that calls into question your competence and trustworthiness.”
The Trump administration has made similar fraud allegations against other political enemies, including Democrats Sen. Adam Schiff and Rep. Eric Swalwell, both of whom have denied wrongdoing.
In September, ProPublica reported that three of Trump’s Cabinet members have called multiple homes their primary residences in mortgage agreements. Bloomberg also reported that Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent did something similar. (The Cabinet members have all denied wrongdoing.)
Pulte, the Federal Housing Finance Agency head, has denied his investigations are politically motivated. “If it’s a Republican who’s committing mortgage fraud, we’re going to look at it,” he has said. “If it’s a Democrat, we’re going to look at it.”
Thus far, Pulte has not made any publicly known criminal referrals against Republicans. He did not respond to questions from ProPublica about Trump’s Florida mortgages.
Filed Under: bill pulte, donald trump, hypocrisy, mortgage fraud
We’ve spent years calling out what a hypocrite Elon Musk is on free speech. But sometimes Elon hands you a gift: three tweets in the span of a little over a week that demonstrate the entire con more clearly than any deep dive ever could. Let’s start with this one:
That’s Elon announcing that:
Falsely labeling non-violent people as “fascist” or “Nazi” should be treated as incitement to murder
Which is, to be clear, an extreme anti-free speech position. It’s an extremely censorial stance.
Yes, free speech allows you to refer to someone as a Nazi. As the ACLU has written: there’s no such thing as a right not to be called a Nazi. There are plenty of legal cases where this has been made clear by judges. Here’s just one:
Statements indicating a political opponent is a Nazi or coward are “odious and repugnant” and far too common in today’s political discourse. But they are not actionable defamation “because of the tremendous imprecision of the meaning and usage of such terms in the realm of political debate.” In other words, being called a Nazi or coward are not verifiable statements of fact that would support a defamation claim
So, already, we see that Elon is taking an anti-free speech stance with that tweet. Political hyperbole, even of the Nazi-calling variety, is protected speech. Always has been.
Now keep that tweet in mind as we head into the next one.
Because over the weekend… Elon Musk pretty clearly falsely called the EU Commission (which just fined him)… Nazis.
If you can’t see that, it’s Elon retweeting someone who posted an image of the EU flag being pulled back to reveal a Nazi flag. The original poster says “The Fourth Reich” and Elon’s quote tweet says: “Pretty much.”
So, let’s recap: falsely calling non-violent people Nazis is, according to Elon, “incitement to murder” and yet here he is… falsely calling non-violent people Nazis. Just a week after that original statement.
And then there’s the third act that ties it all together. I know he’s said this one before in similar forms, but this weekend he also claimed that the “Surefire way to figure out who the bad guys are is by looking who wants to restrict freedom of speech.”
So, uh, yeah. Just a week after Elon says that labeling a non-violent person a Nazi should be considered “incitement to murder” (an inherent attempt to suppress speech of critics), he claims that the easiest way to figure out who are “the bad guys” is to see who wants to suppress speech.
According to Elon’s own standard: he is the bad guy. He is saying that we should suppress speech of those who call him a Nazi. And therefore, he is a bad guy. By his own logic.
The pattern is obvious. Elon’s entire incoherent “free speech” framework collapses into a single, coherent principle: speech I like is protected, speech I don’t like should be punished. He wants the freedom to call the EU Commission Nazis. He wants to criminalize anyone who calls him one. He proclaims that those who restrict speech are “the bad guys” while simultaneously arguing that calling him a Nazi should be treated as incitement to murder—a severe restriction on speech. And when he or his allies do actual Nazi-like things? Well, you better not mention it, or you’re inciting violence.
This is what happens when someone who has never understood the actual principles of free speech tries to cosplay as a free speech absolutist. The mask doesn’t just slip—it falls off entirely, and all that’s left is the naked self-interest underneath.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, defamation, elon musk, eu, free speech, hypocrisy, hypocrite, incitement, nazi
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JD Vance thinks praising Hitler and talking about putting political enemies into death chambers is harmless “kids being kids,” but criticizing Charlie Kirk is somehow deserving of state-supported punishment.
It sure looks like he’s got quite the double standard.
Yesterday, Vance defended Young Republican leaders who were caught in leaked chat logs making racist, antisemitic, and pro-Nazi comments, dismissing their behavior as harmless kids being edgy. But just a month ago, this very same JD Vance was calling for people to be reported to their employers for making far milder comments about Charlie Kirk’s death. And this week, his administration revoked visas from foreigners who criticized Kirk online.
Let’s start with what Vance said yesterday about the Young Republicans scandal. When asked about leaked Telegram messages showing Republican leaders joking about gas chambers, expressing love for Hitler, and using racial slurs more than 250 times, Vance had this to say:
The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. That’s what kids do. And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke — telling a very offensive, stupid joke — is cause to ruin their lives. At some point, we’re all going to have to say, ‘enough of this BS, we’re not going to allow the worst moment in a 21-year-old’s group chat to ruin a kid’s life for the rest of time. That’s just not ok.
You can see that video at the end of this clip here:
JD Vance dismisses Young Republicans who in a group chat said "I love Hitler" and joked about slavery and rape as "a bunch of kids" who "told stupid jokes" and adds that "most of the stupid things I did when I was a teenager and young adult, they're not on the internet."
There are several problems with this defense. First, these weren’t “kids”—many of the participants were in their twenties and thirties, and some held high-level government positions. Peter Giunta was chief of staff to a New York assemblymember. William Hendrix worked for Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach. Michael Bartels serves as a senior adviser in the Trump administration’s Small Business Administration.
Second, these weren’t just “stupid jokes.” The leaked messages included participants saying “I love Hitler,” joking about putting political opponents in gas chambers, using racial slurs hundreds of times, and discussing rape as “epic.” One participant wrote about creating “the greatest physiological torture methods known to man” for political opponents.
But the bigger issue isn’t Vance’s factual errors—it’s his breathtaking hypocrisy.
Just last month, Vance guest-hosted Charlie Kirk’s radio show and had a very different message about “edgy, offensive” comments. When people made critical remarks about Kirk’s death, Vance urged listeners to hold them accountable:
Call them out, and hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.
This wasn’t theoretical. Many people lost their jobs after Vance’s call to action. Apparently, their “edgy, offensive” jokes were uncivil and unacceptable, and a perfectly good reason to “ruin their lives,” but when it’s pro-Nazi (!!!) content, suddenly Vance wants to give it a pass? Come on.
And this week, Vance’s own administration took it even further. The State Department revoked visas from at least six foreigners who made critical comments about Kirk’s death on social media. The department explicitly stated as much in a tweet:
If you can’t read that, it says:
The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans.
The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk. Here are just a few examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the U.S.
It then proceeded to show the posts from people whose visas it had revoked, making it blatantly clear that they were deciding to punish people in America for their speech, an unambiguous First Amendment violation. The State Department then showed social media posts from some of those whose visas were revoked, and they appeared way less “edgy” and “offensive” than anything that was revealed in that Young Republicans chat.
So let’s be clear about the double standard here: When Young Republicans joke about Hitler and gas chambers, they’re just “kids” telling “edgy, offensive jokes” that we shouldn’t ruin their lives over. But when foreigners or Americans criticize a conservative influencer—with comments that were objectively far milder than “I love Hitler”—they deserve to lose their jobs, their visas, and their livelihoods.
And, of course, this is a regular pattern from the Trump administration. Graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk was literally kidnapped off the street for writing a mild op-ed in support of Palestine. The administration has revoked over 6,000 student visas this year, sometimes targeting students who protested in support of Palestine (the State Dept. falsely said it was for “terrorist activity.”) Jimmy Kimmel’s show was taken off the air over an extremely mild joke about MAGA’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death.
And there are many more examples as well.
Hell, there are even more examples of Vance trying to dismiss horrible things his friends say as “kids being kids.” Remember Marko Elez, the 25-year-old DOGE bro who was found to have posted a ton of truly racist shit just last year? After the tweets came out, Elez resigned, but JD Vance quickly stepped up to defend the tweets as some form of youthful edgy indiscretion:
So, again, when it’s blatantly racist, hateful shit, Vance’s response is:
I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life.
The pattern is unmistakable: pro-Nazi, blatantly hateful rhetoric from Republican allies gets dismissed as harmless fun, while even mild criticism of conservative figures or support for Palestinian rights gets you targeted for life-ruining punishment by federal agencies.
Vance owes the American people an explanation that he will never give. When exactly are “edgy, offensive jokes” acceptable, and when do they deserve government retaliation? Because right now, it appears the only rule is that it’s all in good fun if your hateful, pro-Nazi posts are in support of the MAGA plan. And simply cannot be allowed if they call out bad behavior on the part of MAGA folks.
If joking about Hitler and gas chambers is just boys being boys, then surely criticizing a political commentator should barely register as offensive speech. Yet somehow, the people making Nazi jokes get Vice Presidential protection while their critics get federal persecution.
This is the MAGA world view: hateful neo-Nazi supporting bigotry is all cool if you’re doing so in support of team MAGA. But if you’re not on the team, then it’s fine to weaponize the entire government against your political views. This is the very blueprint for authoritarian control of speech.
Vance knows full well that he’s using a double standard here. But that’s part of his fascistic view of the world. He’s flaunting the fact that he will abuse his position to protect his friends, while eagerly punishing his political opponents for doing way less. It’s right out of the fascist playbook.
Vance finds it hilarious that he’s getting away with such a double standard, but that doesn’t mean anyone else needs to play along. Keep calling it out. And if there are any true reporters left, they should keep asking him about this double standard over and over again.
Filed Under: bigotry, charlie kirk, double standard, hitler, hypocrisy, jd vance, neonazis, racism
It would be too kind to say the irony is lost on Republican lawmakers. They would have to be capable of comprehending and acknowledging their own hypocrisy to even begin to recognize the irony. That’s why these lawmakers are so unconcerned with the long-term destruction they’re causing. It’s all worth it if it results in short-term success. And besides, they’re not the ones who are going to have to deal with the fallout.
But every so often, the tides turn fast enough even these sorts of lawmakers are getting caught up in the messes they’ve made. That’s how it’s going in Texas right now, as Republican lawmakers seek to undo campus free speech protections enacted a half-decade ago because it’s allowing people they don’t like to express ideas they don’t like.
Here’s how it started, as reported by the Texas Tribune:
In 2019, the Legislature passed a law requiring colleges and universities to ensure that all outdoor common areas of campus can be used to stage a protest, as long as demonstrators don’t break the law or disrupt school activities.
That measure came after Texas A&M leaders canceled a white nationalist rally and Texas Southern University scrapped a planned speech by Rep. Briscoe Cain, R-Deer Park. Both happened in 2017. Texas A&M said it canceled the event due to safety concerns while TSU said it canceled Cain’s speech because it was organized by an unregistered student group.
“Our college students, our future leaders, they should be exposed to all ideas, I don’t care how liberal they are or how conservative they are,” Sen. Joan Huffman said at the time.
Some of these same lawmakers are now involved in an effort to create more speech restrictions on campus because students failed to comprehend the 2019 law was only there to ensure the presence of white nationalist rallies on Texas university campuses. Now that these expanded protections are being enjoyed by non-white nationalists, it’s time for a change.
Senate Bill 2972, which passed 97-39 in a final House vote on Wednesday, would give university systems’ governing boards the power to limit where protests can take place on campus.
Republicans who support say it will prevent disruption and unsafe behavior seen during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year. Critics say the measure contradicts previous conservative efforts to protect free speech rights on Texas campuses and is unconstitutional.
As is almost always the case when Republicans start re-writing laws they previously enacted, it’s the Republicans who are wrong and the critics who are right. Of the two groups, the critics are, at least, more consistent in their views.
There’s more to the law than simply expanding the amount of viewpoint censorship publicly-funded schools can engage in. In addition to giving universities more discretion on time/place decisions, students would be forbidden from using amplification devices (including microphones) when protesting during class hours, erecting overnight encampments, taking down a university’s “U.S. flag to put up another nation’s or organization’s banner,” wearing disguises (which really just means wearing masks of any kind, including the COVID-prevention variety), and protesting within 300 feet of any residences overnight.
This was never a problem between 2019 and this year, even though none of the proposed restrictions were in place since the law was first passed for the sole purpose of forcing public universities to host far-right speakers and white nationalist rallies. But with pro-Palestine protests taking over college campuses, it’s time for a change. Fewer rights for everyone — something that may result in fewer white nationalist rallies but a hit white nationalists are likely to take because it means people they don’t like won’t be able to protest either.
Even if you ignore the blatant hypocrisy of rolling back protections just because they’re capable of protecting students Texas Republicans don’t like, there’s also the sheer stupidity of what will likely become the finished work product sent to the governor’s desk. Here’s FIRE attorney Tyler Coward pointing out some obvious problems with the current proposal:
“Under this bill, the university would be required to ask a student to take off a MAGA hat if they were wearing it at 10:15 p.m. or a Bernie Sanders shirt because that is political, that is expressive activity,” he said.
Meanwhile, true believers like Senator Huffman will continue to pretend her party isn’t selling out its white nationalist voting bloc with this ham-handed attempt to silence pro-Palestinian protesters.
Huffman, a Houston Republican who authored that 2019 law, voted earlier this month in favor of the new limits on protests, citing similar reasons mentioned by other supporters. She said the new measure doesn’t undermine the former one.
Oh, but it does. It rolls back protections and makes it that much easier for universities to block appearances and rallies by bigots the Republic Party approves of. This attempt to only harm the protesters Huffman doesn’t like while protecting those she does like means the law won’t protect anyone and will make universities less likely to allow protests, rallies, and public appearances of any kind because nearly any cause could be considered to be “political” enough it’s just going to create a bunch of extra enforcement work for schools and their local security/police forces.
Filed Under: campus speech, free speech, gop, hypocrisy, palestine, protests, texas
Since the start of the Trump administration, many of our biggest concerns about how MAGA would attack free speech have not only proven true, but have turned out to be understated. Nearly all parts of the administration are seeking to silence critical speech. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed “free speech warriors” who signed the infamous Harper’s Letter five years ago have gone mysteriously quiet. They were absolutely frantic about “cancel culture” for years, but when actual government censorship comes along? Crickets.
A (seriously incomplete) list of current attacks on speech includes the FCC’s Brendan Carr’s multiple investigations over protected speech, the FTC’s Andrew Ferguson’s attempts to punish speech, interim US Attorney for DC Ed Martin’s series of increasingly unhinged letters to people and organizations over their speech, and, of course, the attacks on foreign college students for things like writing an anodyne op-ed the administration disliked.
And I won’t even get into Donald Trump’s habit of directly threatening people for their speech like some dollar store dictator, including his weird threat to Bruce Springsteen late last week, in which he tells Springsteen he “ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country” and “then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”
In this context of actual attacks on free speech, you’d expect the self-appointed Free Speech Brigade to be manning the barricades and sounding every alarm. But where are they? Probably busy drafting another letter about how someone was mean to them on the site formerly known as Twitter.
Five years ago, Harper’s Magazine published a fluffy, mostly content-free “letter on justice and open debate.” As someone who has spent decades fighting for and writing about free speech, I found the letter to be beyond useless. While there were legitimate attacks on free speech at the time, the letter did basically nothing to grapple with them. Instead, it used vague language to create a false equivalency between actual attacks on free speech with people just facing some consequences (mainly social opprobrium), mostly allowing people facing the latter to act as though they were facing the former.
In short, it allowed a group of overly sensitive writers who were upset about the criticism they faced to hide behind the few actual cases of attacks on free speech while pretending they were one and the same. Harper’s asked me to write (a very short) response to the letter, and this was what I churned out at the time.
After days of debate involving every conceivable perspective on the open letter—on social media, on blogs, on podcasts, in other publications, and in private conversations—I have concluded that the letter’s concern that “the free exchange of information and ideas . . . is daily becoming more constricted” is unfounded and frankly confusing.
Clearly there is robust debate on a variety of subjects, including many that not long ago were considered to be outside the boundaries of public discourse. “The free exchange of information and ideas” is perhaps stronger and more widely accessible today than ever before.
Oddly, the letter ignores more distinct threats to free speech: libel lawsuits that block legitimate criticism, abuse of copyright laws to hamper commentary and culture, and legal threats that intimidate speakers into silence.
Instead, the letter alludes to examples of publications exercising their editorial discretion, and speakers facing social consequences driven by vigorous counter-speech, while omitting the details. If any of these examples deserves serious debate and consideration, the letter fails to foster or even enable it, and certainly does not engage in it.
I also, as a pointless thought exercise, tried to write an alternative letter for what the Harper’s Letter could have said if it actually wanted to be useful. I still think that was pretty good, highlighting how, thanks to the internet, the world had become actually more free and more open to debate, but with that there was “a changing societal consensus on what is, and what is not, appropriate” and at times, this possibly went too far, mainly in that when people tripped over certain lines, some were too quick to assume malice. As I wrote then:
At the same time, in our ongoing and righteous zeal to revisit areas that were previously overlooked and underexplored, there are times when people may go too far. There are times when the nuance and details and context are not initially clear, and some people — including ourselves — may overreact. That overreaction often leads to consequences which, when the full situation is explored and understood, seem unfair. We should seek to be aware that this may happen, and try to avoid it. Furthermore, we should recognize that as fallible as humans are, we will sometimes discover this too late, and should seek to rectify it when we do.
The details will always matter. We should not assume simplistic narratives all of the time, when often there are mixed motivations and complex factors and variables involved. There may be situations that appear similar on the surface, but upon deeper exploration turn out to be quite different. We should be willing to explore those details and to recognize that, sometimes, people we like will face consequences for their speech for an extended pattern of truly reprehensible behavior.
However, we should leave space open for people to learn and to grow. We should recognize that a single misdeed may be innocent and should treat it as such. We should see how people respond to such feedback. At the same time, we should also recognize that a pattern and practice of questionable and hurtful behavior may suggest a person who is deliberately, and in bad faith, seeking to game the system.
The biggest problem I had with the original letter was simply that many of the signatories were clearly using it, deliberately and in bad faith, to game the system to their own advantage. That is, they wished to stake out ridiculous (and, at times, harmful) positions and not be challenged or criticized for those positions. In many ways, the Harper’s Letter itself was way more censorial than anything it claimed to criticize. “How dare you criticize my speech with your speech!” is essentially what it boiled down to for many signers. Free speech for me, but not for thee.
This wasn’t true of all signers, some of whom had legitimate grievances. But the list of signers was full of faux speech martyrs who were effectively standing on the shoulders of the very few people legitimately concerned with these issues, screaming “look how canceled I am!”
In the years since, little has caused me to change my opinion of the letter and its signers. A couple of years ago, I called out some of the signatories for cosplaying as free speech martyrs, and that seems to still be true.
So you might think that now that the attacks on free speech have moved even beyond the ones I had raised at the time of the Harper’s Letter (censorial defamation lawsuits, abuse of intellectual property law) and certainly beyond the perceived threats the signers crowed about (“cancel culture”) that they might speak up a bit? At least a little?
But, nope.
David Klion over at The Nation notes that the vast majority of the signers of the Harper’s Letter have stayed entirely silent regarding pretty much everything that’s going on. He points to a piece from In These Times from last month which even created a spreadsheet looking at all the signatories. It turns out that when actual attacks on free speech happen, many of them go silent:
… high-profile “free speech” advocates such as Bari Weiss, Jonathan Haidt, David Brooks, David Frum, John McWhorter, and Malcolm Gladwell have either remained silent or championed the arrests. A review of the signatories of the now-infamous 2020 Harper’s Letter shows that of those who could issue statements (those who are still alive and not retired from public life), only 24 percent who put their name on the letter defending “Open Debate” have come out in opposition to Trump’s war on campus free speech. Some, like Harvard’s Steven Pinker, have aggressively spoken out about Trump’s withdrawing of funding from higher education, but have been notably quiet on the kidnapping of international students for the supposed crime of political speech.
If you find this shocking, I have an exciting, if slightly scratched, bridge in Brooklyn to sell you. The letter was never about protecting free speech — it was about insulating certain people from criticism. “Free speech” was just the sneaky little facade they put on it to make their argument look respectable.
This weekend, we saw yet another absolutely perfect example of this kind of free speech hypocrisy in action. Many of the signatories to the Harper’s letter were also big fans of the unaccredited, hilariously pretentious “University of Austin,” which got a lot of attention for claiming that it would be a university that supported “free speech” (in the misleading sense of the Harper’s Letter), “academic freedom,” and “heterodox” thinking. Really, the only qualifications for being associated with the University of Austin seemed to be that you had to have been criticized for taking a stupid position on something. A university run by the perpetually aggrieved doesn’t seem all that interesting, but it’s a home for some folks.
Bari Weiss both signed the Harper’s letter and helped to create UATX and remains a trustee of the organization. Jonathan Haidt signed the letter and is on the advisory board. Coleman Hughes signed the letter and is listed as a visiting professor at UATX. There are others as well. The Venn diagram of Harper’s Letter signatories and UATX affiliates isn’t quite a circle, but you might need a microscope to find the differences.
Again, as with the Harper’s Letter, it was obvious from the beginning that the people behind the University of Austin never actually believed in actual free speech. They just wanted a “university” (very much in sarcasm quotes) where their beliefs wouldn’t be regularly challenged and mocked as unserious.
This weekend, there was a hilarious piece in Quillette, which is basically the far-too-serious publication of the perpetually silly faux speech martyr, in which Ellie Avishai wrote about how she was drummed out of the University of Austin for posting a very bland LinkedIn post that quoted Yale Psychologist Michael Strambler’s article suggesting that both sides on the debate over DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) were going too far.
Whether you feel that’s a reasonable argument or not, it’s obviously trying to create some middle ground. And for that, Avishai — who has apparently been whining about Harvard (where she received her doctorate) being too woke because they… asked students to “reflect” on how to be more inclusive (the horror) — was told her services were no longer needed at the University of Austin:
My colleague told me that we needed to talk about a social-media post of mine that “had become a big problem.” I rarely post anything online, so I was confused about what he meant. Apparently, it had something to do with DEI, and had angered a major funder. “We’re trying to slow things down,” my colleague told me. I got the impression that he was upset about the message he was delivering.
[….]
By 5pm on 3 March—the same day I first heard that my LinkedIn post was a “problem”—my team of five and I were all on our way to being pushed out of UATX. I got the news from a junior dean whom I barely knew. He told me bluntly, “the trustees and the management have decided that we’d like to wind up Mill, and I’m calling to let you know that we’re letting you go.”
So much for “academic freedom,” huh? Who could have possibly predicted that the Free Speech University would cancel someone for expressing a moderate opinion? I mean, besides literally everyone?
The University’s response was pretty much exactly what you would expect: Why would we let someone say something nice about DEI when DEI is bad?
When a Quillette editor contacted UATX for comment in regard to the events and issues discussed in this article, we received the following response: UATX is unapologetically opposed to DEI. We believe these programs institutionalize ideological orthodoxy, lower academic standards, and promote a view of human identity that undermines individual dignity. That position is central to our mission.
Of course, that’s exactly what they whined about at other universities, screaming their silly little heads off about how it was against the “pursuit of knowledge” and “academic freedom” for students and faculty to dare suggest that some topics were beyond the pale.
But, apparently, the only subject that is beyond the pale is: DEI.
And, like, you can take that position (as silly and backwards as it is), but it’s way worse than anything any university has done to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in the first place.
It was never about free speech, academic freedom, or heterodoxy. It’s about being free to say whatever offensive thing you want and never, ever having to face criticism for it. It’s “heterodox” in the same way North Korea is a “People’s Democratic Republic.” It is, in many ways, way more censorial, more against academic freedom, and more rigidly orthodox than anything any actual university is doing.
We’ve pointed out for a while now how many of the people who described themselves as “free speech warriors” over the last decade were not just cosplaying, but were actually using the language of free speech to justify the suppression of speech. This is just one more example to throw on the pile.
Filed Under: cancel culture, censorship, dei, free speech, harper's letter, heterodoxy, hypocrisy
Companies: university of austin
I know it’s no surprise that the modern MAGA world is incredibly hypocritical. They speak of free speech while making every effort to suppress speech they dislike. But the latest example of this hypocrisy is glaring. Those who screamed to high heaven about debunked claims of the Biden admin “censoring” social media are noticeably silent about incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr’s recent statements, including direct threats of retaliation against Disney.
For much of the past four years, a narrative has been pushed by a crew of MAGA folks (but also those who haven’t paid close attention) that the White House colluded with social media to censor certain voices. The glaring problem with this narrative is that it was never actually true. Even the very MAGA-friendly Supreme Court called this out last year in its Murthy ruling, noting that the plaintiffs certainly made a bunch of wild claims about censorship efforts by the administration, but couldn’t actually show any proof to back them up.
At best, the Supreme Court noted, the plaintiffs could only rely on a “speculative chain of possibilities” that didn’t seem to have much connection to reality. The content moderation decisions made by social media companies appeared to be wholly independent of any communications from the government. This is unsurprising as there was no evidence of any coercive behavior by the government. There were no threats of action if the government was unhappy.
And yet, we still hear self-proclaimed free speech warriors like Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger insisting that this was a giant scandal. A group of the “Twitter Files” journalists filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court claiming that the government’s efforts were “an existential threat to free speech.”
Except, it wasn’t. For a legitimate free speech threat, there must be evidence of coercive government action. The standard, as first established in the Bantam Books case in the 1960s, is that the government has to be using some sort of threats or coercive power in response to speech. The Supreme Court did not find that with the Biden administration, and it knows the standard deeply. In fact, the same day it heard the case about the Biden administration, it heard a different case about a NY official threatening insurance companies if they worked with the NRA. And in that case, the same Supreme Court that found nothing unconstitutional in Murthy, said that Vullo’s actions violated the First Amendment.
Given all that, it strikes me as notable that we’ve heard nary a peep from the famed free speech warriors concerning the letter incoming FCC chair Brendan Carr sent to Disney boss Robert Iger, pretty clearly stating he would take action against the company if ABC didn’t cut favorable deals with local TV stations (such as those run by Sinclair) and avoid content that “contributed to the erosion in public trust.”
Carr’s letter contains several concerning elements that suggest government overreach and coercion. First, he cites ABC’s settlement of a defamation lawsuit with Trump as evidence they have “contributed to the erosion in public trust.” This implies government disapproval of ABC’s editorial choices. Second, he notes the FCC’s “interest in and authority” to ensure local stations maintain “economic and operational independence,” and warns the FCC will be “compelled to act” if ABC jeopardizes those objectives in affiliate agreement negotiations. The message is clear — make deals favorable to local stations like Sinclair or face regulatory consequences.
Compare this to the Murthy case, where the Supreme Court found no evidence of government threats or coercion influencing social media content moderation policies. Carr, on the other hand, is pretty clearly using threats of regulatory action to influence a media company’s business dealings and editorial stance.
Unlike the more general claims of legislation that were brought up in the Murthy case, but where there was no clear through line between the communication and the supposed threat, here it’s all together in a single letter.
Yet somehow, those who insisted that the Murthy case represented an “existential threat to free speech” haven’t seemed to have had any issue at all with Carr issuing what seem like much more direct threats.
Over at MSNBC, I’ve written an opinion piece diving into this level of hypocrisy.
Many of those same Twitter Files free speech warriors are fans of incoming Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Brendan Carr, whom President-elect Donald Trump himself has called a “warrior for free speech.” Carr has issued a number of letters recently that could reasonably be described as jawboning. First, he addressed the CEOs of Alphabet, Meta, Apple and Microsoft, accusing their companies of participating in a “censorship cartel.” (And, yes, Carr cited the Twitter Files as evidence.)
More recently, Carr sent a letter to Disney CEO Robert Iger citing the fact that Americans have low levels of trust in today’s mass media, while noting that “Americans largely hold positive views of their local media outlets.” He highlights Disney’s controversial recent decision to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump as evidence that ABC has “contributed to this erosion in public trust.” He further writes that since ABC is “renegotiating the terms of many of its affiliate agreements” and those agreements include broadcasting ABC’s national programs, he is watching closely to see how ABC conducts itself. He adds that the “approach ABC is apparently taking in these negotiations concerns me.”
More importantly, though, is that unlike literally anything that came out in the Murthy case or the Twitter Files, here Carr threatens direct action from an agency over which he will soon have control:
Furthermore, as he notes, “the FCC clearly has an interest in and the authority … to ensure that local broadcast TV stations retain the economic and operational independence necessary to meet their public interest obligations.” And he warns that if something is “jeopardizing … those objectives, then the FCC will be compelled to act.”
In November, Carr posted: “Broadcast licenses are not sacred cows. These media companies are required by law to operate in the public interest. If they don’t, they are going to be held accountable, as the Communications Act requires.”
Put all that together and it seems like a way more direct threat and an attempt at coercing speech than anything that came out in the Twitter Files.
And yet… silence from the free speech crew.
The hypocrisy is glaring. Those who cried foul over speculative “jawboning” by the Biden administration are silent as Carr issues warnings about how he will use FCC power to influence media company dealings and content. It exposes their selective and politically-motivated outrage.
Filed Under: 1st amendment, brendan carr, coercion, free speech, hypocrisy, jawboning, retransmission, twitter files
Companies: abc, disney, sinclair
When Elon Musk took over Twitter, one of his primary stated goals was to “bring back free speech” to the platform. He was particularly critical of how Twitter had briefly blocked links to a New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020. But now, the self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” is doing the very thing he criticized: banning links and suspending journalists.
We’ve discussed at great length how almost everyone misremembers and misunderstands the whole “Twitter suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
But the key factors are that Twitter chose to block the sharing of that link for 24 hours, claiming it violated its “hacked materials” policy. Many, many people (including us) called this out as bullshit, and Twitter backed down the very next day and admitted that was a mistake and said it was clarifying the policy to not include news reporting. The NY Post account wasn’t allowed to post for a couple of weeks, because it was told it had to delete the offending tweet first.
Elon has expressed his anger at Twitter for doing this a few times. When he took over the company, one of the first things he did was to give Matt Taibbi access to internal communications about that (which showed… not much of interest beyond standard discussions within the company about how to handle potentially sensitive materials). He was very excited to reveal this:
He has also suggested that those involved deserved prison time:
(FWIW, it’s absolutely false that Twitter’s actions had any impact on the election. The Federal Election Commission investigated it and found nothing. Multiple reports show that the story gained more traction after Twitter blocked links to it. The block only lasted 24 hours, and no other site blocked links. Twitter didn’t block any of the links to any other story about the laptop).
Either way, last year we called out Elon’s hypocrisy when he did the same damn thing regarding the JD Vance hacked dossier. And yet, that story disappeared after a few days, even though it was arguably worse. That also involved secretive materials that recipients weren’t supposed to have related to a Presidential campaign. And in that case, Elon had no problem blocking links and suspending the reporter.
The only real difference was that it was done under the “doxing” policy rather than under the “hacked materials” policy. Elon has a history of stretching the definition of the “doxing” policy, and ignoring it when the doxing happens to people he dislikes.
And now it’s happened again.
For a while now, a bunch of people have insisted that a huge Elon stan on ExTwitter, named Adrian Dittman, was really an Elon-alt account. The main “clue” was that Dittman sounds eerily similar to Musk. They even did a Spaces together, though many people argued that it was just Musk talking to himself.
Dittman and Musk have occasionally joked about it, but whenever anyone tried to call them out directly on it, they tended to just play coy.
Over the weekend, the Spectator published a pretty compelling argument, saying that Dittman really is not Elon, and instead is just a German dude who lives in Fiji who is a huge Elon fan who just coincidentally sounds an awful lot like Elon.
Elon even responded to a tweet about the piece (jokingly) claiming to reveal that he really is Dittman. Except, you may notice something odd here:
Yeah, the tweet Elon is responding to is not available, saying it “violated the X Rules.” The company has banned all links to the Spectator article and suspended the author, Jacqueline Sweet, for 30 days, claiming that the article violated its doxing policy.
Yup, just like the NY Post with the Hunter Biden laptop story, where Twitter told them they had to first delete the offending tweet, the new ExTwitter also says the offending tweet must be deleted to start the countdown.
And, just as with the NY Post story, anyone trying to share the link is blocked from doing so:
In no world does this violate any actual “doxxing” policy. Dittman was posting under his own name. The reporting was just confirming that Dittman is who he said he was. How is that doxxing? Revealing that someone is who they claim to be is not doxxing by any reasonable definition. It didn’t reveal his location beyond “Fiji,” a country with about a million inhabitants.
But, either way, this is again Elon doing exactly the same thing that he loudly proclaimed was so horrible before, a supposedly egregious suppression of free speech that apparently required a takeover of Twitter and a public airing of the internal discussions that resulted in that decision.
Of course, as with the JD Vance story, these actions will quickly be forgotten, while we’ll undoubtedly keep hearing the misleading (or downright false) claim that Twitter illegally suppressed the story of the Hunter Biden laptop.
Yes, Elon is free to manage ExTwitter however he wants since it’s his property. But it would be nice if some people (including Elon!) could at least have the intellectual honesty to admit (1) that he’s doing the same damn thing that he got upset at Twitter for doing and (2) that this completely undermines his claims about why he had to take over the site.
Filed Under: adrian dittman, content moderation, doxing, doxxing, elon musk, hunter biden laptop, hypocrisy, news reporting
Companies: spectator, twitter, x
For years, a vocal group of self-described “contrarian” Substackified pundits warned about a supposed “censorship industrial complex” involving collusion between the White House and social media companies to set content moderation policies. There was just one problem: it wasn’t even close to true.
Now, with Elon Musk owning ExTwitter and Donald Trump heading back to the White House, we have a situation that actually matches what those contrarian chroniclers claimed to fear: powerful tech moguls with direct ties to the administration in a position to influence online speech. Suddenly, the grave concerns about “creeping authoritarianism” have evaporated. The double standard couldn’t be more blatant.
So, I figured it was worth calling out the hypocrisy, and MSNBC kindly gave me the space to do so:
The so-called Twitter Files, hyped by Elon Musk and handpicked journalists, were touted as smoking-gun proof of a vast conspiracy between social media and the government to violate the First Amendment. Testifying before Congress, these reporters called it a “grave threat” and evidence of “creeping authoritarianism.”
Flash forward to today. Donald Trump is heading back to the White House. And Musk, owner of the social media company X (formerly Twitter), is a top donor, surrogate and soon-to-be government “efficiency” overseer. Musk has openly used his platform to boost Trump, attack his opponents and shape the political narrative. The collusion between government and Big Tech is no longer a conspiracy theory — it’s out in the open.
Yet suddenly, all those grave concerns about the threat to democracy have evaporated. Most of the same voices who warned of shocking government overreach in the pre-Musk Twitter era are either silent about this turn of events or they’re in wild celebration of the Trump-Musk alliance. This reveals the issue wasn’t a matter of principle; it was a matter of party.
The limited space in the MSNBC piece prevented me from delving into the additional hypocrisy around how swiftly Elon Musk banned a reporter and links related to the leaked JD Vance dossier. This action was an even more extreme version of what GOP pundits have baselessly claimed Twitter did with the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story.
Yet, even as the completely exaggerated claims about what happened with Twitter and the Hunter laptop are still regularly brought up by the MAGA faithful, the story about Elon and the Vance dossier disappeared after, what, two days?
But, really, the piece takes aim at the Elon/Trump enablers. The Sophist Substackerati who position themselves as brave truth tellers, standing up to government overreach: the Matt Taibbis, Michael Shellenbergers, and Bari Weisses of the world, who all seem to have forgotten what they were saying not too long ago about the hallucinated story of coziness between the White House and social media.
Taibbi called it “a grave threat to people of all political persuasions.” Shellenberger called it “the shocking and disturbing emergence of State-sponsored censorship.” A reporter from The Free Press — a publication created by Bari Weiss (another Twitter Files reporter) — Rupa Subramanya, testified in one of these hearings warning that the American government was heading down a dangerous path of censorship, calling government connections to social media “creeping authoritarianism.”
But, oh, how things have changed.
Elon Musk still owns X. Donald Trump still owns Truth Social. These are two social media networks that can drive the news and conversations about important events in the world.
Unlike before, when there was conjecture (without evidence) of grand conspiracies and connections between the White House and important social media companies, now it’s completely explicit and out in the open.
Yet, all talk of the “grave threats” and “shocking and disturbing” connections between the White House and social media have disappeared entirely. Shellenberger has called the new administration “cathartic.” Taibbi has posted numerous articles celebrating the results of the election. The Free Press has a bunch of articles praising the new Trump administration and celebrating how the election was “a win for a new generation of builders like Elon Musk.”
The “Twitter Files” pundits built their brands on a false narrative of anti-establishment rebellion against the “elite” trying to control social media. But when faced with the real thing, they’re too busy high-fiving each other to care. Their “grave concerns” about government collusion with Big Tech have suddenly evaporated now that the administration and the tech mogul are their ideological allies.
Or, as I note:
Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the creeping.
There’s a lot more in the piece, but I want to point out why it’s so important to call out this hypocrisy. I know that there are a bunch of cynical “too savvy for school” folks who always respond to things like this by saying “what, it surprises you that they were full of shit?”
No, it doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve been calling out this kind of nonsense for years. But people who don’t follow this stuff closely don’t know this. There are so many times where I hear something these nonsense peddlers pushed over and over again pop up in the mainstream media or among random people who just assume what they’re saying is accurate.
Calling out the hypocrisy isn’t to impact those in the Intellectual Derp Web. They have their captured audiences and have made it clear they don’t give a shit. But it’s important to remind everyone else what the grift is here. The cluelessness, the gaslighting, and the utter nonsense they spent years spreading for clout. Some of us recognize it for what it was.
We need to keep telling people and reminding people so that everyone else knows it’s bullshit too.
Filed Under: bari weiss, censorship industrial complex, contrarians, donald trump, elon musk, hypocrisy, matt taibbi, michael shellenberger, nonsense peddlers
Companies: truth social, twitter, x
Elon Musk’s recent claims that corporate boycotts of social media platforms are criminal reek of hypocrisy, given his own eagerness to join the #DeleteFacebook boycott just a few years ago.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Musk publicly supported the #DeleteFacebook campaign, even going so far as to remove the official SpaceX and Tesla pages from the platform. Yet now, as the owner of ExTwitter, he’s singing a very different tune — suing advertisers who choose to boycott his platform over content moderation concerns.
The blatant double standard is notable, if not surprising. Musk was happy to wield the power of the boycott when it suited his interests and let him mock his rival, Mark Zuckerberg. But now he condemns the tactic as criminal when turned against him. This “rules for thee, but not for me” attitude deserves to be called out even if he and his supporters will happily ignore the rank hypocrisy.
Earlier this year, Elon sued GARM — the “Global Alliance for Responsible Media” — a tiny non-profit that sought to advise brands on how to advertise safely on social media in a manner that (1) wouldn’t tarnish their own brands, and (2) was generally better for the world. GARM had no power and didn’t demand or order any company to do anything. It just worked with advertisers to try to establish some basic standards and to advocate that social media companies try to live up to those basic standards in how they handled moderation.
As we noted, just weeks before Elon sued GARM, ExTwitter had “excitedly” rejoined GARM, knowing that many advertisers trusted its opinion on determining where they should focus their ad spend.
But it seems clear that Elon felt differently. After a very misleading report was put out by Jim Jordan, Elon declared war on GARM and sued a bunch of advertisers. In response, GARM was shut down.
Musk and his friends are now going around saying that participating in an organized boycott of social media is criminal. Right around the time he sued, Musk suggested such a boycott might just be “RICO”:
And, as we just discussed, here’s Musk-backer and friend, Marc Andreessen, claiming that such boycotts are criminal.
However, my cohost on Ctrl-Alt-Speech called out in last episode that Elon Musk himself was quite happy to support a similar boycott not all that long ago.
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which Facebook data was used to try to influence voters to vote for Donald Trump (yes, this is ironic, given what Elon did with ExTwitter), some activists kicked off a boycott campaign called #DeleteFacebook.
Elon Musk showed some interest in the campaign by joking to someone “What’s Facebook?” in response to a (now deleted) tweet about the campaign. Some users then challenged him to join the #DeleteFacebook campaign by removing the SpaceX and Tesla accounts from Facebook, which he did.
As far as I can tell, to this day, there are no official, verified Tesla or SpaceX pages on Facebook.
Years later, after he had taken over Twitter, Elon even mocked Facebook for “caving” to the very boycott that he participated in himself.
Musk’s brazen hypocrisy on boycotts is just the latest example of his free speech double standard. He delights in wielding his immense power and influence to mock, criticize and yes, boycott those he disagrees with. But the moment anyone turns those same tactics against him, he cries foul and literally makes a federal case out of it.
This kind of self-serving double standard is corrosive to public discourse and the principles of free speech that Musk claims to hold so dear. While he and his supporters will almost certainly choose to ignore the stench of hypocrisy, the rest of us shouldn’t. Musk’s boycott hypocrisy deserves to be dragged out into the light again and again for everyone else to recognize.
Filed Under: boycotts, delete facebook, elon musk, hypocrisy
Companies: facebook, garm, meta, twitter, x
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