[Disclaimer: this post is the kind I would ordinarily put on my Substack because that is where free thought lives – so this is your trigger warning. My thoughts do not reflect the thoughts of the staff here at AwardsDaily.]
Twitter might be a very small pond that contains too many big fish who compete for space, but its influence can’t be denied. It isn’t that everyone uses Twitter. At its peak in 2013, 500 million tweets per day flew through its platform. It reached that number again in 2020, as so many people were stuck inside due to COVID. Now, it averages roughly 300 million tweets per day, which seems like a lot. Twitter is dominated, however, by a small but loud cadre of users, most of them with the high status blue-check. It’s said that roughly 15% of the users generate 80% of the content. They are mostly Democrats, said this study. At least that was where things stood back in 2019.
The country is polarized at the moment, but that polarization is made much worse by the relationship between Twitter, media, and government, thanks to both Obama’s and Trump’s use of the platform to build their coalitions. Everything is political, and everything is a contest to see who will win in a given day. Elon Musk buying Twitter feels like a loss for the Left, and they’re pulling out everything they have to question or block the sale.
On Twitter, there isn’t much room for nuance or a middle ground because the most inflammatory and high drama tweets tend to land at the top of everyone’s feed. It’s an easy way to drive fear and hysteria. By then, it seems really super-important because so many of the high-profile alpha users are rendering judgment. You think wow, this must really be a big deal. The media then covers what Twitter is doing and to them, Musk’s buyout is a bad thing.
Ask the general public, however, and they’re mostly on board. Why would there be such a disconnect between Twitter, the media and the public? Well, because that is how the pendulum is swinging right now. The public is turning away from the areas that are micromanaged by the Left, which can be described now as an alliance between the Democratic Party, social media, Big Tech overall, most major institutions of power, education, science, and entertainment. They represent the de facto ruling class, and they are becoming, it would appear more and more disconnected from the everyday reality of most Americans.
This isn’t an easy conversation to have with people. I find when I talk to people on the Left I have to be very careful about what I say, even to those I am closest to. It is a movement that believes in being good, as opposed to bad, and if you speak to the Right, or see them as human beings — instead of, you know, human garbage — that makes you bad too. The Left are always on the lookout for signs that you might be one of “them.”
I am not really on the Left or the Right at the moment. Issues-wise, I’m mostly still left-leaning, but like Elon Musk, I feel where the Left has gone is a bridge too far for me. It has become, I think, a political movement captured by a fundamentalist religion. That means, where art or science or history or music or comedy is concerned, it has to end at the same point every time. It’s like Christian Rock, or “skit night” at the Scientology Center. You know the rules because you live them. You know the ideology because either you believe it or you have been forced to believe it.
All of that runs counter to the whole point of any of it. The Left used to be the side that pulled away from culture in the grips of religion. That explains modern art, among other things. It also explains the counter-culture revolution of the 1960s, when filmmakers, storytellers, journalists and everyone else began to break away from the religious dogma of Christianity regulating content. Now, we have come all the way to other end of the spectrum, dogma is back. And it’s suffocating the creative spirit and the necessary pursuit of hard truths.
This isn’t the FREE SPEECH as granted to every American under the Constitution, this is the concept of a country that values having lots of different people with different ideas having the freedom to explore those ideas. That is what sets America apart from every other country: that we hold this truth to be self-evident – we have a right to what we think and believe.
Why is Musk buying Twitter good for the Oscars and film overall? Because his presence alone helps to loosen the grip the blue-checks and Twitter have in policing thought and speech in this country. It has been catastrophic for the film industry, especially in the area of film awards. Everyone is afraid of saying the wrong thing, making the wrong casting choice, writing the wrong review — all because one person throwing a fit on Twitter leads to many people throwing a fit and eventually some administrative lackey in the studio executive suites gets involved to “save” the image of the company.
How did we get here? Various events drove us to this point. To simplify it greatly, the left of this country built a kind of utopia for itself that reached its peak under the Obama presidency. We were good people doing good things. We valued our goodness above all else, which is how we parented, how we awarded films, how we standards for what journalists wanted to be (Rachel Maddow as the shining example of this). Someone like Jon Stewart was kind of controversial back then because he sometimes flirted with being “bad,” meaning he occasionally saw the opposing viewpoint.
Around 2012, during Obama’s re-election, the Tea Party began to rise and that was interpreted by the Left as being a racist movement. They had 100% certainty about this. We all believed that half of this country was mad that a Black man had rose to such a powerful position. That really put the focus on race in Obama’s second term where it hadn’t really been there before. The whole country had initially seemed really happy about Obama’s win, even those on the Right.
But as the Tea Party rose, the right side of the aisle in Congress was overtaken by the Freedom Caucus, and people like Sarah Palin and others became the faces of the movement, that kicked into gear closer analysis on the Left about the topics of race and gender. This was the point when the Obama presidency, and the entire movement of the Democrats and the Left shifted more towards what many observers like to call “identity politics.”
Critical Race Theory began spreading on college campuses, and public high schools like my daughter’s. I was writing about it here on this site, as readers will remember. This was roughly 2013, 2014. We were already passionately invested in pushing marginalized people to the forefront.
Trump’s win was the trigger that ignited a massive culture fuse that meant the Left saw everyone who voted for him as a racist. We saw some of the largest protests in American history under Trump’s reign and they were mostly focused on race and rape, or sex crimes. We had the Me Too movement, the Time’s Up movement, and then the Black Lives Matter movement. Each of these started out as consequential reckonings, but they also kind of devolved into paranoia and suspicion that everyone was potentially a rapist or a racist. But there was something else happening.
Evergreen College provides, still, the best harbinger for what kind of forces were about to overtake the Left, and the Democratic Party, and most institutions of power in this country.
To better understand how we got to Evergreen, you have to also understand the generation that has come of age and now holds sway over the entire Left. They were activists who were building their own utopian world online, otherwise known as Tumblr circa 2014. These were kids raised by helicopter parents like me who over-protected them, which gave them only their online spaces for self-discovery. This generation sort of fractured into social justice warriors ™ or trolls who headed to 4-chan. You can also read about how a blog on Tumblr called “Yur Fave is Problematic” kickstarted so much of what we think of as “cancel culture” today:
Your Fave Is Problematic had around 50,000 followers at its peak, in 2014, when I was a high school senior, but its influence was outsized. I got in a feud with a prominent young adult fiction author over his inclusion. One actor submitted himself, perhaps as a dare (or a plea) to dig up his worst. “Problematic fave” became a well-worn meme; even after I stopped posting, my blog was cited in books, articles, podcasts and think pieces. Through it all, my identity stayed private.
The blog started, as so many anonymous online projects do, as vengeful public shaming masquerading as social criticism. I was fine-tuning my moral compass and coming into my own as a feminist. So when I noticed classmates making sexist jokes on Facebook, including some about me, I started taking screenshots to post on a Tumblr called Calling Out Sexists. My policy was that I would take down a post only if its author publicly apologized.
The Evergreen story mirrors exactly what has happened to this country since 2020. That generation grew up, joined the workforce and led much of the uprisings, alongside Black Lives Matter, all through that summer. The press almost completely ignored what was actually going on because they were focused on the story of “systemic racism,” as it overtook the narrative briefly before it returned to fear of COVID. But you lived through it and you remember. I don’t have to tell you how things have changed. You know how they’ve changed.
Many of the white men who have been designated as being on the bottom of the newly defined power pyramid have become docile, with the only passion they ever express in any direction is anger at Trump. They can’t attack the Left, even though the Left is what is driving more people towards the right, and what is inciting an even more extreme reaction to their causes.
That they were not only chasing around Bret Weinstein as a racist, but also the school’s president as a “white supremacist” reflects the same forces that have overtaken Film Twitter and much of Hollywood. Those who run corporations and industries that rely on Gen-Z believe that they have to follow this doctrine in order to be accepted by this new generation. The thing is, they’re kind of wrong. While Gen-Z and Democrats are decent people who want change and don’t want marginalized people to be left behind, the most extreme voices have come to dominate all of it.
This is why an entire industry has sprung up of outsider voices, people who write on Substack (like me), or make videos on YouTube because the late-night comedians’ Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Trevor Noah, and SNL are either true believers or counted among those who are afraid to step out of line and meet the wrath of Twitter. Joe Rogan gained two million listeners after the massive machine of Twitter and media tried to have him canceled in Evergreen fashion.
But the problem with alternative information being available, people will listen to it. When they do, they will discover oh wow, I’m not crazy. This really is happening. Slowly, bit by bit, people are being red-pilled. That isn’t because they consider themselves Republican. It’s because they don’t want to belong to the fundamentalist religion of Tumblr Circa 2014 or Evergreen College.
Blue-check Twitter looked at that graphic Musk posted and it sucked up an entire news cycle.
This story by Parker Malloy really defines “the take” on Twitter now.
That Parker Malloy thinks Musk is the one out of touch is exemplary of why the Democrats, Hollywood, and the Left overall are the ones who are truly out of touch.
The market, however, will destroy it anyway. Democrats are going to be blown out of government in November and very likely 2024. The main reason being, the people are not into any of this AT ALL. It serves a very small but loud minority on Twitter. Not even Gen-Z is down with it.
Remember the lesson of Evergreen. They sought to purge Bret Weinstein for dissenting against their desire to have all white people leave campus. To Weinstein, that was a violation of free speech. He believed you had the right to absent yourself but not to absent other groups from a shared space.
What has happened to the modern-day Left is not that different from the Chinese Cultural Revolution or the Russian Revolution. They created a climate of fear, punished dissent and demanded ideological compliance. Up to now, we did not have government involvement. Now we do with Biden’s 1984-like “Ministry of Truth,” called the “Disinformation Governance Board.”
They will say it’s to combat Russian disinformation but really it’s the government trying to rule over Musk. Remember, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube banned the sitting President of the United States. They showed they were more powerful. Musk steps in and buys Twitter, then the government forces that probably ordered social media to ban Trump, now put in place an agency to police Twitter under Musk, showing that they are still more powerful.
I’m not saying the Right would not do the same thing — in fact, they did throughout the McCarthy era. The Hays Code was driven by the Christian Right. Had Twitter banned Trump and the populist Right had the power to put in place some kind of law that would prevent that from happening they would surely have done it.
As expected, the blue-checks blindly support this action, as does the media class that is in complete alignment with them. They are gearing themselves up to use “disinformation” and “misinformation” as their main cudgel to go after Musk. After all, he was just on Twitter the other day talking about anti-depressants, and to the Left you can’t do that because they think it means people will follow what he says and do exactly what he says. They are mirroring their obedience to their directives; however, without realizing it, people support Musk not to follow what he tells them to do, but for the exact opposite reason — because they want the freedom to think for themselves.
So much of what we’re living through feels like George Orwell’s 1984.
Musk noticed how powerful Twitter has become, essentially Big Brother, in being the arena for public shaming that intimidates and silences dissenting voices. He is probably the only person on the planet, or certainly only one of them, who has the status and the power to challenge the dominant forces of Twitter+media+government. As you can imagine, they are not taking it well.
Regardless, they’re pulling out the stops to shame and weaken Musk because to them he is their biggest threat: a powerful, high-status person who believes in original thought.
I’m not against government regulation of speech on Twitter. I think there should be laws that protect social media under the 1st Amendment but that the Constitution should be amended to adjust to what social media has become, how it toys with our impulse control, allows us to dehumanize one another, and addicts us to the platform. However, I don’t trust the people in power to do that unless it truly is bi-partisan. There have been too many mistakes, too much of a double standard, and too much blatant hypocrisy. If you’re going to do it, it has to come from a place of truth not hysteria.
So really, what you see I’m getting at here is that it isn’t really fear of Musk that you’re watching go down, as it wasn’t fear of Joe Rogan at Spotify or Dave Chappelle at Netflix. It’s fear of losing control to tell everyone what to think. There is a reason those guys are popular. There is a reason people stopped watching Oscar movies. There is a reason the ratings are declining. Dogma-driven art is BORING. Dogma-driven comedy is USELESS. Dogma-driven science is not science. These institutions have all been captured by religious dogma and none of it is compelling to anyone who isn’t a true believer. Sooner or later the backlash will force them to face facts.
There is more to discuss on why there is so much push back against Musk from the LGBTQ community, but I’m almost at 3,000 words so I’d better end it now. I wrote more about that over at my Substack, which you can read here.
Essentially, there is a reason why so many people are responding to Elon Musk as a counter to the oppressive forces against free speech. You can’t really believe speech is violence and speech is harm and also believe in free speech. They exist in opposition to each other.
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