“Musk should be nervous.” These menacing words are from an August 25 tweet from Alexander Vindman. Vindman, of course, is one of the twin Ukrainian-American brothers who, while working at the White House in 2019, opposed President Donald Trump (the other twin, Eugene, is now running for Congress as a Democrat in Virginia).
Reacting to Vindman’s words, Darren Beattie, also a former Trump White House official, tweeted, “And there it is… mask off.”
So, what, exactly, is Elon Musk supposed to be nervous about? Vindman’s full tweet concerned Pavel Durov, CEO of the messaging app Telegram, who was arrested in France on August 25:
While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter. There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be nervous.
While Durov holds French citizenship, is arrested for violating French law, this has broader implications for other social media, including Twitter. There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability. Musk should be… https://t.co/GyPMquKtKV
— Alexander S. Vindman (@AVindman) August 25, 2024
Vindman’s meaning seems clear: If Durov can be arrested for his management of Telegram, perhaps Musk can be arrested or severely sanctioned for his management of X.
Vindman did, indeed, take the mask off, celebrating “growing intolerance for platforming disinfo.” As every Breitbart News reader knows, the left has aggressively attacked “disinformation” — even if its capacious definition of the “d”-word includes so much of what the right thinks.
Who can forget when Hunter Biden’s all-too-real laptop was declared “disinformation?” And when those who reported on it — including Emma-Jo Morris, now at Breitbart News — were de-platformed? The Anti-Disinformation Industrial Complex is a multi-billion dollar enterprise funded by foundations and worldwide deep states.
Vindman, regularly attacking Trump, thrives within this progressive-left domain. Having set up his own group, he is also a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. So, when he speaks, he gives voice to the Democrat Party-friendly Establishment. (Which many prefer to call the Regime.)
National Security Council Ukraine expert Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman arrives to testify against President Donald Trump on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on November 19, 2019. (OLIVIER DOULIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
By any name, this Establishment, this Regime, this Empire is global. The left-leaning, opinion-leading Guardian has suggested, more than once, that Musk be cuffed. Indeed, given the United Kingdom’s crackdown on free speech, it might be wise for Musk to stay out of the U.K. (Which could mean, of course, that the famously contrarian and gutsy Musk simply shows up over there.)
In fact, Musk is under legal fire all over the world, having received threatening transmissions from several top officials of the European Union; he is also in a struggle with Brazil.
Moreover, Musk has jousted with the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA), which claims to represent 90 percent of all the advertising on the planet, some $900 billion a year. On August 6, Musk’s X filed a lawsuit against a unit of the WFA, the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), claiming restraint of trade, a legal term from antitrust law.
Then, something interesting happened: The WFA immediately erased GARM. That is at least something of an admission of wrongdoing, eh?
Elon Musk at the Cannes Lions International Festival Of Creativity 2024 on June 19, 2024, in Cannes, France. (Marc Piasecki/Getty Images)
Yet, now, the Empire has a new trouper in the person of Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. In 2022, Walz said on MSNBC, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” Whereupon legal pundit Eugene Volokh corrected him:
Walz was quite wrong in saying that . . . The Supreme Court has made clear that there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment . . . The First Amendment generally protects the views that the government would label “hateful” as much as it protects other views.
Further perspective comes from Brendan Carr, a sitting commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, appointed to that post in 2017 by President Trump. “Free speech is the counterweight,” Carr says, “It is democracy’s check on government control. That’s why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream. After all, there’s a straight line from the soap box to the ballot box. You retain freedom at both or neither.”
Musk himself had a wry-geek take: “Being a free speech advocate these days is increasingly feeling like a Kobayashi Maru problem.” Star Trek fans get the reference to a difficult puzzle solved by the young James T. Kirk when he was a cadet at Starfleet Academy in the twenty-third century.
Yet, in the present day, all social media platforms are tangled up in regulatory and legal issues — even if they are dealing with them in very different ways.
For instance, there is Meta, the former Facebook, which boasts a market capitalization of $1.3 trillion. That stupendous total puts it just behind the GDP of Indonesia and just ahead of Holland. Indeed, to hold that much wealth, Meta operates within 150 countries; no wonder it hired a former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom as its head of “global affairs.”
Without a doubt, the company has many affairs. On August 24, German influencer Naomi Seibt cited a CBS News report of sexual abuse on Meta platforms (not just Facebook, but Threads, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram), and asked her 191,000 followers, “Why don’t they arrest Mark Zuckerberg for enabling child predators?”
To which Musk answered, “Because he already caved into censorship pressure. Instagram has a massive child exploitation problem, but no arrest for Zuck, as he censors free speech and gives governments backdoor access to user data.”
So, there is one answer for Big Tech: Make a deal with Big Government. (Some might even call it collusion.)
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee at the Dirksen Senate Office Building on January 31, 2024 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
It seems that Durov — born in Russia, now holding joint citizenship in France and the United Arab Emirates — chose a different path; maybe that is why he is now accused in a French jail.
Durov’s company says it has “nothing to hide.” Yet, inevitably, a case spanning the continents will be complicated, even murky. Some say Durov is a free speech hero, others say he is a Russian asset (and there is even a minority report that holds he wanted to be arrested in France to be safe from Russian hitmen).
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on February 23, 2016. (Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
We can hope that French authorities allow for a transparent legal proceeding so that all the issues — is Telegram a hub of free speech, a conduit for criminals? — can be cleared up.
Because, obviously, these questions have importance for the U.S., including American citizen Musk and his X. Happily, here we have the First Amendment. Yet, even if we reject Walz-type censorship, we must be mindful of the metes and bounds of civilization itself. To cite a cliche, we can not yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater.
We might also recall the enduring wisdom of the Supreme Court’s unanimous opinion in the 1942 case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire:
There are certain well defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words — those which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
So, yes, good citizens respect each other’s rights. At the same time, the citizenry must be alert to those who trample those rights: Darth Walz and the Disinformation Police are at the gate. So, as we stand guard on the ramparts of freedom, we can hold dear words from Thomas Jefferson: “We are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”
Freedom. That is always the keyword. To protect freedom, if need be, legal political combat must be employed to defend the Constitution and our Republic because we know: The Empire is readying its next strike.