Elon Musk
April 17, 2023 — Elizabeth Stauffer
At a private Manhattan fundraiser in 2016, then-candidate Hillary Clinton famously described Donald Trump supporters as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” This was Clinton’s updated version of former President Barack Obama’s snide remark in 2008 about the people living in small-town Pennsylvania, whom he depicted as bitter folks who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy.” Liberals are fond of making these blanket statements about Republicans
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March 9, 2023 — John Hinderaker
Today the House’s Weaponization Committee held a hearing in which Democrats attacked Twitter and the “so-called journalists” who revealed the Twitter Files: “Twitter Files” reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger held firm Thursday against an onslaught of attacks from Democrats who referred to them as “so-called journalists” and demanded they give up their sources during a tense House subcommittee hearing. “The Republicans have brought in two of [Twitter CEO] Elon
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January 5, 2023 — Scott Johnson
I have followed the Twitter Files as posted by Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, Bari Weiss, and David Zweig in a series of Notes on the Twitter Files. Taibbi has now posted a set of capsule summaries of each of the 12 installments posted on Twitter so far at his TK News site on Substack. It is posted here in accessible form. Most of Taibbi’s posts at TK News are behind
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December 16, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Elon Musk has suspended the Twitter accounts of six Democratic Party operatives from CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc. They violated Twitter’s terms of service by linking to a site that tracks the location of Musk’s private jet. The rationale is strong: the whereabouts of the jet is not public information, but someone apparently has software that is nevertheless able to track it, and these operatives apparently
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December 16, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Twitter Files reveal the suppression of the New York Post’s reporting on Biden family corruption at the behest of the deep state authorities with whom Twitter was collaborating. The absurd letter by 51 former intelligence officials reported by Natasha Bertrand and published by Politico was a key piece of the puzzle (to the extent it was a puzzle). Holman Jenkins takes it up in his Wall Street Journal column
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December 15, 2022 — Scott Johnson
At her Free Press site Bari Weiss has posted background on the reporting behind the Twitter Files I have noted so far. She calls her backgrounder “Our reporting at Twitter.” (The URL suggests she might have called it “Why we went to Twitter.”) It answers certain of the questions I raised in my previous “Notes on the Twitter Files.” She writes (links omitted): [W]e—the journalist Matt Taibbi; investigative reporters connected
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December 13, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Liberals are aghast at Elon Musk’s movement to free Twitter: how can we get along without censorship? People might say bad things about Saint Fauci! But Americans are squarely in Musk’s corner. Rasmussen finds an extraordinary level of concern about censorship on social media sites. Almost everyone believes that political censorship is going on: The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 77% of Likely U.S. voters
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December 12, 2022 — Scott Johnson
New York Post columnist Miranda Devine reported the contents of the Hunter Biden laptop for the Post in advance of the 2020 presidential election only to see her work suppressed on Twitter and other social media platforms. With the revelations of the Twitter Files over the past week, she has a few thoughts about the deafening silence of her colleagues in the media. In this passage she takes up one
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December 12, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Steve Hayward has his thought of the day scheduled to go up this afternoon, so I will claim this either as yesterday’s thought of the day or as today’s early edition. My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022 Musk packs a couple of thoughts into that declaration, both of them worthy of recognition. He responded respectfully to one critic who took him up on his refusal
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December 3, 2022 — John Hinderaker
I was initially skeptical of Elon Musk. After all, he has never been, or claimed to be, a conservative, and he voted not only for Barack Obama but for Slow Joe Biden. But give the man credit: he is catching on fast. Thus his apt characterization of the utterly dishonest New York Times: That is because The New York Times has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying
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November 29, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Elon Musk seeks to recast Twitter as a free speech platform. He is an important player in the struggle to resist the impositions of the authorities and their supporters in social media. I am following Musk’s updates on Twitter. Perhaps most notably, Musk gives us a preview of coming attractions in the tweet below. Let it be. Buried in the Twitter Files is the saga of Hunter Biden’s laptop —
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November 28, 2022 — Scott Johnson
If he’s writing his own material and running his own Twitter feed, I infer that Elon Musk has an excellent sense of humor. It must help him keep things in perspective. I take it, for example, that he understands his critics quite well. He doesn’t want to drive them off Twitter. He will take them on in his own way. He resists their efforts to continue the censorship regime they
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November 26, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Elon Musk’s effort to turn Twitter into a free speech platform has encountered angry resistance from the Left. The EU has demanded that he expand censorship, liberals have insisted that “hate speech” has proliferated since his takeover, and so on. As Scott noted earlier, members of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety Council,” who may or may not be out of a job, have denounced Twitter’s incipient libertarianism. At the same time,
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November 26, 2022 — Scott Johnson
The Associated Press is one of the anchors of the garbage media in its newsprint form. The garbage manifests in a wide variety of aspects. See, for example, its story “Musk says granting amnesty to suspended Twitter accounts.” The headline is a bit difficult to decipher and the “reporter” who wrote it is not identified. The story, however, is datelined San Francisco. Perhaps that is all ye need to know.
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November 23, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Resuming our coverage of the Twitter death watch, I can report that Twitter is still up and running and that the new owner seems to think there is life in the old bird yet. World Cup traffic hit almost 20,000 tweets per second today! Great work by Twitter team managing record usage. — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022 Assuming that Musk is writing his own material, I think he
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November 20, 2022 — Scott Johnson
Every one of the several news services to which I subscribe email updates reported last night: Trump returns to Twitter! Elon Musk had been conducting his own Twitter poll on the subject — I think his purpose was facetious, but nobody seems to grok Musk’s sense of humor. The vote was close. At one point Musk suggested that bots were voting — again, I doubt we are to take the
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November 4, 2022 — John Hinderaker
Elon Musk is said to be laying off half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. This doesn’t come as a surprise: Twitter’s head count seems absurdly high, and expenses will need to be cut to have any hope of generating a profit commensurate with Musk’s purchase price. But Elon says there is more to it than that. He says Twitter’s revenue has dropped dramatically because leftists have pressured companies not to advertise
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