Mere moments after former President Donald Trump dropped his "big announcement" about a new line of virtual trading cards, more than a few left-leaning voices were scoffing and asking how any self-respecting person could continue to associate themselves with such a huckster. While I will let Trump fans speak for themselves, I feel it incumbent to ask how these same leftists continue associating themselves with the credibility clown show that is modern American progressivism right now.
I'm speaking specifically of those who continue overplaying their own hand on the Elon Musk Twitter purchase. You'd think I would be used to the theatrical faux-panic that characterizes the engagement strategy of progressives on their pet issues. We were all going to die from Y2K, then the end of Net Neutrality was going to obliterate the internet and "literally kill people," and climate change hysteria is in a league of its own.
Yet, even knowing that's the tried and tested game plan, I still can't help but be amazed when I see hot takes like this:
"Twitter is dying," leftists like Vindman unironically announce… on Twitter, believing that's the story. The real story is that Twitter isn't dying despite new owner Elon Musk canning half the staff. While progressives have shouted their goodbyes into a Twittersphere that to their surprise has gone on just fine without them, the platform has continued with no serious outage or interruption of service whatsoever.
Not only that, but since the staff was pared down to a skeleton force of what it was before, the platform has finally moved aggressively to expunge child pornography. Twitter founder Jack Dorsey attempted to argue that the social media network always took the issue seriously, but Musk quickly exposed the evidence to prove that wasn't the case.
You would think that all this might provoke a basic question among the intellectually curious: What exactly were all those now-jobless employees doing? Well, thanks to the Twitter Files dump, we now know: they weren't "running Twitter," they were "running Twitter users."
To this point, the Files exposed by independent journalists trusted by Musk to tell the whole truth, demonstrate pre-Musk Twitter was:
- Up to its armpits in opaque, systematic limiting of disfavored (non-progressive) viewpoints
- Permitting federal law enforcement to wield inside influence leading to the censoring of stories it didn't like
- Engaged in routine secret blacklisting of contrarian accounts, specifically preventing the spread of right-leaning tweets, and eliminating various right-leaning accounts from appearing in search results.
Collusion and government-influenced suppression of free speech on this grand of a scale? That alone should elicit wall-to-wall coverage from mainstream media outlets.
Think for a minute about progressive politicians like Rep. Eric Swalwell, Rep. Mike Doyle, and Rep. Ted Lieu. Both men stuck their own necks out, vehemently assuring everyone that the very things that we now know were happening at Twitter weren't happening at Twitter.
Here's Swalwell:
And Doyle:
And here's Lieu:
The release of these Twitter Files makes both of those Democrat representatives look like fools. But notice that neither man is incensed that Twitter has made a fool of him. They both simply deny that this is the story it obviously is. Has anyone paused long enough to ask why? Why continue denying what is now a matter of public information record? One can only assume it's because politics matters more to both men than their own reputations for honesty. How sad.
Ditto that for alleged journalists like NBC's Ben Collins, whose response to the jaw-dropping evidence was this:
Rather than jumping on this story, Collins yawns before joining in attacking the independent journalists who, liberated from the corrupt Democrat/media machine, are reporting on it all. None of this fools honest people. Singer/songwriter John Ondrasik pointed out what everyone knows:
