I have actually never watched her show. I see too many people posting her deranged racist idiocy on Twitter. That's more than enough.
Turns out I'm not the only one. Maybe she's become even more deranged, racist, and idiotic in recent weeks, as it's become clear the left is in *a lot* of trouble this year.
From David Auerbach, at UnHerd, "Elon Musk has sided with the rabble":
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter is a litmus test of where you stand in the online ecosystem. To some, it means a dawn of “free speech” on a platform that has increasingly cracked down on unwanted views. To others, it means the takeover of a valuable public forum by a capricious and unaccountable oligarch. Triumphalism and horror abound, but both responses are a distraction. While it is difficult to predict exactly what Musk will do with Twitter (he has announced his intention to soften content moderation and make the algorithm open-source, but only time can tell on both), what his purchase represents is considerably clearer: it is a major flashpoint in the shift from a centralised culture of public elites to a more decentralised, chaotic, and devolved world. In this context, debates about free speech and accountability miss the point. There was nowhere near this much panic when Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013. Nor, for that matter, do people worry about the fact that Warner Bros Discovery owns CNN or that Comcast owns MSNBC. So why all the hoopla about Musk? There are two reasons for the excitement. The first is related to Musk himself: his perceived character and affiliations. Elite media and progressive circles tend to regard him as more dangerous than Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos not because he is richer or more powerful, but because he is more culturally aligned with various deplorables, from crypto-bros to MAGA-heads to Joe Rogan. This perception helps to explain the fretting over Musk’s claim to be a “free speech absolutist”, which human rights groups have warned could usher in a torrent of online hate. But whether or not you think unrestricted free speech is a good thing, it is unlikely to be put into practice. There is widespread agreement that unmoderated public forums are completely unmanageable due to trolling and abuse, and any administrator of any social media platform will have to engage in some filtering or censoring. The worry is about what kinds of speech he will and won’t let through. The second reason relates to Twitter’s tenuous role in preserving an established national elite in an age in which the very idea of such an elite is dying. Twitter has in recent years, just like the internet itself, bifurcated into two broad strata: a national “overculture” of elites — academic, celebrity, political, or journalistic — and a more shadowy, disparate “underculture” of often-pseudonymous hoi polloi, who increasingly define themselves in opposition to the traditional elites. For many years now, the undercultures of Reddit, 4chan, and other online forums have made the idea of a respectable, professionalised online discourse more difficult to maintain. And the ability of the underculture to mobilise masses of anonymous users to push against the elevated voices of the overculture has shaken the established media culture to the bone. This dynamic was on display last week in the conflict between Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz and the formerly anonymous Libs of TikTok Twitter account...
From Sultan Knish, at FrontPage Magazine, "When the will of 2% of the country is imposed on the other 98%":
When pilots and flight attendants announced the end of the mask mandate in-flight, most passengers cheered. Everyone except the media which claimed the masked were the victims. Biden, in an unexpected moment of sanity, said, "it's up to them” whether people wear masks. But since Biden has as much impact on the policy of his administration as the shoeshine guy at Union Station, the DOJ and the CDC have triggered a legal challenge to the federal court ruling. Biden and the entire D.C. elite don’t like wearing masks. Most people don’t. Universal masking is mandated to accommodate a vocal minority, most of whom are not immunocompromised or otherwise especially vulnerable, but who still demand that everyone accommodate them. This tyranny of minorities has long since come to define the Democrat coalition which knits together single-issue victimhood voters whose pet issue, whether it’s police shootings, green energy, racial justice, men pretending they’re women, or the right of teachers to sexually indoctrinate kindergartners against the wishes of their parents, must take precedence. That is why the Biden administration will fight for an otherwise unpopular mask mandate. Democrat political authority comes from the moral authority of defending oppressed minorities. The old Democrat party which asserted that it represented an oppressed majority being kept down by men of wealth has made way for a coalition of increasingly implausible minorities. That’s the wide gap between the party of Jackson and of Obama. And it’s Obama’s party now. Beyond the racial minorities of the civil rights movement, the moral minority consists of wealthy white elites, their sexual fetishes, cultural obsessions, and neurotic tics. Masking is just the latest neurotic tic that the decadent element that makes up its ruling base demands of all of us. From police defunding to mandatory masking to men roleplaying as women, the outré demands are a minority even within the Democrat coalition. But the minority of minorities, by banding together, take something that only 2% of the country might want and turn it into something that the 31% of Americans who identify as Democrats are obligated to support on the party line. And if the Democrats win, the will of the 2% is ruthlessly imposed on the 98%. Each minority horse trades intersectional political acceptance for its cause in exchange for supporting everyone else’s causes. The black nationalists get slavery reparations and police defunding while the men who wear dresses get to be on the women’s swim team. Feminists get abortion until the last nanosecond of birth and environmentalists can have the EPA regulate backyard puddles. And wealthy hipster remote workers can make everyone wear masks. Everyone gets what they want but the tradeoff is they all get even more things they don’t. Fanatics and extremists are willing to make that tradeoff while terrorizing everyone else. The echo chamber of cancel culture is really a cooperative of crazies acting in concert to protect their own special privilege because they know perfectly well that in a healthy society and political culture their brand of insanity would never receive a hearing, let alone a mandate. And they know that their best offense is by destroying norms to normalize their insanity. The minority of minorities coalition forces Democrats to accept crazy premises and then to vocally defend them even when they don’t believe in them. Civil rights, once rooted in recognizable arguments about racial equality, has soured into esoteric culture wars. The simplicity of lunch counter sit-ins has given way, as it was always going to, to deconstructionist lists of grievances written by academic committees with their own specialized vocabularies. Leftists still speak with the moral authority of victimhood even when they’re millionaires, but the moral language, once so clear and simple, pitting workers against bosses, black protesters against fire hoses, continues to be appropriated for every new incomprehensible cause. Obama’s rise promised to revive the old moral assertions of civil rights for a new generation, instead he buried them under new layers of irony, postmodern exercises in egotistical empowerment, and deconstructionism, delighting the media while alienating Americans. In the Biden era, the moral assertions weaponized for social media have become fumblingly ineffective. The Left declares that it must wield power in order to protect the power of corporations like Disney and the right of teachers to push sex ed to kindergartners. The remoteness of these causes from any classic paradigm of the oppressors and the oppressed reflects the distance that the Democrats have traveled from any notion of democracy. The tyranny of minorities also ‘minoritizes’ morality into siloed causes that few can relate to. Intersectionality labors to sell the various causes to those who have already bought into the coalition. The entertainment industry rushes to turn the incomprehensible trending mishmash of causes categorized as identity politics talking points into songs and shows to sway the public. Morality requires universally agreed on values which moral minorities attack at every turn. The great effort to transform the existence of moral minorities into its own moral authority through intersectionality requires unsustainable amounts of messaging and outright intimidation. Cancel culture terrorizes people into not speaking or even thinking for fear they’ll run afoul of constantly changing codes that no one except their cultural oppressors can even keep track of. Totalitarian states deploy mass propaganda like this either at the height of enthusiasm for their revolutions or at their insecure decline when everyone is starting to lose faith in the revolution. And it’s been a generation since even the faithful believe in the cause rather than the anti-cause characterized by a rotating cast of conservative hate objects in the media and social media. The best evidence that the minority of minorities cause has become incomprehensible even to its adherents is the extent to which it relies on anti-cause outrages rather than a utopian vision. What does the Biden administration stand for? What are MSNBC, Jon Stewart, and their cast of celebrity activists fighting for? Tellingly, the very title of Stewart’s failed new Apple TV show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, signaled this inability to articulate a positive vision of his politics. A country faced with real problems has less patience for the moral narcissism of elites. The tyranny of moral minorities uses an assembly line of victimhood to assert their right to absolute power, but both the causes and the problems have become alien to the crises, inflation, crime, and despair, that threaten to dominate the American body and soul. The Old Left could have met economic crises with class warfare, but the Postmodern Left has lost any tenuous hold it ever had on economic issues. Even its familiar prescriptions of social welfare are centered around the preoccupations of its coalition with green energy nuttery, racial equity supremacy, and gender and transgender politics so that mere economics takes a backseat to what has become the far more exciting Marxism that puts identity over money. How can you do class warfare when you’ve become a movement of billionaires whose supreme causes are electric cars that cost more than the average annual income, the sexual fetishes of wealthy men, and the fussiness of remote workers who don’t like being around other people? It’s getting increasingly hard to disguise the fact that leftist revolutions aren’t about liberating the majority, but about enslaving it to the cultural obsessions of a tiny minority. You can only dress up the tyranny of an upper class in oppressed drag for so long. The moral minorities aren’t out to liberate anyone, including themselves, but to force everyone to use the words they want, to eat and dress like them, and to live like them. There’s a leftist term for that, it isn’t revolution or liberation: it’s colonialism. When 2% of the country gets to tell everyone else how to live, that’s true oppression. Now their masks, literal and metaphorical, are coming off and they fear that more than anything else because power can simply be defined as a question of who has to accommodate whom? In the sky or on the ground, in the classroom or the office, the answer is all too clear.
Emily Schrader, on Twitter.
עם ישראל חי. @Vouch4Eachother pic.twitter.com/rL4RahZyqT
— Emily Schrader - אמילי שריידר (@emilykschrader) April 27, 2022
It's the great Freddie DeBoer, "This really gives the game away, if you think for five minutes"...
There are plenty of models for where this site is likely headed. I'm on those sites all day. I cover extremism and lies for a living. You're not gonna like it.
Nowadays “left” opposition to free speech in principle is more or less explicit, though not coherent. As I’ve documented before, a core dynamic in left-of-center American politics is the transition from “lol that’s not happening” to “lol of course that’s happening and it’s good.” Extreme social justice ideals from cultural studies departments were never going to spread outside of campus, you dumb idiot, and then they did, and suddenly they always knew that would happen and were in favor of it. Free speech is in the awkward zone in between, where lots of liberals will dutifully argue that they’re the ones fighting for free speech while many of their fellow travelers are insisting that free speech is an inherently reactionary concept. The cool thing now is to put free speech in sneer quotes, which ensures that other left-of-center people know you’re one of the good ones. It does not, I’m afraid, represent clarity about what they actually believe the correct perspective on speech should be.
Anyway, it’s important to remember that the original justification for left censorship was that they were only interested in getting rid of the really noxious stuff - literal fascism, literal white supremacy. You don’t want literal fascism on the internet, do you?? You know how that movie goes: what they consider literal fascism just grew over time, so that things that were perfectly common conservative positions 10 years ago now fall under that umbrella, and whatever simplicity and limitation that rule contained is gone. It’s led us to a place where discussing factually correct reporting on Hunter Biden was banned on social networks, as was criticizing Anthony Fauci, whose leadership is certainly questionable and who by admission has worked on horrific experiments on lab animals. Meanwhile, as Collins’s tweet here points out explicitly, the most noxious stuff still flourishes online. So here’s the question, Ben: if you acknowledge that far-right sentiment flourishes on the internet in many places, what does keeping it off of Twitter accomplish? If the ideas and arguments and symbolism of fascism and white supremacy can be traded on the internet elsewhere, what are you preventing from getting more and more censorious on major social networks? Do you think people are going to go to Twitter to treat it like Stormfront, find themselves censored, and just give up? People like Collins believe that far-right sentiment is very prevalent and dangerous, that’s his job description. So in what world does a Twitter ban function as any sort of check on that? What’s the idea here? Last year I wrote a piece making the simple point that heavyhanded attempts to censor extremism are bound to fail because the flow of information cannot be stopped in the digital era - that we can’t ban ideas, as a matter of fact, so there’s no matter of principle to discuss. Should we stop the free flow of ideas is a meaningless question because we can’t. France and Germany’s decades-old laws against far-right arguments and organizations have failed entirely to prevent extremism in those countries. Drug cartels communicate around the world effortlessly. When ISIS was being pursued by the entirety of the Western military and intelligence establishment, they still actively recruited. In English! They got white middle-class teenagers to fly to goddamn Syria to sign up! And you’re telling me that tweaking Twitter’s terms of service is going to eliminate the ideology that wasn’t ended by a war that killed 4% of the world’s population? What the fuck are we talking about here? No, liberals and leftists are afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter not because they think it will contribute to right-wing extremism, which exists and always has and always will but which is also far more marginal than they like to pretend. They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives. Which is why it’ll never stop at “the really bad stuff.” The things that liberals believe should be eliminated from social media have grown and grown as time has gone on, and will continue to grow. Eventually people will say that those who disagree with them about the correct size of the Earned Income Tax Deduction are literal fascists...
Still more.
A great piece, at the Nation, "The New York Times Book Review at a Crossroads."
At Amazon, Ilisa Barbash, Molly Rogers, and Deborah Willis, eds., To Make Their Own Way in the World: The Enduring Legacy of the Zealy Daguerreotypes.
Following-up, "Harvard University Pledges $100 Million to Redress Past Ties to Slavery (VIDEO)."
At the New York Times, "The First Photos of Enslaved People Raise Many Questions About the Ethics of Viewing."
This is Renty below, in a very famous photograph you may have seen before.
From the article:
For a century, they languished in a museum attic. Fifteen wooden cases, palm-size and lined with velvet. Cocooned within are some of history’s cruelest, most contentious images — the first photographs, it is believed, of enslaved human beings. Alfred, Fassena and Jem. Renty and his daughter Delia. Jack and his daughter Drana. They face us directly in one image and stand in profile in the next, bodies held fixed by an iron brace. The Zealy daguerreotypes, as the pictures are known, were taken in 1850 at the behest of the Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz. A proponent of polygenesis — the idea that the races descended from different origins, a notion challenged in its own time and refuted by Darwin — he had the pictures taken to furnish proof of this theory. Agassiz wanted images of barbarity, and he got them — implicating only himself. He had hand-selected his subjects in South Carolina, seeking types — “specimens,” as he put it — but each daguerreotype reveals an individual, deeply dignified and expressive. Their hurt, contempt, fatigue, utter refusal are unequivocal. The photographer, Joseph T. Zealy, who specialized in society portraits, did not alter his method for the shoot; he carried on as usual, using the same light, the same angles, giving the images their unsettling, formal perfection. Agassiz showed the pictures only once. They were then tucked away at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. Rediscovered in 1976, they have been at the center of urgent debates about photography ever since...
Ooo!
Well one would think. They're sitting on a $53.2 billion endowment. I'm sure they can afford a chintzy $100 million to throw a sop for reparations. *Eye Roll.*
At the New York Times, "Harvard Details Its Entanglements With Slavery and Its Plans for Redress."
Plus, "The Major Findings of Harvard’s Report on Its Ties to Slavery":Harvard University issued a 134-page report investigating its ties to slavery, and its legacy. Here are the key findings. In 2019, Harvard’s president, Lawrence S. Bacow, appointed a committee of faculty members to investigate the university’s ties to slavery, as well as its legacy. Discussions about race were intensifying across the country. Students were demanding that the names of people involved in the slave trade be removed from buildings. Other universities, notably Brown, had already conducted similar excavations of their past. The resulting 134-page report plus two appendices was released Tuesday, along with a promise of $100 million, to create an endowed fund to “redress” past wrongs, one of the biggest funds of its kind. Here are some of its key findings and excerpts. Slavery Was Part of Daily Life at the University The report found that enslaved people lived on the Cambridge, Mass., campus, in the president’s residence, and were part of the fabric, albeit almost invisible, of daily life. “Over nearly 150 years, from the university’s founding in 1636 until the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found slavery unlawful in 1783, Harvard presidents and other leaders, as well as its faculty and staff, enslaved more than 70 individuals, some of whom labored on campus,” the report said. “Enslaved men and women served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students.” Four Harvard Presidents Enslaved People The committee found at least 41 prominent people associated with Harvard who enslaved people. They included four Harvard presidents, such as Increase Mather, president of the university from 1692 to 1701, and Benjamin Wadsworth, president from 1725 to 1737; three governors, John Winthrop, Joseph Dudley and John Leverett; William Brattle, minister of First Church, Cambridge; Edward Wigglesworth, professor of divinity; John Winthrop, professor of mathematics and natural philosophy; Edward Hopkins, founder of the Hopkins Foundation; and Isaac Royall Jr., who funded the first professorship of law at Harvard. The University Benefited From Plantation Owners While New England’s image has been linked in popular culture to abolitionism, the report said, wealthy plantation owners and Harvard were mutually dependent for their wealth. “Throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the university and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery,” the report said. “These profitable financial relationships included, most notably, the beneficence of donors who accumulated their wealth through slave trading; from the labor of enslaved people on plantations in the Caribbean islands and in the American South; and from the Northern textile manufacturing industry, supplied with cotton grown by enslaved people held in bondage. The university also profited from its own financial investments, which included loans to Caribbean sugar planters, rum distillers, and plantation suppliers along with investments in cotton manufacturing.” Integration Was Accepted Slowly Early attempts at integration met with stiff resistance from Harvard leaders who prized being a school for a white upper crust, including wealthy white sons of the South. “In the years before the Civil War, the color line held at Harvard despite a false start toward Black access,” the report said. “In 1850, Harvard’s medical school admitted three Black students but, after a group of white students and alumni objected, the school’s dean, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., expelled them.” Faculty Members Spread Bogus Science Harvard faculty members played a role in disseminating bogus theories of racial differences that were used to justify racial segregation and to underpin Nazi Germany’s extermination of “undesirable” populations. “In the 19th century, Harvard had begun to amass human anatomical specimens, including the bodies of enslaved people, that would, in the hands of the university’s prominent scientific authorities, become central to the promotion of so-called race science at Harvard and other American institutions,” the report said. The bitter fruit of those race scientists remains part of Harvard’s living legacy today... The Legacy of Slavery Lived On Until as recently as the 1960s, the legacy of slavery lived on in the paucity of Black students admitted to Harvard...
Heh.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Wait, you mean Twitter could ban one party’s political speech?":
My, what a progressive panic Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter has inspired. MSNBC host Ari Melber warns that Mr. Musk could hack the political debate by having the website “secretly ban one party’s candidate” or “turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it until after the election.” Uh, hello? Twitter has banned President Trump. A month before the 2020 election, it moved to “turn down the reach” of the New York Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden’s laptop. Those actions weren’t secret, but Mr. Melber’s alarm echoes what conservatives have been saying for years about big tech’s censorship. As long as the usual Silicon Valley overlords controlled all of social media, progressives didn’t mind. But Elon Musk buys Twitter, and suddenly freer speech is a national crisis...
The shoe's on the other foot, and it's hurting.
WATCH: "MSNBC's Ari Melber is worried that Elon Musk would use Twitter for partisan political purposes!"
Dems are scared, alright.
At AoSHQ, "UPDATE: MUSK CALLS HER CENSORSHIP OF THE HUNTER BIDEN LAPTOP STORY 'INCREDIBLY INAPPROPRIATE'."
Heh.
More at London's Daily Mail, "Elon Musk slams Twitter's top lawyer who sobbed after he bought social media network and blasts her for 'incredibly inappropriate' censorship of Hunter Biden laptop story [PHOTOS]."
Ace suggests she's out. *Shrugs.*
"Sparking concern," lol.
That's putting it mildly, indeed. These people have lost their minds.
At Fox News, "Democrats worry Trump will return to Twitter":
Congressional Democrats sounded the alarm this week after Tesla CEO Elon Musk struck a deal to buy Twitter for roughly $44 billion and take the social media company private. Among the lawmakers' chief concerns was that Musk could allow former President Donald Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter in January 2021 after spreading misinformation about the 2020 election, back onto the platform. While Musk has not said whether he plans to lift Trump's Twitter ban, the tech executive is a frequent citric of the platform, which he has previously accused of stifling free speech. In the past, Musk, who describes himself as a "free speech absolutist," has proposed relaxing Twitter content restrictions, fueling speculation that Trump could return to his onetime favorite social media website. During a recent interview at a TED conference, Musk argued that social media networks should not remove comments that are offensive if they are still legal. "If it's a gray area, let the tweet exist," Musk said...
Still more.
At at the Hill, "Musk buying Twitter alarms Democrats."
From Dana Loesch, on Substack, "It's Official: Elon Musk Takes Twitter":
"Tots and pears" to the apoplectic left.
More insanity.
Frankly, I've never heard of the book until now, so this leaked video of Amazon employees completely melting down --- lying about the book and defaming Matt Walsh --- will definitely boost sales.
Insanity's a word I hear a lot these days with reference to the LGBTQIA8 left.
This is the greatest moment of my career
— Acclaimed Children's Author Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) April 26, 2022
From Mike Solana, at Bari Weiss's Substack, "Elon Conquers The Twitterverse"
Our chattering class claims Musk is a supervillain. The truth is simpler: He wants free speech. They don't. Three weeks ago, a regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that Elon Musk, billionaire Shitposting God of Silicon Valley, had acquired over 9% of Twitter, making him the company’s largest shareholder and setting in motion a chain of events that led, ultimately, to yesterday’s outright purchase of the now $44 billion company. In a press release, Elon shared his goals for the platform, which echoed the goals he’s shared all month: “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated. I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” “Freedom,” “open source technology,” and “man, I really hate these spam bots.” The media’s reaction to these ambitions was instant and apoplectic. They were akin, we were told, to literal Nazism. Welcome to the Clown World. Boy, do we have ground to cover. The social internet is always a Dalí painting—surreal and horrifying and beautiful. A million crazy people screaming over nonsense, with funny jokes or anecdotes mixed in, fortune cookie observations, legitimate political happenings, and “words are violence” hall monitors from The Washington Post waging daily information war on trolls and Russian bots and okay actually just a lot of regular people with whom they disagree, or simply don’t like. But even by the gutter standards we’ve come to accept from media, this has been a month for the books. Out of the gate, it was incoherent fury, with no consensus motive. We were told that Elon, who explicitly opposes censorship, intended to deplatform, and ultimately destroy, all of his critics, who are themselves explicitly in favor of censorship. We were told that Elon was building a propaganda engine. We were told that Twitter, which was until last week apparently a peaceful, utopian haven for principled discourse, would now revert to some earlier, imagined world of carnage (very bad tweets). The case was made, with zero evidence, that Elon is a racist. It was all just table stakes, really. After a week or so, in brutal, Darwinian competition for attention, arguments against Musk blossomed into something more colorful. From Axios, a company committed in writing to never sharing an opinion, it was “reported” that Elon, once likened to Iron Man, was now behaving “like a supervillain.” His ownership of Twitter would lead to World War III, the case was made elsewhere. In one of my favorite moments of derangement, NPR helpfully reminded us that Elon is an imperialist. The basis for such an incredible charge? In the tradition of America’s Apollo Moon landing, one of the most celebrated accomplishments in human history, Elon wants to settle Mars, an uninhabited desert planet 155 million miles from Earth. This is just like colonial-era Britain’s brutal conquest of half the world, when you think about it. The takes were all extraordinarily stupid, and yes, I loved every single one of them...
Big story, at CNN, "Emmanuel Macron wins France’s presidential election."
But maybe a bigger story, here, WSJ, "Even in Defeat, Marine Le Pen Leads France’s Far Right Closer to Power":
Candidate won 41.5% of the vote, showing that her once-fringe party is a political contender.PARIS—Marine Le Pen fell short of her goal of attaining France’s highest office, but her campaign laid the groundwork for the far right to become an enduring force in French politics. With 41.5% of the vote, Ms. Le Pen won a greater share of the electorate than any far-right presidential candidate in France’s post-World War II era. In doing so, the 53-year-old politician transformed a party that was once a fringe insurgency into a real contender. The result, Ms. Le Pen told her supporters Sunday, “represents a striking victory,” adding: “The French have shown tonight their desire for a strong check to the power of Emmanuel Macron.” Ms. Le Pen’s 17-point loss to Mr. Macron was wider than some polls had estimated but it was a significant improvement on her 32-point loss to him five years ago. Ms. Le Pen gained ground by hitting on a new strategy that focused on the economic problems of the French working class. She toned down her anti-immigrant rhetoric during the campaign. Ms. Le Pen also shifted her party’s anti-European stance, saying she no longer wants to withdraw from the European Union’s common currency, the euro, a move that has little popular support in France. The approach allowed her to cobble together a broader coalition of middle- and working-class voters living outside France’s big cities, in areas where the forces of globalization have closed factories, wages are stagnant and the rising cost of living has hit households hard. Those voters include traditional conservatives and even some on the left drawn by Ms. Le Pen’s attacks on the economic and cultural elite. “She represents so much for so many French people,” said Jérôme Auvray, a member of Ms. Le Pen’s party who lives in the outskirts of Paris. “She is still young…She should run again in five years.” Still, Ms. Le Pen’s drive to broaden her party’s appeal faces deep skepticism among many French. Ms. Le Pen’s father, the far-right ideologue Jean-Marie Le Pen, co-founded the party in the 1970s, calling it the National Front and adopting the neofascist tricolor flame as its symbol. Ms. Le Pen changed the name in 2018 to National Rally. She kept the symbol. “A cat can’t bark,“ said Ludovic Seynaeve de Daussé, a 55-year-old retired military man from northern France who didn’t vote in the runoff after casting a first-round ballot for far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon. ”The National Front will always be the National Front.” Ms. Le Pen ran on a platform that would impose far-reaching changes long supported by the far right. She wanted to ban wearing the Muslim head scarf in public, claw back powers from the European Union and change the French constitution to give priority to French nationals over immigrants, including documented ones. Ms. Le Pen said in February that she wouldn’t run again for president if she lost but also that she wouldn’t retire from politics. At the party’s election-night gathering in Paris on Sunday, Ms. Le Pen’s supporters, some in tears, grappled with another election loss. Many wanted Ms. Le Pen to run again. Would-be successors are waiting in the wings, including Jordan Bardella, the 26-year-old acting president of National Rally, and Marion Maréchal, Ms. Le Pen’s niece. Eric Zemmour, the television pundit turned presidential candidate, made fighting immigration and Islamist influence his signature issues, seeking to wrest control of the far right from Ms. Le Pen. Mr. Zemmour fizzled in the first round of the elections, drawing only 7.1% of the vote. On Sunday, Mr. Zemmour called on supporters of France’s conservative party, National Rally and other far-right movements to come together. “We must forget our quarrels and unite our forces,” Mr. Zemmour said. Sonia Peneloup, a painter and National Rally activist who attended Sunday night’s gathering, said she supported Mr. Bardella as a potential successor but wondered whether a change at the helm was enough to get the party over the hump. “Would it make a difference? Frankly, I don’t think the French are ready,” she said. Ms. Le Pen’s defeat follows a decadeslong push by France’s far right to win the presidency. When her father founded the party, its strident anti-immigrant stance made it a fringe movement in European politics. Mr. Le Pen was convicted of anti-Semitism in the 1980s for describing Nazi gas chambers as a “detail of World War II history.” A breakthrough came in 2002, when Mr. Le Pen shocked the world by qualifying for the presidential runoff. More than a million French people took to the streets to denounce Mr. Le Pen’s candidacy. The incumbent, Jacques Chirac, ended up trouncing Mr. Le Pen by a margin of 64 percentage points. In 2011, Ms. Le Pen inherited the party and set about remaking its image, a process the party called “de-demonization.” She ousted her father from the party in 2015 after he repeated his comment about Nazi gas chambers. In 2017, Ms. Le Pen reached the presidential runoff for the first time. Her campaign ran aground due to her unpopular push to drop the euro. She lost to Mr. Macron, then a political neophyte, in a 32-point landslide. Ms. Le Pen focused her 2022 campaign on pocketbook issues such as her fight against inflation. She also zeroed in on the impact that the war in Ukraine was having on France’s economy, particularly the higher fuel prices that affect working-class commuters. She promised to slash taxes on fuel and other essentials if elected. Ms. Le Pen began opening up about her personal life, softening her reputation as a hard-nosed ideologue. She mused publicly about her love of cats and discussed her childhood as the daughter of Mr. Le Pen. Ms. Le Pen was eight when a bomb targeting her father destroyed their apartment in Paris. “I was made to pay for my father’s commitment,” she said at a rally in February. “She is one of us,” said Isabelle Flouret, a 48-year-old widow from Hénin-Beaumont, a town in northern France where Ms. Le Pen cut her teeth on the municipal council. “My children call her Auntie Marine.” Competition from Mr. Zemmour also softened Ms. Le Pen’s public image, because his fiery anti-immigrant rhetoric at times made her seem tame by comparison for some of the electorate...
I'm just tickled by this. The funniest thing is I had no doubts he'd take over the company. Turns out it was just a matter of arranging financing, and for a guy like than, how hard could that be?
What's even more hilarious, of course, is the left's reaction to the buyout. Twitter itself is in meltdown mode. Folks on the right are gloating, rolling over laughing on the floor. Folks on the left are panicking, literally not sure what they're going to do now that their Twitter power has been zapped by a force more powerful than kryptonite.
It's glorious.
I never moved to Trump's Truth Social. I dismissed all the others as wannabee's, Gab, Parler, Gettr, or whatever. I'm sure they can generate some good discussions or whatever, but they can't claim to be the "digital town square," not just at home, but globally. Until someone beats Twitter at that scale, attracting even more users, I don't see a credible substitute.
It's an amazing thing, truly a phenomenal thing. And frankly, as shocking and stupendous is all of this, not much is likely to change. In terms of censorship (and free speech), frankly at the granular level, Musk's ownership might not make much difference. As Megan McArdle points out, "No matter what new policies Musk sets, there will be gray areas. And it is Twitter's progressive workforce, not Elon Musk, who will be making the calls in those gray areas."
In any case, lots of loz at Twitchy. See, "Brian Stelter’s alarmed by ‘total freedom for everybody’ after Elon Musk buys Twitter," and "Build your own: Sounds like Robert B. Reich wants to leave Twitter and keep his followers, is haunted by old tweets."
Plus, the fear is palpable, "NBC News reporter who covers ‘extremism and lies’ for a living says you’re not going to like where Twitter is headed."
In any case, at A.P., "Elon Musk buys Twitter for $44B and will take it private."
More, at the video below, Kara Swisher, New York Times tech maven reporter, spurts the truth to make leftists very unhappy.
And the Los Angeles Times, "Elon Musk reaches $44-billion deal to buy Twitter":
Elon Musk’s bid to buy Twitter and take the company private succeeded on Monday, 11 days after the world’s wealthiest man first announced that he’d like to buy the social media firm. After days of back and forth, Twitter’s board approved Musk’s approximately $44 billion offer Monday. “Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement announcing the deal. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans.” The company’s leadership initially tried to fend off the bid, adopting a “poison pill” measure that would make a hostile takeover difficult. But Musk announced that he had $46.5 billion in financing lined up in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, prompting Twitter’s board to meet on Sunday to discuss the bid. Following that meeting, the board opened negotiations with Musk that stretched late into the night, according to reporting by the New York Times. The deal values Twitter stock at around $54 per share, above the $39 per share that the stock was trading at before Musk’s interest in the company became clear in early April, when he purchased a 9% stake in the company, but also well below the stock’s 2021 high of $77 per share. Musk stated that his interest in Twitter is motivated not by the company’s finances but by its role as a public forum and his belief that he could manage the platform better than its current leadership. “Having a public platform that is maximally trusted and broadly inclusive is extremely important to the future of civilization,” Musk said at a public interview on April 14, a day after he first announced his offer to buy the company. “I don’t care about the economics at all.” He elaborated on this theme in his SEC filing, writing: “I invested in Twitter as I believe in its potential to be the platform for free speech around the globe, and I believe free speech is a societal imperative for a functioning democracy,” and that he believes “the company will neither thrive nor serve this societal imperative in its current form.” Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has become one of the core companies of the social media age — but it has had a difficult time becoming a profitable business and has been a site of explosive disagreement over the moderation of online speech. Founded by Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Noah Glass and Biz Stone as a site that allowed users to post 140-character messages using SMS texting, Twitter experienced its first surge of interest after a presentation at the 2007 SXSW festival in Texas. The next few years brought explosive growth. In 2011, the company announced it had 100 million monthly active users. By the time Twitter went public, in 2013, that number had doubled to more than 200 million people using the platform every month. But Twitter could not sustain that rate of expansion. While Facebook, Instagram and upstart platform TikTok rocketed past Twitter to more than a billion users in the past decade, Twitter hit a plateau. The company counted 300 million monthly users in 2019 before switching its reported metrics. Now it has 217 million monetizable daily active users, per its latest corporate filings. Under a series of chief executives, Twitter did figure out how to squeeze more money out of those users. Revenue grew from $1.4 billion in 2014 public to over $5 billion in 2021. But the company only booked a profit in 2018 and 2019, and returned to losing money in the past two years. Even as its user growth stagnated, however, Twitter became the go-to platform for journalists and politicians, a volatile combination that has turned it into one of the key battlegrounds in the fight over online harassment, the limits of public speech and the power of tech companies. Nowhere was the battle hotter than in the debate around banning former President Trump from the platform...
