Twitter

Is Andrew Breitbart’s over-quoted theory that “politics is downstream from culture” really true? Today, with media machinations stealing prime newspaper homepage real estate from presidential campaign launches, it feels more like politics is downstream from media. Over the last twenty-four hours, Chris Licht was fired at CNN, just a year and a half after he was appointed, and Tucker Carlson launched his new show on Twitter. I get the impression people are hungrier for details about these media stories than, say, the ins and outs of Mike Pence’s presidential announcement.  That’s not because America is suddenly more interested in media than politics, but because the line between the two is more blurred than ever.

The battle is joined! Welcome to the inaugural edition of the new Spectator newsletter, THUNDERDOME.  Loyal readers will know this has been the name of my columns covering presidential election coverage for years. It was always a tribute to the late great Tina Turner, such an incredible icon and the star villain of the classic Mad Max movie where “two men enter, one man leaves.”  I’ll be writing it once a week, and you can sign up to receive future editions direct to your inbox here. Please sign up today!

Marjorie Taylor Greene wants Americans to get a national divorce, and the only question is who gets custody of Puerto Rico. Actually there are other questions, such as: why the hell are we talking about this again? And: why is a member of the United States House of Representatives advocating breaking up the United States? And: which third party gets to be the divorce lawyer? Because there is no way Canada is telling me how much alimony I have to pay. For those of you leading normal and productive lives, this latest brain-plague began on Twitter when Congresswoman Greene declared, "We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government," adding, "Everyone I talk to says this.

Here's a simple question: how much American taxpayer money is being spent to silence, censor, and blacklist opinions? Legacy media reporting on the House Oversight Committee's initial look into the actions of Twitter during the 2020 elections focused mostly on questions surrounding Hunter Biden's laptop. The committee's investigative reports, however, ought to hone in on the most disturbing aspect of this story: social media giants were routinely directed and coerced into censoring and silencing American citizens by entities funded by those same taxpayers.

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, free speech was primarily defended by civil libertarians and the Democratic Party. This was in the 2000s, when a handful of civil libertarians on the right and many more on the left worried about how the Patriot Act would enhance the government's ability to monitor its own citizens. They also opposed the growing power of the intelligence community, which they thought could pressure companies into providing private information that the government could not legally grasp for itself. The past is a different country. Yesterday's hearing before the House Oversight Committee with three former Twitter executives illustrated as much. Democrats repeatedly made the case that the hearing was a distraction, unimportant, even conspiratorial.

As usual, Elon Musk cut to the chase with a tweet that's both funny and accurate: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1619770090530181120 Pretty good, isn’t it? And do note the little rainbow in the background for the the sexually exotic. Musk’s tweet was in response to the revelation last week (hat tip to the great Matt Taibbi for ferreting through the garbage to retrieve it) that a shadowy group called “Hamilton 68” had been doing exactly what the title of Musk’s imaginary Golden Book says: accusing anyone and anything they don't like of being, or being influenced by, a Russian bot.

Given the fire-hose disgorgement of revelations about the behavior of the FBI, the CIA and their infiltration of the mainstream media, there is ample justification for believing that we are living in some dystopian, distinctly unfunny version of The Truman Show. In the movie, the gormless Truman Burbank grows up thinking he is living a normal, happy life in a normal, happy town. Only gradually does he realize that something is amiss. Slowly, piece by piece, the awful truth dawns on him: his entire social world is a fabrication, a gigantic product-placement concession with him as the unwitting MacGuffin. The deception is played for laughs, mostly.

After President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address last year, White House chief of staff and the administration's resident Twitter addict Ron Klain joined a confab of journalists on Twitter Spaces to discuss the speech. When a reporter asked Klain, in response to Biden’s poor approval ratings, whether he thought they were having trouble getting their message out, Klain responded, “Well, I’m doing Twitter Spaces, aren’t I?” It was a perfect demonstration of how Klain had taken to guiding administration policy in accordance with the whims of Twitter.