No one has done more to secure free speech in the United States in the past several years than Elon Musk. By buying X, the social media platform formerly known as “Twitter,” Musk has provided a platform where content that would be banned or suppressed in virtually every other online space, including Twitter before Musk owned it, can be shared freely among subscribers. That alone is a great service to this country.
But both he and Tucker Carlson do Americans a disservice when they argue “free speech is essential to democracy.” It is not. Free speech is essential to individual liberty, not democracy.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects free speech from the democratically elected Congress. Implicit in its protection is the idea that democracy is a danger to liberty in general and free speech in particular. Indeed, the entire Bill of Rights, along with all the so-called “checks and balances” (bicameral legislature, presidential veto, etc.) are there to protect us from democracy.
Musk’s own tweet of Tim Walz’s comments about free speech should make this clear to Musk. Democracy is what made Walz the Governor of Minnesota and the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee. It obviously wouldn’t protect us from Walz’s implied suppression of free speech should he achieve federal office. The anti-democratic First Amendment would.
This has nothing to do with the technical distinction between “a democracy” and “a republic,” either. Imagine a system where the people democratically elected representatives and those representatives could do anything they wished as long as they executed the will of the majority. That would be a republic, and it would be every bit as dangerous to liberty as a pure democracy.
That seems to be the system both Elon and Tucker have in mind when they refer to “democracy” and the importance to it of free speech. But it is not the system created in either the U.S. Constitution or any of the state constitutions. In all of those, the will of the majority is limited and not by their republican form but by their limits to the power of the government, regardless of the wishes of the majority.
One of my favorite moments in the Star Trek movie franchise occurs near the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The details of the plot aren’t important here, other than that the Klingon villain, Kruge, played by Christopher Lloyd, is holding Kirk, Spock, and an Enterprise landing party hostage on a planet that is in the process of destroying itself. Kruge threatens to doom himself and his hostages if Kirk doesn’t surrender something called, “the Genesis Device.”
Spock, who had died in the previous film, has been brought back to life by the Genesis device but is aging rapidly because of it and must get off the planet immediately or die. When Kruge has the rest of the landing party beamed up to his ship as prisoners, the following exchange occurs between Kirk and Kruge:
Kirk: Take the Vulcan, too.
Kruge: No!
Kirk: But, why?
Kruge: Because you wish it.
Kruge doesn’t know what is happening to Spock or why Kirk has an interest in getting Spock off the planet, especially considering he’d be Kruge’s prisoner. He only knows Kirk wishes it and anything Kirk desires is likely against his own interests.
What a wonderful analogy for so many of the figures who have stood up to oppose the Washington, D.C. empire over the past several years. I don’t agree on much with Donald Trump, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, or Bari Weiss. But it is apparent the empire fears and loathes these people and will do anything it can to destroy them.
Therefore, I am inclined to do whatever I can to defend them against the empire’s attacks. Should the empire deign to ask why I wouldn’t allow this collection of mercantilists, socialists, and statists (but I repeat myself) to be crushed, my answer is the same as Kruge’s:
“Because you wish it.”
The latest in this cast of opposition characters is self-described socialist Elon Musk. Musk claims to have purchased Twitter primarily to change its content moderation policies to allow for freer speech, something he claims is essential to “democracy.”
That all sounds wonderful to the average, miseducated American and there is good reason to believe Musk is sincere. He spent $44 billion on a company that currently makes $5 billion in gross revenues – and loses money. No likely combination of revenue growth or cost cutting will make this a wise business investment anytime soon.
Taking Musk at his word, it is worthwhile to unpack just what Musk is championing. On one hand, anything the empire is opposing this strenuously is on its face a good for the rest of us. But we should have open eyes about what Musk is offering in its place. There are several assumptions most people take for granted that need to be challenged. They include free speech, democracy, and liberty.
Musk evidently shares the empire’s stated ideal of democracy as an end in itself. In deciding whether to allow former President Trump to return to Twitter, Musk held a Twitter poll. When it came out in favor of allowing Trump’s return, Musk tweeted the results with the Latin phrase, “Vox Populi Vox Dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”).
Of course, the American system has never assumed democracy is an end in itself. On the contrary, it includes many anti-democratic elements alongside the democratic ones. The reason for having a bicameral legislature, presidential veto, independent judiciary, and Bill of Rights is to protect individuals and constituent polities from democracy.
That’s what makes Musk’s Trump poll so ironic. He suggests a majority vote has something to do with free speech when the First Amendment was written to defend free speech against democracy. The 2nd Amendment was written to protect the right to keep and bear arms against democracy. And so on with all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, the last to protect individuals from the accumulation of power even in one, central government, however democratically elected its representatives.
Congratulations to Elon Musk. He’s managed to get both the left and right furious with him over the course of a single week. He took a victory lap himself over this on Thursday, tweeting, “Being attacked by both right & left simultaneously is a good sign.”
Ironically, left, right, and Elon Musk himself are wrong about content moderation on Twitter being “a free speech issue.” Twitter is and always has been private property, even when it was publicly traded. It is not “the new public square.” This is commie talk.
Now, many would argue that the people previously running Twitter were communists themselves. There is good evidence this is true, including the admission by one of Twitter’s employees to a Project Veritas undercover journalist that the Twitter workforce is “commie as f—.” But the personal views of the employees, executive or otherwise, is not at issue. The company was and is privately owned by its shareholders.
That the platform is widely popular has given rise to the notion, especially among those aggrieved by being censored or banned, that one has a right to be on the platform and express one’s views, based on a right to free speech. Musk says he bought the platform to protect free speech on this supposedly “public forum.”
Let’s take a moment to consider what is a Twitter account. A Twitter account is a bundle of code, residing on a physical server, created and maintained by Twitter employees. It interacts with various applications that combine to make up the Twitter platform, all also created and maintained by Twitter employees or vendors.
In other words, the Twitter platform, each individual Twitter account, and all the other software and hardware that combine to make Twitter run are the products of the labor of other people. Ultimately, all this labor is paid for by private owners just like the labor in a clothing factory or a supermarket. And no one can have a “right” to the labor of other people.
By way of preemption, please spare me the “but it uses tax funded infrastructure to operate!” I shouldn’t have to point out that if one applies that standard across the board to all businesses the commies win. I’m all for abolishing publicly funded infrastructure and making every business provide their own, but until that happens, I want as much private property and capitalism as possible.
Every argument against government healthcare or the welfare state in general rests upon the principle that no person can have a right to the labor of another. There is no ambiguity here. You don’t have a right to a Twitter account. Period.
Corporatism vs. Captialism
When I make this argument, I’m often told by midwits I don’t understand the difference between corporatism and capitalism. The thrust of this argument is that the existence of the regulatory state, particularly the FCC and other federal agencies, create a government-controlled market that gives advantages to preferred corporations over others. I am very aware of this argument and agree wholeheartedly. I’ve written extensively about the damage FDR’s New Deal continues to do to the American business environment.
The problem is that argument doesn’t apply to this situation. Nothing stopped me from joining MeWe, Parler, Gab, Gettr, or even former President Trump’s own platform, Truth Social. If the 74 million people who voted for Trump did likewise, then every one of those platforms would have more U.S. users than Twitter, which has 70 million.
Instead, these same people cry out for the government to regulate Twitter like a public utility – most of which are terrible precisely because they’re regulated like public utilities – rather than simply availing themselves of the costless opportunity to create accounts on competing platforms.
They also have the prerogative of deleting their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, or any other platform whose policies offend them. If they could all coordinate their activities to vote for Donald Trump on the same day, they could certainly coordinate their activities to delete their Facebook accounts on the same day. This would deal a devastating blow to the platform without an iota of government intervention, which would do no good and much harm anyway.
The Public Accommodation Concept
The idea that private companies which sell products to the public or “accommodate” the public on their premises are subject to government regulation of their policies has its roots, at least in this country, in the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century. And as almost everyone conveniently forgets, that civil rights movement was dominated by socialists and communists.
That’s not to say there wasn’t a problem that needed to be addressed, but the communists, following the advice of Marcuse and other critical theorists, made sure they dominated the movement as a front in the war to abolish capitalism. That is why it is not surprising that the idea of “public accommodation” was central to the solution they came up with.
If you can’t abolish private property – the communists’ ultimate goal – the next best thing is to water it down. And that’s just what the public accommodation concept did. It made private property not entirely private anymore since the owner could no longer dispose of it as he or she saw fit. It was now at least partially owned by the public, since the public could override the owners’ decisions about who was allowed on the property.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act works just fine without Titles II and VII. The market certainly would solve the problem of discrimination on private property. In fact, it had already begun to do so, even in the Deep South, as evidenced by the existence of Jim Crow laws prohibiting integration. Had some restaurants and other hospitality businesses not tried to integrate, there would have been no need of passing those laws in the first place.
Both partisan censorship and racial discrimination on private property are odious. The latter was arguably much worse, since as long as I tweet or post like a good little commie, Twitter and Facebook will let me remain on their platforms. But a black man in 1960 Alabama wasn’t staying at a restricted hotel no matter what he said or did, even if his only other choice was to sleep in a morgue with the stiffs.
Regardless, it is a property owner’s unqualified right to exclude anyone he or she wants. Once you begin making exceptions, you are working with the communists, intentionally or not, to dilute private ownership itself.
A Colossal Strategic Error
The Civil Rights Act didn’t stop with racial discrimination. Once the boundaries of private property had been breached, the government charged in to start making all sorts of other rules. The public accommodation concept underlies the Americans with Disabilities Act, which required every business at the time to make physical changes to their properties to accommodate people with disabilities, whether they could afford to or not. Those that couldn’t went out of business.
Everything people despise about the modern office environment, with its ludicrous rules purporting to prevent sexual harassment, racial discrimination, age discrimination, or any number of other supposed offenses, all spring from the idea that the owners of businesses that serve the public don’t have all the rights of other property owners.
It also underpins the Christian baker being forced to bake the gay wedding cake. It’s all the same principle.
One could argue social media is already even worse, and that its stifling environment is the result of government coercion. I don’t agree for two reasons.
First, speech on social media platforms is still far freer than it is in any corporate office. I have facetiously lamented many times that I had never been suspended or even warned by a single platform during my illustrious, anti-government career (I recently erased this black mark from my record). In the corporate world, I would have been called into HR and/or fired for hundreds of the things I’ve said on Twitter and Facebook this year alone.
Second, I don’t believe the executives at Facebook or Twitter feel coerced by the government. Libertarians would like to believe they do, but an honest evaluation of Mark Zuckerberg’s comments about being contacted by the FBI before banning the Hunter Biden laptop story can only conclude he welcomes the FBI partnership. Note that they didn’t have to tell him what specific content to ban. Zuck wasn’t intimidated at all. It was more like, “Thanks for the heads up, we’re on it!”
The argument that there is anything to be done about social media censorship is an argument that unregulated markets don’t work. Anarcho-capitalists especially should agree with this. Does anyone think that in a society without government censorship wouldn’t exist? Of course it would. The same impulses that motivate governments to censor and people to support governments censoring would motivate people in anarchatopia. There would be only one solution there: the market.
And I’m sorry, it is not good enough to rant against social media censorship as a free speech issue and mumble under one’s breath or in the fine print that one does not want government intervention against it. Libertarians should know full well that 95% of the people listening will assume they do.
Neither are the arguments that social media companies “aren’t really private companies” helpful to our cause. Let’s be honest. These are just rationalizations for infringing their property rights. And our enemies already have plenty of those. They don’t need our help.
All arguing the free speech or “public square” angle does is help build the consensus the commies will use for the next great incursion into private property. There is nothing to gain by making these arguments and plenty to lose.
Hampered as it is, the market still provides ample opportunity for people to fight social media censorship without infringing the property rights of those perpetrating it. Anyone making this a free speech issue is both mistaken in principle and playing right into the hands of the communists. If you believe in private property and freedom, this is an opportunity to champion it in the face of adversity. Waffling now will be disastrous.
Twitter took the unprecedented step on Friday of banning the president of the United States from its platform. Their justification lay in the dubious assertion Trump incited the vastly overblown incident inside the Capitol on January 6, as lawmakers attempted to count the electoral votes for president sent by the states.
Never mind that banning Trump can only incite more violence. There is the larger question of whether this constitutes an assault on free speech and what should be done about it. For libertarians, if not conservatives (no, they’re not remotely the same thing), the answer should be clear as far as government action goes: nothing.
The left’s timeworn tactic of calling anyone who opposes outright socialism a racist has worn so thin as to become cartoonish. There is a significant segment of the population who are sick of it. That was one of the major reasons Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Trump got 12 million more votes in 2020 than he did then.
Until Covid-19 and the monstrous, unscientific government response to it, it seemed the left had learned little from their previous defeat. No longer content to simply call non-socialists “racists,” they now upped the ante to “white supremacist” or “white nationalist.” Why? Let’s forget the meaning of the actual terms. For most Americans, “white supremacist” merely means “somebody who’s way worse than even a racist.”
I don’t believe Donald Trump is a racist and he has certainly never advanced a single policy that can accurately be described as “white supremacist.” Neither do I believe any significant portion of the 74 million people who voted for him did so because they are racists or white supremacists. But just as hundreds of his supporters may have been baited by FBI infiltrators, Antifa activists, or both into committing a self-destructive act on Wednesday, Trump’s and his supporters’ call for government action against Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. is going to blow up in their faces.
Let’s not forget the libertarian and conservative position on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In a nutshell, both groups generally agree with the Act’s prohibitions on any government-enforced racism. But purists in both camps disagree with its prohibitions on private businesses, specifically in Titles II and VII. I was clear in my own piece on the subject that these sections of the law should be repealed. Why? Because people have a right to make whatever rules they want on their own property, no matter how vile we may find them.
I stand by that position to this day, regardless of my personal feelings on the Jim Crow south (and north, in some cases). Yes, I fully understand Jim Crow was state and local governments prohibiting integration in restaurants and hotels and that those laws were only necessary because some people would presumably integrate their businesses without them. But let’s not pretend Jim Crow laws had no support among the people. They had overwhelming support. And they were really, really bad.
Quincy Jones recounted how black musicians had to sleep in a mortuary, with several dead bodies, while on tour in the South, because “separate but equal” failed to provide any hotels. People would travel hundreds of miles looking for a “separate but equal” place to eat lunch or even use a restroom. Next to what these people went through, suspension of our supposedly God-given right to bloviate on Twitter rather pales in comparison.
If we’re going to defend the property rights of segregationists, and I do, then we’re going to have to answer for why we don’t defend the property rights of woke tech giants. I defend them for precisely the same reason I defend the property rights of the 1960s lunch counter owner from refusing to serve black people. It’s his lunch counter. If you believe in limited government, it’s the government’s job to enforce his property rights, not other people’s preferences.
As long as I’ve been a libertarian, the answer to the question, “What would stop people from doing reprehensible things without government?” has been, “private enforcement of property rights.” Ostracism has frequently been cited as a tool individuals could use to fight against distasteful behavior and speech without government.
Well, here we are. Tech giants and the woke crowd have been doing precisely what we libertarians have always said was the non-government way to avoid associating with people we don’t want to associate with. And what is our reaction? “Regulate them!”
How could anyone credibly argue there isn’t hypocrisy here? What defense would any libertarian or conservative who objects to Titles II and VII on principle offer to those who charge them with racism, when they abandon those principles now?
Yes, it’s true the call for regulation by Trump and his supporters is to remove an exemption in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) of 1996 to protect internet content providers from being sued for content by their users. This, argues the regulate crowd, gives them an unfair advantage over traditional media. Somehow, also goes the argument, this allows them to achieve “monopoly power” over the internet.
Are they kidding?
Yes, this is a protection afforded internet providers over traditional media, but it doesn’t give Google any particular advantage over other search engines nor Facebook or Twitter over MeWe or Parler. But the real question is, “Do libertarians and conservatives have total amnesia?” Does no one remember how the internet was celebrated just a few years ago as a way around the gatekeeper traditional media? Now, we’re supposed to defend CNN against Twitter and somehow that will help our cause?
Besides being tactically moronic, it’s unprincipled. If you’re a libertarian and won’t go full Monty anarcho-capitalist, then you should be looking to extend the protection to traditional media, not take it away from the tech platforms. That’s the free speech position, to protect speech from government-enforced mobbism in the courtrooms.
Let’s face it. We like to criticize the left for being dumb, especially on economics. But they’re not. They’re smart and they’re winning. The tech billionaires became billionaires largely because they think strategically. They’ve maneuvered the entire non-socialist movement into betraying their own most fiercely held principles and opening themselves up to the tired charge of racism and making it stick. I’m not sure even I could effectively defend against a charge of racism someone who thinks Titles II and VII should be abolished but Twitter should be regulated. On what grounds?
If we want to fight for property rights, free markets, and individual liberty, the special pleading must stop. Arguments like, “this isn’t really a free market” are astoundingly obtuse. Are we saying that unless and until there is 100% laissez faire, all property rights are off the table? Good luck with that. You might as well vote for AOC in 2024.
Twitter took the unprecedented step on Friday of