The Guardian is Trying to Get Elon Musk ARRESTED
This Has Played Out Before - We Must Speak Out
Carl von Ossietzky did all he could to sound the alarm about German rearmament. In the years leading up to the Second World War, the journalist saw that—against the orders of the Versailles Treaty—the Germans were preparing for another war. Amid a growing climate of fear and oppression in 1930s Germany, von Ossietzky stood out for his boldness and refusal to look the other way.
I don't really need to write what happened to him next because you already know, even if you've never heard of von Ossietzky.
But here goes: first, the government convicted him of treason and espionage. Then, they sent him to prison for 18 months. Later, the Nazis brutally tortured him and sent him to Esterwegen concentration camp. He died of tuberculosis.
In the last few weeks, The Guardian has called for the arrest of X owner Elon Musk numerous times. I won’t link to them, lest one of you clicks it and doubles their audience for the month. But here’s a screenshot of the latest article:
Perhaps amid the noise of the culture wars, we forget quite how serious it is to call for the locking up of our adversaries.
But what makes this even more insidious is that the Left claims to champion the reduction of the number of people in prison. This is particularly the case for non-violent offenders, but the UK's new authoritarians have informed us they intend to let the violent offenders out to free up space for speech criminals.
Almost unprecedentedly, The Guardian’s greatest enemy, The Daily Mail, is aligned with it. It so happens that both of these rags—who purport to hold the elite to account—share their critical view of Musk and social media with our dear leader, Keir Starmer.
In attacking the bogeyman of the Far Right, they echo the McCarthyist Red Scare (also part of Hitler's playbook).
Fascists, fascists everywhere,
And not a one to think.
Shouted from the rooftops loud,
Yet vanished in a blink.
I wrote the first line, and ChatGPT wrote the next 3.
Based on Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge.
This collusion of disinformation between adversarial publications and the government is highly unusual and its ramifications are chilling. There are many reasons for it, not least the prime minister’s urge to control the populace and the newspapers’ financial need to curb the growth of social media, which is now the source of news for more than 30 percent of people.
The arrest of Elon Musk-lite free speech absolutist and entrepreneur Pavel Durov in France brings the clampdown of free speech into sharp relief. The Telegram owner, also known as the Mark Zuckerberg of Russia, is facing a number of charges, including an alleged failure to cooperate with officials regarding a lack of moderation in his app.
Telegram is one of the world's largest messaging platforms, with 900 million users worldwide. It is encrypted more securely than WhatsApp, protecting its speech from intrusion. On the flip side, this means that all sorts of evil is facilitated by the app, including child trafficking and child sexual abuse material.
I'm hesitant to form a strong opinion until more about Durov's arrest is known.
Elon Musk's X, however, is different.
My book The Psychology of Secrets: My Adventures with Cults, Murderers & Influencers is out this week in the US.
Click here to get it now because it’s about exactly this authoritarian suppression.
Click here to pre-order in Australia for next month!
Click here to order it in the UK.
The Guardian and its ilk want Musk locked up for the public posts facilitated on the app. Social media’s detractors undoubtedly have a point. There is an issue with veracity in a social media landscape where everyone has a voice.
But - despite occasionally falling for fake news trends, such as the false information that the child stabber in Southport was Muslim - most of its users are aware the information from anonymous trolls doesn't always carry the same weight as traditional and credible sources.
More egregious then are the lies emanating from The Guardian and the BBC, two pillars of trust - just ask convicted paedophile Huw Edwards (who is, funnily enough, unlikely to go to prison). Both publications reported heavily - and bullishly - that the two men who beat up women at the Olympics were women.
Or what of Labour MP Jess Phillips lamenting ‘men’ who attacked her during her campaign, when she meant Muslim men.
Is that not disinformation?
Well, she wrote this week about how her support for Palestine got her to the front of the queue at the NHS. That might explain why she misinformed her public about the type of men that had been harassing her. Who doesn’t want to skip the queue?
Amnesty International - one of the world’s most famous NGOs - willfully misguides the public by claiming that nearly two percent of the population has intersex traits. That’s palpably untrue, the real number being 0.018%.
They also wrote that Roxy Tickle, the man who successfully sued women-only app Giggle to be admitted, was a woman. They deliberately used a false photo to make their lie more appealing. In the face of falsehoods promulgated by trusted organisations, social media is vital. Note the ‘community notes’ implemented by X at the bottom of this post.
So, yes, let’s arrest Elon Musk for building a platform that facilitates lies. Why not!? But the liars must join him in the Gulag. Let us start with the staff at Amnesty International, before moving on to The Guardian and the BBC. And then, if there’s still space, perhaps Huw Edwards might see the inside of a cell.
What really winds me up is that these institutions - with their duty of care and legal requirements - look down on the democratic wild west of social media. But it is precisely because of tight regulations that legacy media journalists are so easily captured by fashionable ideologies:
Imane Khelif, the man who beat up women, is currently suing Elon Musk as well as JK Rowling. Would a TV channel with thousands of salaried employees be incentivised to risk telling the truth about him when it might lead to a court battle?
Would employees responsible for issues around Duty of Care be incentivised to take risks in broadcasting the truth if that might cause offence or put the mental health of an individual in jeopardy?
Would any staff member at these grey mass corporations be incentivised to put their head above the parapet and risk the livelihood that puts food in their children's mouths?
These restrictions and checks are often a force for good, which is why we still need some form of legacy media. But where it errs - and it errs often - is where we need social media, warts and all.
The past decade has seen censorship championed as though its advocates have never studied history (when have the censors been looked back on fondly?).
Even while writing this article, I have just received news from an agent that a theatre has said no to a show I was really excited to put on because
Sign up to support this journalism or get a free trial to finish the article!
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Heretics with Andrew Gold to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.