$44 Billion To Post Cringe
Elon Musk bought Twitter a little earlier in the year. To nobody's real surprise, he’s done the one thing billionaires always seems to do when they buyout media— they nuke the fucking shit out of it and make it into a pet tabloid.
Now you could go ahead and point to the other 50 billionaire shitheads who have done this same thing and it’d all be a pretty bleak — but you don’t shell out $44 billion USD to ground a Bon Apetit or Gothamist into a bland content mill.
No — Musk bought Twitter and that’s because Twitter occupies a unique space. It’s a platform that has become central to not only politics — but journalism and academia.
For years, conservatives have railed against these circles in public dialogue. Their most common claim — a claim Elon shares — is that they are being shut out of public discourse. This is despite almost every metric showing that social media algorithms favor right leaning topics and discourse.
In 2022, to espouse this as your political view is definitely a bit cringe — imagine being the richest man in the world with a view the equivalent of Sesame Street in politics.
But Musk got downright face spasm inducing cringe for the Twitter Files. Musk just cast all that centrist shit aside and appeals right to the right wing grifter circus — “Hey, idiots look at this! I can prove you were canceled” And it worked like a fucking charm. Every conservative media figures brain snapped like Mike Lindell ranting about the voting machines in 2020. This, in many of their eyes, proved the election was stolen or at the very least tampered with — even though none of these happened.
Fair and simple, a company decided a New York Post story — a right leaning publication that often is fantastical — shouldn’t run on their website. No election is turning on a New York Post expose in this country. It’s absurd. There’s no real conversation over censorship or transparency. Who gives a shit.
But to the bullshit beyond this — the cancel culture muck — this is just so fucking cringe. The idea that a conservative can be a counter culture is complete dogshit. It’s like traditionalists in a culture that grab onto the horrors of western imperialism when faced with human rights calls. “They value only our destruction” they say turning inward often to religion or another sacred text while tossing aside the unanswered objective moral questions of its free people.
Whenever you see that pattern, its always the same story: Powerful people discarding the truth for happy platitudes that substantiate their wealth and status in society.
