ArchivingLeftists (@ArchivingLeftists)

"Many left-wing figures, in the US as in #Europe, label #Musk as far-right. Some even go so far as the word "Nazi." I did the opposite of the accusation: read before judging. Two biographies. Dozens of hours of interviews and documentaries. Zero ounces of racism detected. What I found was a constant obsession with freedom: buying #Twitter in the name of #freespeech, reinstating banned accounts, publishing the #TwitterFiles, opening up the algorithm's code, open-sourcing #Grok, freeing #Tesla's patents in 2014, reactivating #Starlink for #Iranians cut off from the net during the protests and for #Ukraine, repeatedly refusing state censorship requests. Now, let's do the thought experiment that his accusers never do. Imagine Musk really is evil. This man owns a satellite network that covers the planet, meaning near-total surveillance capability. He owns the world's most influential digital public square. He owns the first fortune in history to reach 1,000 billion, since #SpaceX's IPO on June 12. No individual has ever concentrated so many levers of power. A truly malevolent Musk, with all that in his hands, wouldn't tolerate for a second being called a Nazi 24/7 on his own platform. He would ban. He would surveil. He would crush. We'd already be living in 1984. But look at reality: the accounts that accuse him of Nazism still tweet. Every day. Without hindrance. On his network. With his algorithm. The totalitarian dystopia they're attributing to him is disproved by the absence of the gulag. That's the turnaround. 1984—the control of speech, mass surveillance, the public designation of heretics—that's not his project. It's the fantasy of those who accuse him. The accusation always describes the accuser. This is Girard in its pure form: we designate a scapegoat to avoid seeing the mechanism we ourselves carry. The one who screams "Nazi" often quietly dreams, in silence, of the power to ban, to file, to silence. The man who would have all the means to build 1984 is precisely the one who lets his worst detractors speak. Ask yourself who, in this story, really dreams of the telescreen." https://archive.is/Z8ZRp