by Bill White

[Transcript]

Well, it’s official. He did it. Elon Musk’s offer of $54.20 per share for Twitter, Inc., has been accepted by that company’s board of directors and will now be placed before shareholders for a vote, which means Elon has bought Twitter. Unless Leftists are able to secure another, better, offer from someone who might be more palatable to their sensibilities, this is a done deal.

This should be GREAT NEWS! And it is good news. Honestly, you can measure the merit of a thing by how much the other side hates it and the Left well and truly hates this news. So, that’s fantastic! But for me, something lingers…

To tell you the truth, I like Elon Musk, so I am not worried at all when I consider his plans for the company or at least those that we know about. He has repeated his desire to ‘unlock’ Twitter’s potential in terms of free speech and he has also confirmed that regular mortals will be verified (which means there will be some future financial cost to using Twitter) and that’s okay, too. That means that we’ll go from being the product to being the customer (at least on Twitter) and that’s gotta be a good thing.

But I still have this feeling that we’re missing something. I guess it’s worth noting that in a single act Elon Musk wiped out all of Twitter’s competitors, or at least he disrupted their unique selling point (free speech) and I suspect that once the transfer of power has happened, a lot of users who were previously suspended from Twitter or felt censored by the previous management, will return from Gettr, Parler, Gab, Rumble, etc. and so these companies may not welcome the news as much as you might think.

Almost immediately, the White House announced that it will look to change Section 230 of the Telecommunications Act. Section 230 provides that "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider", which is a long way to say that Twitter cannot be sued for anything that I might Tweet. The clock is ticking, and they’ve got until November to act, so watch this space.

Basically, the White House is saying that the Biden Administration is looking for ways to make it possible for Twitter to be sued, to waste its money, which might worry some people, but Elon Musk has been in court before and prevailed, so I don’t think he’s too worried about this thinly veiled threat. I don’t think he cares about money, which is why he’s got so much of it. Ironically, a week ago it was the Right threatening to do the same thing to Twitter and Leftists were screaming about Twitter being a private company that could do whatever it wanted. Oh, what a difference a week makes.

But I digress… This feeling I have lingers. And it’s the idea that our collective free speech is dependent upon one man, who has made it clear that he’s going to Mars. And even if he doesn’t leave the planet, how long can we depend upon his influence. Not to put too fine a point on it, Elon won’t live forever…

Remember, our rights are supposed to be protected by the Bill of Rights (in America) and to a lesser extent by example elsewhere around the globe, NOT safeguarded by Elon Musk! Our leaders are elected to protect those rights and to defend them as our representatives, when in truth, they ARE the people who deny us our G-D-given Rights and lie to us, while they live off the tax money, taken from us, under the threat of prosecution.

So, truth be told we cannot depend on our leaders and at this point in history we must surely fear them. Corporate media and government are one and the enemy of the people. Twitter now stands alone as a bastion of free speech and one man stands guard.

Today, our speech has been saved because of one man and that worries me greatly.