House Speaker Kevin McCarthy meets with Twitter CEO Elon Musk: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — I told y’all he was coming to Washington in the new year with a political agenda to help feed fake dirt to the Republicans in the House.

Sure enough — totally unlike Mr. Smith who came to Washington in another era for a far more innocent and altruistic purpose — this week after spending hours on the witness stand as a defendant in a federal securities lawsuit in San Francisco over his false declaration that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private at $420 a share, Twitter CEO Elon Musk jetted into Washington this week. He met with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordon, no doubt bringing them a copy of the “Twitter Files” and coverage of same by formerly respected Gonzo journalist Matt Taibbi.

Related: The Twitter Files: The Removal of Donald Trump

Jordon is gearing up to launch investigations into the FBI, the Department of Justice, the IRS, the president of the United States and especially Joe Biden’s son Hunter, and Musk is acting as “Deep Throat” to provide the fake evidence to juice up the traffic on social media for the MAGA crowd of methheads and morons.

Related: Republicans Weaponize the House to Torpedo the Federal Government

According to a fair and balanced deadline report from The Washington Post, owned by another tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Musk engaged in two days of closed-door, private “hushed” meetings with the Republican leaders who are hell-bent to investigate social media companies for discriminating against conservatives. He also happened to run into the new Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the New York Democrat, in the hall, where he said hello, claiming on Twitter that he met with Jeffries too.

Just met with @SpeakerMcCarthy & @RepJeffries to discuss ensuring that this platform is fair to both parties

— Mr. Tweet (@elonmusk) January 26, 2023

He also had a private meeting with Congressman James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky, who as chairman of the House Oversight Committee, plans to launch a sensational probe into the role played by government officials in Twitter’s decision to suppress a fake news story that has already been discredited in 2020 about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Between Comer and Jordon, they will also be looking into Twitter’s decision to first moderate former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account for inciting violence and hate speech, and then booting him from posting on the platform after the seditious conspiracy and violent insurrection exploded on Jan. 6, 2021.

Apparently Musk also tried to get a meeting with President Biden at the White House, but instead was relegated to meeting with two members of the president’s staff, Mitch Landrieu and John Podesta, where he supposedly discussed federal investments in electric vehicles and charging stations. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre confirmed the meeting in the daily briefing.

The Post reports that Musk’s relationship with Biden “has long been strained.” Apparently Musk has had problems with Biden for policies related to Tesla and SpaceX.

An early version of Biden’s bill to provide tax incentives for people who purchase electric cars included a $4,500 bonus credit that would have excluded Tesla, since qualifying vehicles would have been required to be built by union workers. Tesla is the only major American automaker with a nonunion workforce. The provision was ultimately dropped during negotiations and compromises with Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and may have been the sticking point that kept the legislation bottled up for a year.

Federal officials who met with Musk declined to discuss their conversations, according to The Post, and the tech executive did not respond to a request for comment.

“But as Musk’s plane departed the region midday Friday, his short burst of shuttle diplomacy illuminated the growing complexity of his task — as the leader of three massive companies with complicated, conflicting needs, and an increasingly outspoken political figure in his own right.”

“He has a reality distortion field, coming to Washington believing he can make all those conflicting parts work just by the force of will,” said David Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. “What I suspect is that he’s going to find that really doesn’t work.”

For Musk, the political and economic stakes may be high, but perhaps not as high as Musk has been of late at parties in San Francisco, according to sources who have seen him there.

Tesla may be the world’s most valuable automaker, although its stock has been in steep decline since Musk took over Twitter and began his partisan crusade. And while SpaceX seeks lucrative federal contracts with NASA to be included in future trips to the Moon and Mars, there is a growing concern inside the government about Musk’s unstable behavior.

Related: The Elon Musk Files: Concern Grows at NASA, Space X About the Outspoken Billionaire

“”I think Musk’s financial connections to the Saudis and other authoritarian governments, which the President himself has said warrants scrutiny, along with his consistent push of talking points which align almost verbatim with Russian propaganda, his sudden shift to the far-Right over the last 2 years, his direct attacks on pro-Democracy groups and coordination with at least one authoritarian government in India to censor criticism against them — all of these things point in the direction of a very specific intent and carry the stench of ‘useful idiocy’,” said Adam Stevenson, who administers a Facebook group for Maryland Democrats, followed by many federal workers in the D.C. area. “And I think the FBI should take a serious look into that.”

When Musk took Twitter private, he made big claims about restoring “free speech” on the platform, clearly not understanding the American principle based in the First Amendment to the Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…”

It says nothing about private companies such as Twitter.

For much of American history, the press was careful to edit and moderate its content, including letters to the editor in newspapers. Even in the era of broadcasting, stations with public licenses for many years had to adhere to a “Fairness Doctrine.”

That went the way of the Dodo in the Reagan era in the 1980s, and then came the onslaught of conservative radio blowhard Rush Limbaugh. Then in the 1990s, along came Fox News, the 24-hour right-wing cable propaganda channel. When the internet was emergent, Google created a monopoly web ad service and began dismantling ad funding for newspapers and news sites. Then Facebook came along and nearly wiped them off the map.

Related: Big Tech’s Advertising Monopoly is Destroying the American Press and Damaging Democracy

A number of studies have shown that since the creation of Facebook and other social media platforms, including Twitter, misinformation, hate speech and other forms of false, harmful content spread faster in society than accurate, factual information. The way the algorithms were programmed by hackers, it allowed the system to be exploited by Trump and other players like Steve Bannon of Breitbart News to spread White nationalist, Neo-Nazi propaganda and attack ads and bots demonizing Democrats. That that helped Trump turn many working class White males into raving lunatics and get himself elected in 2016 – ramping up the partisan divide on steroids even from inside the White House.

While the ill-equipped hacker/programmers who created these programs — most of them college dropouts — struggled to develop moderation systems in the face of criticism in the Trump era, when Musk took over Twitter he immediately began firing employees and dismantled many of the key teams of programmers focused on limiting the spread of violent content and misinformation. He then overturned the suspensions of many conservative Republicans who had clearly violated company policies, standards and rules, including Trump.

Many liberals and Democrats have reacted with alarm over Musk’s changes, some vowing to leave the platform altogether, and blasting his decision to suspend the accounts of prominent journalists, including The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, who remains locked out of Twitter.

Republicans have largely cheered Musk’s takeover of Twitter, happy that he would reverse content-moderation policies and allow fake political propaganda back on the platform.

When Musk’s plans to buy the company became public in April, Jordan tweeted that “free speech is making a comeback.”

But coming out of his mouth, free speech is nothing more than partisan doublespeak.

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