The passionate romance between Twitter and journalism suddenly seems to be on the rocks — and that’s good news for people who care about real news, delivered straight.
The latest sign of a break-up came, naturally, in the form of a tweet from Chris Licht, who’ll soon take over as CEO of CNN. Licht writes that May 2 will be his first official day at the cable channel and his last day on Twitter — which, he says, can “skew what’s really important in the world.”
That was posted less than two weeks after out-going New York Times executive editor Dean Baquetinstructed his staff to “tweet less, tweet more thoughtfully and devote more time to reporting.” The paper issued fresh guidelines to “reset” the newsroom’s interactions on Twitter.
These are crucial moves in the news world because social media — Twitter included — stand for many things solid journalism should not. The damage done by the outsized influence of tweets on news judgement is only now being assessed.
Things didn’t start out this badly, of course. At first, Twitter was seen as an efficient way to distribute links to stories, at a time in the mid- to late-2000s when news outlets were desperate to establish a beachhead in the rapidly expanding digital universe. While celebrating Twitter’s ninth anniversary in 2015, founder Jack Dorseythanked journalists as one of the main reasons “why we grew so quickly.”
But two years later, Twitter doubled the allowable size of tweets to 280 characters — which meant there was now space for the platform to deliver more than just headlines linking to content. It could also provide commentary, opinion and — most importantly — personality.
Twitter, in other words, embraced its true purpose, the one it has in common with all social media: promotion. Specifically, promotion of that phenomenon marketers term “the brand called You.”
On top of that, a lot of these social media personalities soon only appeared to care about and comment on each other. The largest single group of Twitter’s “verified users” — 25 percent — are journalists; according to research, journalists are also the most active people on the platform. One result: more and more stories seemed based on issues that “blew up on Twitter” or “went viral in the Twittersphere” — substituting this new yardstick for the concerns of real people outside the online bubble.
It’s impossible to measure, but it only makes sense that this all plays into the diminished credibility of journalism for large sections of the public. It feeds the belief that reporters are merely one part of an elitist group-think that leaves out particular story angles and points of view.
Some prominent media leaders now seem to recognize this — and have begun tackling the problem. Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter might intensify journalism’s obligation to end the relationship. Still, the break-up battle will be tough. It may be very difficult to give up that “brand called You” world view; a little taste of personal fame can be addictive.
In the end, it could be too late to repair the damage and make everyone forget that awful significant other, but the news profession has to try — for itself, and for a society in dire need of institutions it can trust again.
That’s the message from Vanity Fair, the May issue of which includes a report from a small but colorful corner of the intellectual and political landscape. In the after-parties and corridors of the National Conservatism conference held in Orlando last October, reporter James Pogue discovered a subterranean network of “podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters.” Attracted to the right but far from conservative, these dissidents dream of overthrowing some of the basic premises of 21st-century American life. Where others might see a threatened but legitimate constitutional order or a struggling yet still functional economy, they perceive a tyrannical yet incompetent “regime” collapsing under its own weight.
The shock value associated with these views is an important part of their appeal. As the boundaries of acceptable opinion shift to the left, at least within major institutions, the opportunities for dissent have become concentrated on the right. In universities, media, and many big companies, there’s nothing controversial about saying that white people are an essentially malign portion of the human race, that gender is independent of biological sex, or that people who voted for former President Donald Trump are an existential threat to democracy. If you aim to provoke, you’d better reject these claims, loudly and often. On social media, this countercultural quality is known as being “based.”
But there’s more to the “new right,” as it’s somewhat anachronistically known (a succession of movements with similar names has emerged since the 1950s), than being based. This motley crew is composed of people in their 20s and early 30s, largely though not entirely men. A recurring theme in their conversation, in the piece as well as the blogposts, Twitter threads, and private chats where they develop their ideas, is the belief that some kind of revolution would be necessary for them to achieve goals that once would have seemed utterly mundane. Not so long ago, professional advancement, stable romantic relationships, and residential independence seemed like the birthright of young Americans industrious or lucky enough to graduate from college and make it to one of the metro areas heavily populated by others of their kind. Today, these markers of adulthood can be delayed by years or decades — and increasingly seem out of reach.
The frathouse atmosphere Pogue describes reflects that arrested development. Unlike the buttoned-up official sessions of the conference, the new right confabs revolved around late nights, many drinks, and casual attire. Despite the contempt for academia that infuses the new right, its intellectual and social style derives more from the college campus than from the “real America” that its participants idealize.
In that respect, the new right can be viewed as a negative image of the woke left. Both movements invoke a favored cohort of the truly disadvantaged. In practice, they’re more attentive to the anxieties of what George Orwell called the “lower-upper-middle class” — in updated terms, the journalists, academics, and other “knowledge workers” whose expectations outstrip their income. On the left, that encourages a fixation on symbolic diversity, student debt, radical police reform, and other issues that are distant from the actual concerns of the poor and racial minorities. On the right, it leads to otherwise perplexing obsessions with content moderation on social media, bodybuilding, and other displays of flamboyant manliness and obscure theological doctrines.
You can acknowledge the tensions between the nominal goals of extremist youth movements and their underlying inspiration without dismissing them as poseurs or fools. Moralistic tendencies dominate precisely because they’re not driven by outright material deprivation. The appeal of the new right doesn’t lie in its policy proposals, which range from sketchy to fanciful. It lies in the ability to tell a sweeping story about what’s worth fighting for, why it’s so elusive, and who is to blame.
Early in 1941, the German-Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss delivered a consideration of the generational appeal of the far-right to his colleagues on the faculty of the New School for Social Research. Drawing on his experiences as a young intellectual in the 1920s and early ’30s, Strauss argued that opposition to the Weimar Republic among his educated contemporaries was essentially a protest against the formless boredom of modern life. Assured of survival without enjoying real security and lacking causes to inspire sacrifice, “young nihilists” turned not only against liberal democracy but against civilization itself.
In the lecture on “German nihilism,” Strauss suggested that this energy could have been diverted from its rendezvous with National Socialism by more skillful education, particularly in ancient philosophy. I have always found this conclusion dubious. The yearning for risk and commitment he describes can only rarely be satisfied in the library or classroom. For the young and the restless, ideas are appealing to the extent that they inspire action rather than merely offering the opportunity for contemplation.
To be clear, the revolutionary instincts of today’s pseudonymous bloggers, underemployed graduate students, and freelance journalists have limited appeal at the moment. As Pogue emphasizes, this strand of the new right is somewhat distinct from the more populist and electorally consequential MAGA movement. J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, both supported by their former employer Peter Thiel, have tried to bridge the gaps in campaigns for the GOP Senate nominations in Ohio and Arizona, respectively. With Trump’sendorsement, they may best divided fields in the upcoming primaries (neither is currentlyleading). But their efforts so far have relied more heavily on familiar culture warring than the reactionary modernism found in online conversations.
Still, the dissidents at the Orlando afterparty are both responding to a transformation of the intellectual right and helping to ensure that it continues. While they remain staples of think tank issue papers and fundraising appeals, ritualized appeals to the Founders, the Constitution, or patriotic loyalty to the existing United States have become passé among a younger generation of thinkers, writers, and readers. It’s no use to tell these elements of the new right that they’re not particularly conservative, because they already know that. With building hopes for a kind of Caesar willing to mount a frontal assault on “the regime,” the question is what comes next.
It’s not clear how this is really a threat except to the political left. The Vanity Fair story describes:
NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers—a crop of people representing the American right’s “radical young intellectuals,” as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism’s “terrifying future,” as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic. …
They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It’s better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as “the way the world is.” And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.
This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century—that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It’s a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right–ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures. …
At one end are the NatCons, post-liberals, and traditionalist figures like Benedict Option author Rod Dreher, who envision a conservatism reinvigorated by an embrace of localist values, religious identity, and an active role for the state in promoting everything from marriage to environmental conservation. But there’s also a highly online set of Substack writers, podcasters, and anonymous Twitter posters—“our true intellectual elite,” as one podcaster describes them. This group encompasses everyone from rich crypto bros and tech executives to back-to-the-landers to disaffected members of the American intellectual class, like Up in the Air author Walter Kirn, whose fulminations against groupthink and techno-authoritarianism have made him an unlikely champion to the dissident right and heterodox fringe. But they share a the basic worldview: that individualist liberal ideology, increasingly bureaucratic governments, and big tech are all combining into a world that is at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning—as Blake Masters recently put it, a “dystopian hell-world.” …
Vance believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech. This has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class—a quasi-aristocracy he calls “the regime”—to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up. In the Vancian view, this class has no stake in what people on the New Right often call the “real economy”—the farm and factory jobs that once sustained middle-class life in Middle America. This is a fundamental difference between New Right figures like Vance and the Reaganite right-wingers of their parents’ generation. To Vance—and he’s said this—culture war is class warfare.
At a minimum the Vanity Fair story represents yet again the usual lefty dismissal of any views that don’t agree with theirs. It’s not clear why people should be surprised, though, that there would be a counterreaction to the metastasizing freak show that is liberalism today, in which non-liberal whites are automatically evil, non-liberal men are automatically evil, and approval of, for instance, those dissatisfied with the sex they were born with is demanded.
Twitter has a new sheriff in town, and his name is Elon Musk. The world’s wealthiest man offered to buy the social media site for $44 billion, and the company’s board accepted the offer yesterday.
Musk has many reasons for buying the company, but his main drive appears to be to preserve—or even strengthen—the site’s commitment to the principles of free speech.
“Twitter is the digital town square, where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” tweeted Musk.
Admittedly, the town square analogy is imperfect, as my colleague Liz Wolfe highlighted in her excellent post on the subject. For one thing, Twitter is a private company, rather than a genuinely public space, which means that it is not bound by the First Amendment. Unlike the actual town square, Twitter retains the right to punish users for perfectly legal speech. It’s also the case that while Twitter is incredibly important for the political class, journalists, business leaders, and other social influencers, it’s not nearly as big or as frequently visited as Facebook, YouTube, or TikTok. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick put it, the entire internet is really the town square; Twitter is one small space that’s part of it.
Twitter’s social importance is inflated by media and political figures because the site is their preferred virtual meeting ground. This is true of Musk himself; he clearly enjoys the platform, and uses it to great effect, and thus may be overstating its importance to society. But there are many others ways to communicate political messages, and if Twitter ceased to exist tomorrow, it’s doubtful that anyone’s ability to speak would be irreparably harmed.
Admittedly, the people really overstating Twitter’s importance are actually Musk’s critics in progressive and mainstream media. And boy are they overstating it: Current Affairs Editor in Chief Nathan Robinson fretted that “the only comforting reason to think [former President] Donald Trump might not win in 2024 is that his prior success was so dependent on his Twitter account. If Musk takes over it’s very likely that Trump will be back and therefore unstoppable.”
Robinson apparently thinks that Trump’s ability to win reelection hinges on whether he’s on Twitter. Not the shape of the U.S. economy, the direction of the pandemic, or whether President Joe Biden’s ill-considered policies have created an opening for the former president…but Twitter.
Frustratingly, many liberals and progressives—especially in the media—have convinced themselves that the only way to effectively counter bad speech is to label it misinformation or harassment and prevent it from being uttered. This runs counter to Musk’s stated views on the subject, which reflect classically liberal ideas about speech.
I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means
It’s strange to see this idea—that silencing opponents is not only self-defeating but also wrong on principle—transformed into an explicitly right-wing talking point. This is a demoralizing result of the new political reality, in which the journalists and bureaucrats who comprise Team Blue fear and distrust speech they cannot control, while Team Red purports to love free speech even as its political figures wage war on speech they do not like. And it’s one that does not work to Democrats’ advantage; as Nate Silver points out, free speech in the abstract is extremely popular among the voting public.
The best way to de-politicize the social media free speech debate—and the optimal thing that Musk could do with control of Twitter—would be to devolve content curation to individual users, as I explained in The Los Angeles Times:
“Elon Musk’s best bet would be to devolve content curation to individual users. Many on the right are frustrated with Twitter’s inconsistently applied rules, regardless of whether they are enforced by algorithms or by human employees of the company; many progressives, on the other hand, are afraid that lax moderation means more misinformation or harassment. The least polarizing way forward is to give users more means of controlling their own feeds. If you have a low tolerance for unpleasantness, you should be able to turn on a setting that shields you from the worst of what can appear on the platform. If you prefer the Wild West, there should be a setting for you, too.”
In any case, I hope that fixing Twitter doesn’t distract Musk from his far more important goal of colonizing Mars (something NPR criticized as imperialist, because of course they did). We’re already a multi-platform species, but not yet a multi-planet species.
Over the last week, SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk arranged $46.5 billion in financing to follow through on his unsolicited offer to Twitter’s board to buy the social media site from them. This afternoon, the board accepted Musk’s offer to buy the company for $54.20 a share.
Long a Twitter power user/troll/loudmouth, Musk bought a 9.2 percent stake in the company last month, becoming the largest shareholder, before deciding he’d rather have the whole thing.
So, for users of the platform, what’s likely to change?
Musk has panned the site’s existing content moderation policies, saying they are too restrictive and encroach on people’s ability to speak freely without being censored. Some liberalization of these policies and the re-platforming of controversial figures like former President Donald Trump—who was banned in the wake of the January 6 riot for inciting violence among his fans—seems likely, though unpopular with droves of users.
At the mid-April TED conference in Vancouver, Musk talked about his interest in making Twitter’s algorithm open-source. The Diff‘s Byrne Hobart took this a step further, outlining how “Twitter should monetize a protocol rather than run an app,” and explaining the tension between Twitter as a consumer product and as “a way for individual users to update a universal shared database, which can then be filtered based on who’s interested in what.” Hobart claims that it’s possible that Twitter has been “radically miss-monetized,” and that Musk could potentially realign its priorities. However, little of the online discourse has focused on the technical possibilities.
The new Twitter owner has, through coy tweets, hinted that his new policies will not be applied arbitrarily and that consistent application will mean some number of right-wing users currently cheering his new ownership will surely be disappointed …
Elsewhere, Musk has said that Twitter is a “town square” or “public square,” and that banning people from using the platform effectively prevents them from participating in the important discussions of the day.
Though people who care about fostering a culture of free speech may agree with the tenor of Musk’s comments, the analogy is a terrible one. For most of America, the public square is the school board meeting and the town council meeting. There are also numerous other privates spaces for civic engagement: the church pulpit and the post-sermon fray it inspires; neighborhood listservs and the cesspool that is NextDoor; or maybe it’s Facebook, in-person conversations, and email lists. For many millions of Americans, Twitter is not integral to hashing out values, concerns, and disagreements. Think of the implications if we expected the government to treat such companies—which have their own terms of service and standards that they are free to decide and we are free to consent to—as something akin to public utilities.
If anything, the new owner of a social media company should convey an inflated sense of the platform’s worth! But Musk has at times, despite his forceful defense of free speech culture on the internet, repeated confused talking points that indicate scattered thinking while simultaneously failing to fully flesh out what day-to-day operations will look like. For example, a lot of content moderation involves the unsexy—and not very ideological—challenge of keeping spam under control. And, as Mike Masnick points out at Techdirt, Musk doesn’t seem to have a particularly robust understanding of “hate speech” and how much of what we call hate speech is, in fact, protected by the First Amendment.
A lot remains to be seen about how Twitter will change and what Musk will bring to the table. Optimism, with some reservations about Musk’s ability to execute, seems warranted. Hysteria—like declaring that it’s now open season for white supremacists, that Musk’s vision for free speech will be “lethal,” or that Musk is an echo of imperialist, colonizer forebears because he wants to go to Mars—is not.
But the mere hyperreaction makes Musk an unqualified success.
The Walt Disney Co. needs Florida more than Florida needs Walt Disney. That’s the latest chapter in this tale of a CEO who followed his woke staff like a lemming off the cliff of cultural politics. Disney employees demanded that Mickey Mouse oppose Florida’s misdescribed “don’t say gay” bill. Now state lawmakers are reacting by putting down a few glue traps.
***
The Florida Legislature voted this week to abolish the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which in effect lets Disney World run its own private government. Created by the Legislature in 1967, the district covers about 40 square miles and features two water parks and four theme parks, including the Magic Kingdom. Disney essentially controls land use, environmental protection, fire service, utilities, more than 100 miles of roads, and more. …
The Journal cites a source who knows Disney’s finances and says the district saves the company tens of millions of dollars a year. Without it, services like fixing potholes could revert to county government.
Disney largely funds the Reedy Creek district, which had about $150 million in revenue last year. It also carries close to $1 billion in debt. The mayor of Orange County warned Thursday that if the district goes, then upkeep will “fall to the county’s budgets,” putting “an undue burden on the rest of the taxpayers.” The headaches look large enough that it’s difficult not to wonder about the bill’s effective date. It dissolves the Reedy Creek district on June 1, 2023—time for Disney and Mr. DeSantis to make up.
Are Florida Republicans engaged in unfair political retaliation? “As a matter of first principle,” Mr. DeSantis said last month, “I don’t support special privileges in law, just because a company is powerful.” Live by the corporate carve-out, die by the corporate carve-out. As a matter of political realism, the Reedy Creek district is a perk the state gave Disney. The mystery is why Disney thought it could push around state lawmakers without any pushback.
One answer is that previous corporate political signaling came with little cost and media hosannas. Recall when Major League Baseball pulled its All-Star Game out of Atlanta, as a punishment for Georgia’s new voting law. “Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said. The voting law “does not match Delta’s values,” fretted CEO Ed Bastian.
Did they read the bill? Or did they trust President Biden, who called it “Jim Crow 2.0”? Voting absentee in Georgia is still easier than in New York or Delaware.
The political frenzy in Florida began with a similar dynamic. Early versions of the state’s controversial bill were broader, but here’s the key line in the law that passed: “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate.” That language belies the claim that kids with gay siblings or two moms couldn’t talk openly about their families.
At first CEO Bob Chapek told employees that Disney would take no position. “As we have seen time and again, corporate statements do very little to change outcomes or minds,” he wrote. “Instead, they are often weaponized by one side or the other to further divide and inflame.” But inspired by an earlier tweet from former CEO Bob Iger, Disney employees went into open rebellion. Soon Mr. Chapek was groveling to his underlings and calling Florida’s bill a “challenge to basic human rights.”
Perhaps he thought this would be a free way to mollify his staff, but Mr. Chapek misjudged the political moment. Republican voters who have watched companies side with the progressive agenda and silence employees who disagree are fed up. Mr. Chapek was right the first time: Disney’s political foray didn’t stop the Florida law. But it made a lot of people mad, including Disney customers and state lawmakers.
***
There’s a warning here to other companies, especially Big Tech and Wall Street, which are mainly based in liberal states but conduct business everywhere. If they try to impose their cultural values, they risk losing Republican allies on the policy issues that matter most to their bottom lines, such as regulation, trade, taxation, antitrust and labor law. Polls show rising GOP hostility to big business, and that is likely to be reflected when Republicans take power.
If good tax policy can’t pass Congress because Republican voters are furious about cultural imperialism from the C-suite, that’s bad for the country. It’s also bad for business. The Disney lesson for CEOs is to stay out of these divisive cultural fights. The lesson for political partisans in the workplace is that their bosses run the office, but they don’t run the country.
If there’s any good to come from the Walt Disney Company’s opposition to Florida’s new parental rights law, it may be in helping to expose the misleading promises of the “corporate social responsibility” movement. …
Disney’s intervention into Florida politics highlights again the problems that arise when businesses stray from their central purpose of creating long-term value for shareholders. This column has been criticizing the 2019 decision by the Business Roundtable to rewrite its principles. All but a handful of the CEOs of large corporations that comprise the group’s membership agreed that year that a corporation should not simply focus on serving shareholders but instead commit to serving a larger universe of vaguely defined “stakeholders.”
The Business Roundtable’s rewrite was a mistake because serving the long-term interests of shareholders necessarily requires executives to treat non-owners fairly—to attract and retain a talented workforce, to provide good value for consumers, to deal reasonably with suppliers, and to respect the laws and customs wherever a business operates. On the other hand, “stakeholders” are often activists pursuing political agendas that they couldn’t persuade voters to approve and for which they won’t have to pay. There’s no good reason to elevate their gripes above the interests of others. Milton Friedman, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in economics, explained more than half a century ago the flaws in such declarations:
What does it mean to say that the corporate executive has a “social responsibility” in his capacity as businessman? If this statement is not pure rhetoric, it must mean that he is to act in some way that is not in the interest of his employers.
This brings us to Disney and its CEO Bob Chapek, who seems to have decided that some “stakeholders” should drive corporate activism while other “stakeholders” should be ignored. Mr. Chapek’s signature appears on the Roundtable’s current version of its policy:
Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation
Americans deserve an economy that allows each person to succeed through hard work and creativity and to lead a life of meaning and dignity. We believe the free-market system is the best means of generating good jobs, a strong and sustainable economy, innovation, a healthy environment and economic opportunity for al
Businesses play a vital role in the economy by creating jobs, fostering innovation and providing essential goods and services. Businesses make and sell consumer products; manufacture equipment and vehicles; support the national defense; grow and produce food; provide health care; generate and deliver energy; and offer financial, communications and other services that underpin economic growth.
While each of our individual companies serves its own corporate purpose, we share a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.
The statement continues and specifically includes the following pledge:
Supporting the communities in which we work. We respect the people in our communities and protect the environment by embracing sustainable practices across our businesses.
Time will tell how sustainable Disney’s business is over the long term. But how supportive and respectful is a company that presumes to tell the community of Florida parents that they must accept state-sponsored instruction in gender identity for six-year-olds?
In March, after the parental rights bill had passed Florida’s duly-elected state senate, Mr. Chapek issued a statement on behalf of Disney suggesting it was a “challenge to basic human rights.”
This column must have missed the section of the Constitution guaranteeing government employees the right to give sexuality lectures in kindergarten classrooms.
Voters and shareholders beware, Mr. Chapek also announced that he will be using Disney resources to promote his corporate social agenda nationwide:
Starting immediately, we are increasing our support for advocacy groups to combat similar legislation in other states.
Does he not even wish to learn what the “stakeholders” in those other states want for their children? Apparently not, and this should not come as a surprise given the lack of respect he’s extending to his stakeholders in Florida.
Also, how do Disney shareholders benefit from Mr. Chapek’s foray into cultural politics? Some may want to sell their stakes and instead buy shares in a business where the CEO demonstrates corporate responsibility—to the owners.
For what it’s worth, Disney’s stock price dropped 2.78 percent Friday.
Twitter Inc. is in discussions to sell itself to Elon Musk and could finalize a deal as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter said, a dramatic turn of events just 10 days after the billionaire unveiled his $43 billion bid for the social-media company.
The two sides met Sunday to discuss Mr. Musk’s proposal and were making progress, though still had issues to hash out, the people said. There are no guarantee they will reach a deal.
Twitter had been expected to rebuff the offer, which Mr. Musk made April 14 without saying how he would pay for it, and put in place a so-called poison pill to block him from increasing his stake. But after the Tesla Inc.TSLA -0.37% chief disclosed that he has $46.5 billion in financing and the stock market swooned, Twitter changed its posture and opened the door to negotiations, The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Sunday.
Mr. Musk has said from the beginning that his $54.20-a-share offer is his “best and final,” and he reiterated to Twitter’s chairman Bret Taylor again in recent days that he won’t budge on price, some of the people said. The conversations between the two sides were expected to focus on issues including what Mr. Musk would pay should an agreed deal fall apart before being consummated.
Twitter is slated to report first-quarter earnings Thursday and had been expected to weigh in on the bid then, if not sooner.
The potential turnabout on Twitter’s part comes after Mr. Musk met privately Friday with several shareholders of the company to extol the virtues of his proposal while repeating that the board has a “yes-or-no” decision to make, according to people familiar with the matter. He also pledged to solve the free-speech issues he sees as plaguing the platform and the country more broadly, whether his bid succeeds or not, they said.
Mr. Musk made his pitch to select shareholders in a series of video calls, with a focus on actively managed funds, the people said, in hopes that they could sway the company’s decision.
Mr. Musk said he sees no way Twitter management can get the stock to his offer price on its own, given the issues in the business and a persistent inability to correct them. It couldn’t be learned if he detailed specific steps he would take, though he has tweeted about wanting to reduce the platform’s reliance on advertising, as well as to make simpler changes such as allowing longer tweets.
Some shareholders rallied behind him following the meetings. Lauri Brunner, who manages Thrivent Asset Management LLC’s large-cap growth fund, sees Mr. Musk as a skilled operator. “He has an established track record at Tesla,” she said. “He is the catalyst to deliver strong operating performance at Twitter.” Minneapolis-based Thrivent has a roughly 0.4% stake in Twitter worth $160 million and is also a Tesla shareholder.
Mr. Musk already has said he is considering taking his bid directly to shareholders by launching a tender offer. Even if he was to get significant shareholder support in a tender offer—which is far from guaranteed—he would still need a way around the company’s poison pill, a legal maneuver it employed that effectively blocks him from building his stake to 15% or more.
One oft-employed tactic to push a bid, seeking to gain control of the target’s board, is out of reach for now. Twitter’s directors have staggered terms, meaning a dissident shareholder would need multiple years to gain control rather than a single shareholder vote. Twitter tried last year to phase out the staggered board terms given that they are frowned upon by the corporate-governance community, but not enough shareholders voted on the measure. The company is attempting to do so again at this year’s annual meeting set for May 25. Only two directors are up for re-election, and it is too late for Mr. Musk to nominate his own.
Twitter’s shares have been trading below his offer price since he made the bid April 14, typically a sign that shareholders are skeptical a deal will happen, though they did close up roughly 4% Friday at $48.93, the day after he unveiled financing for the deal. Mr. Musk has indicated that if the current bid fails, he could sell his stake, which totals more than 9%.
The financing included more than $25 billion in debt coming from nearly every global blue-chip investment bank aside from the two advising Twitter. The remainder was $21 billion in equity Mr. Musk would provide himself, likely by selling existing stakes in his other businesses such as Tesla. The speed at which the financing came together and the market selloff in recent days—which makes the all-cash offer look relatively more attractive—likely contributed to Twitter’s greater willingness to entertain Mr. Musk’s proposal.
Twitter’s board should engage with Mr. Musk since its stock has “gone nowhere” since the company went public eight years ago, Jeff Gramm, a portfolio manager with Bandera Partners LLC, a New York hedge fund with about $385 million under management, said earlier. The firm last bought Twitter shares in February and owns about 950,000 overall, which accounts for about 11% of its portfolio.
Mr. Gramm said Twitter’s board can’t walk away from Mr. Musk’s offer without providing an alternative that gives real value to shareholders. “I’m not sure what that can be at this stage besides finding a higher bid,” he said.
This will give Twitter employees a new attack of the vapors this morning.
Elon Musk is speaking to investors who could partner with him on a bid for Twitter, sources close to the matter told The Post.
A new plan that includes partners could be announced within days, those sources said.
One possibility, the sources said: teaming with private-equity firm Silver Lake Partners, which was planning to co-invest with him in 2018 when he was considering taking Tesla private.
Silver Lake’s Co-CEO Egon Durban is a Twitter board member and led Musk’s deal team during the 2018 failed effort to take Tesla private, sources said. Silver Lake declined to comment.
Whether Musk would present Twitter with an entirely new offer — perhaps raising his current bid — or whether new partners would simply go in on a purchase with him isn’t clear. A Musk spokesperson declined to comment.
But that pill may not stop other entities or people from acquiring their own shares of up to 15% of the company. Those owners could partner with Musk to force a sale, make changes in the executive ranks or push for other overhauls of the company.
Twitter hasn’t yet filed its shareholder rights plan with the SEC, though it announced the poison pill in a statement. The SEC filing will give more details on whether it prevents like-minded investors from teaming to buy a greater than 15% stake.
“This is not over,” a source close to the situation said.
Musk has announced he presently owns 9.1% of Twitter. He offered Thursday to buy Twitter for $54.20 a share. Shares last traded at $45.08 each, as there is skepticism that he will succeed with his current take-it-or-leave-it proposal.
Saudi Arabian investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal said on Thursday that, as one of the major shareholders in Twitter, he rejected the proposed takeover bid.
Meanwhile, Twitter may have options besides just saying no.
Private-equity firm Thoma Bravo told Twitter it is studying the possibility of making a rival offer for the company, Bloomberg and Reuters reported on Friday, citing sources familiar. This comes after The Post reported exclusively Thursday that Thoma Bravo was considering a Twitter bid.
Most have now heard of Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, and a lot of people in the liberal media are freaking out that he would (gasp) restore free speech on the platform, which confirms that its current purpose is to suppress and censor information it does not want you to know.
It is worth knowing who owns Twitter and who it is that determines who and what can be heard, who it is that determines what is “disinformation” that dare not be uttered in the public square.
Twitter is not a bunch of tech hippies in Silicon Valley serving your best interests – it is the richest and most powerful Wall Street oligarchs deciding what you can know.
To wit:
Twitter is how the mainstream media, corporations, politicians, and governments communicate with the general public – less than one million tune in to CNN, but tens of millions see their tweets on smartphones
It seems odd that our most important national conversations are limited to 280 characters, but that is why I don’t tweet.
In 2020, Twitter cancelled thousands of voices that its owners did not want us to hear – it suppressed information that contradicted media narratives on covid, the riots in our cities, political campaigns, and the elections themselves.
Twitter’s most blatant act of partisan activism occurred in October, when it shut down the New York Post account and prohibited any discussions of the Hunter Biden laptop unless they concurred it was Russian disinformation.
When the media later admitted the authenticity of the laptop and its contents, a survey of Biden voters (half of whom had not heard of it) showed that 15% of them would have voted differently had they known it was real. Mission accomplished.
Its stock price rose from $25 in February of 2020 to $75 in February of 2021– censorship was very profitable for Twitter’s Wall Street owners, and they lobbied the administration they installed to make their truth-arbiter status a permanent fixture of the regulatory state.
Since then, facts have escaped its firewall through alternative media and its central narrative themes of 2020 were discredited; Twitter stock fell to $34 in February of 2022. Free speech is bad for business on Wall Street.
Facebook followed Twitter’s censorship lead (or vice versa, who knows?) in 2020, and its stock price surged from $156 to $376 and it too lobbied its new administration for regulations that would secure its truth-arbiter status.
Zuckerberg took things a step farther – in addition to silencing undesirable (to him) views, he invested half a billion dollars into the private management of 2020 voting itself through his 503c foundation the Center for Tech and Civic Life.
The distribution of CTCL funds was finally disclosed in 2021 in its IRS Form 900 filing, and its allocations to states and cities debunks its claim of noble neutrality.
Georgia and North Carolina are two southern states of similar population and demographic make-up. Zuckerberg “invested” $7 million in NC and $45 million in Georgia – $9 per vote cast. Mission accomplished.
As 18 states began looking into the propriety and legality of Zuckerberg’s drop-boxes and ballot harvesting operations, alienated subscribers left FB and the stock price tumbled to under $200 in February of this year. Transparency is also bad for business on Wall Street.
Elon Musk is not known to be a partisan one way or another; his only statement on the matter in recent years is, “I am not a conservative” and he is registered as an independent. Presidential job approval among independents has dropped 49 pts in the last year and is currently 26% and leaking oil.
The blue-check media’s talking points this week are quite remarkable – free speech and transparency are existential threats to democracy, they tell us. Musk must be stopped, they feverishly plead.
We should be mindful of who “they” are – the six giant corporations who own 90% of the media outlets, the Wall Street oligarchs who own Twitter and Facebook, and the office holders who dutifully read their scripts
If that is what democracy has come to, then bring on the free speech and transparency that threaten it – that would be a good thing. The owners of Twitter will probably not sell it to Musk, but major acquisitions take all sorts of twists and turns so time will tell.
I do know, however, what other media figures think Musk’s influence on Twitter will be. They think it will be bad — very bad, bad! How none of them see what a self-own this is is beyond me. After spending the last six years practically turgid with joy as other unaccountable billionaires tweaked the speech landscape in their favor, they’re suddenly howling over the mere rumor that a less censorious fat cat might get to sit in one of the big chairs. O the inhumanity!
A few of the more prominent Musk critics are claiming merely to be upset at the prospect of wealthy individuals controlling speech. As more than one person has pointed out, this is a bizarre thing to be worrying about all of the sudden, since it’s been the absolute reality in America for a while. …
Probably the funniest effort along those lines was this passage:
We need regulation… to prevent rich people from controlling our channels of communication.
That was Ellen Pao, former CEO of Reddit, railing against Musk in the pages of… the Washington Post! A newspaper owned by Jeff Bezos complaining about rich people controlling “channels of communication” just might be the never-released punchline of Monty Python’s classic “Funniest Joke in the World” skit.
Many detractors went the Pao route, suddenly getting religion about concentrated wealth having control over the public discourse. In a world that had not yet gone completely nuts, that is probably where the outrage campaign would have ended, since the oligarchical control issue could at least be a legitimate one, if printed in a newspaper not owned by Jeff Bezos.
However, they didn’t stop there. Media figures everywhere are openly complaining that they dislike the Musk move because they’re terrified he will censor people less. Bullet-headed neoconservative fussbudget Max Boot was among the most emphatic in expressing his fear of a less-censored world:
I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter. He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.
In every newsroom I’ve ever been around, there’s always one sad hack who’s hated by other reporters but hangs on to a job because he whispers things to management and is good at writing pro-war editorials or fawning profiles of Ari Fleischer or Idi Amin or other such distasteful media tasks. Even thatperson would never have been willing to publicly say something as gross as, “For democracy to survive, it needs more censorship”! A professional journalist who opposed free speech was not long ago considered a logical impossibility, because the whole idea of a free press depended upon the absolute right to be an unpopular pain in the ass.
Things are different now, of course, because the bulk of journalists no longer see themselves as outsiders who challenge official pieties, but rather as people who live inside the rope-lines and defend those pieties. I’m guessing this latest news is arousing special horror because the current version of Twitter is the professional journalist’s idea of Utopia: a place where Donald Trump doesn’t exist, everyone with unorthodox thoughts is warning-labeled (“age-restricted” content seems to be a popular recent scam), and the Current Thing is constantly hyped to the moronic max. The site used to be fun, funny, and a great tool for exchanging information. Now it feels like what the world would be if the eight most vile people in Brooklyn were put in charge of all human life, a giant, hyper-pretentious Thought-Starbucks.
My blue-checked friends in media worked very hard to create this thriving intellectual paradise, so of course they’re devastated to imagine that a single rich person could even try to walk in and upend the project. Couldn’t Musk just leave Twitter in the hands of responsible, speech-protecting shareholders like Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal? …
Even though it hasn’t happened yet, why wait to start comparing Musk’s Twitter takeover to the Fourth Reich? Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis of CUNY certainly thinks it isn’t too soon:
Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.
The most incredible reaction in my mind came not from a journalist per se, but former labor secretary Robert Reich. His Guardian piece, “Elon Musk’s vision for the internet is dangerous nonsense,” is a marvel of pretzel-logic, an example of what can happen to a smart person who thinks he’s in Plato’s cave when he’s actually up his own backside. The opening reads:
The Russian people know little about Putin’s war on Ukraine because Putin has blocked their access to the truth, substituting propaganda and lies.
Years ago, pundits assumed the internet would open a new era of democracy, giving everyone access to the truth. But dictators like Putin and demagogues like Trump have demonstrated how naive that assumption was.
Reich goes on to argue… well, he doesn’t actually argue, he just makes a series of statements that don’t logically follow one another, before dismounting into a remarkable conclusion:
Musk says he wants to “free” the internet. But what he really aims to do is make it even less accountable than it is now… dominated by the richest and most powerful people in the world, who wouldn’t be accountable to anyone for facts, truth, science or the common good.
That’s Musk’s dream. And Trump’s. And Putin’s. And the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron on Earth. For the rest of us, it would be a brave new nightmare.
Reich starts by talking about how Vladimir Putin is cracking down using overt censorship, progresses to talking about how making the Internet less “accountable” is bad, then ends by saying Musk is like Putin, and Trump, and every evildoer on earth, again before Musk has even done anything at all. He may be trying to say that Musk could use algorithms to silently push reality in the direction he favors, but this is the exact opposite of Vladimir Putin passing laws outlawing certain kinds of speech. Any attempt to argue that dictators are also speech libertarians is automatically ridiculous.
More to the point, where has all this outrage about private control over speech been previously? I don’t remember people like Reich and Jarvis, or Parker Molloy, or Scott Dworkin, or Timothy O’Brien at Bloomberg (“Elon Musk’s Twitter Investment Could Be Bad News for Free Speech”), bemoaning the vast power over speech held by people like Sergei Brin, Larry Page, or even Jack Dorsey once upon a time. That’s because the Bluenoses in media and a handful of hand-wringers on the Hill successfully paper-trained all those other Silicon Valley heavyweights, convincing them to join on with their great speech-squelching project.
It’s become increasingly clear over the last six years that these people want it both ways. They don’t want to break up the surveillance capitalism model, or come up with a transparent, consistent, legalistic, fair framework for dealing with troublesome online speech. No, they actually want tech companies to remain giant black-box monopolies with opaque moderation systems, so they can direct the speech-policing power of those companies to desired political ends.
When someone like Reich says, “Billionaires like Musk have shown time and again they consider themselves above the law. And to a large extent, they are,” he’s talking about an authoritarian framework that already exists in the speech world, just with different billionaires at the helm. What’s got him cheesed off isn’t the concept of privatized civil liberties — we’re already there — but the idea that one particular billionaire might not be on board with the kinds of arbitrary corporate decisions Reich likes, like removing Trump (“necessary to protect American democracy,” he says).
When I first started to cover the content-moderation phenomenon back in 2018, I was repeatedly told by colleagues that I was worrying over trivialities, that there couldn’t possibly be any negative fallout to coordinated backroom deals to de-platform the likes of Alex Jones, or to the Senate demanding Facebook, Twitter, and Google start zapping more “Russian disinformation” accounts. Even when I pointed out that it wasn’t just right-wingers and Russians vanishing, but also Palestinian activists and police brutality sites and a growing number of small independent news outlets, most of my colleagues didn’t care. Because they were so sure they’d never be targeted, the credentialed media were mostly all for the most aggressive possible conception of “content moderation.”
It was beyond obvious that self-described progressives would eventually regret hounding people like Mark Zuckerberg to start getting into the editorial business, and that pushing Silicon Valley to take a bigger interest in controlling speech was flirting with disaster. Of course they would someday wake up to find these companies owned by people less sympathetic to their niche political snobbery, and be horrified, and wish they’d never urged virtually unregulated tech oligopolies to start meddling in the speech soup.
Now, here we are. To all those people who are flipping out and shuddering over the possibilities (CNBC: “If he owns the whole place…? The Orange man is probably going to be back!”), remember that you didn’t mind when other unaccountable tycoons started down this road. You cheered it on, in fact, and backlash from someone with different political opinions and real money was 100% predictable. This is the system you asked for. Buy the ticket, take the ride, you goofs!
I read a Facebook comment (which now I can’t find) that said he didn’t care what Musk’s politics are or how he would run Twitter if his bid is successful; the reaction from lefties was worth it. Collateral damage or creative destruction, if you will. That’s how I feel.
The New York Times has re-discovered the religious right. In a front-page story, we learn the awful truth that there is a “right-wing political movement powered by divine purpose, whose adherents find spiritual sustenance in political action.” They sing hymns; they pray; they burn candles. They import “their worship of God, with all its intensity, emotion and ambitions, to their political life.” Quite a few support Trump and also protest “against Covid restrictions,” among other unspeakable acts.
Once, long ago, I ventured into this dark territory, not armored by the shield of New York Times-style contempt for the deplorables, but like Marlowe heading up river into the Heart of Darkness. It was a hard-won lesson.
In February 1949, a forty-year-old farmwife in rural Wisconsin had a vision of the Virgin Mary appearing in her bedroom. Mrs. Mary Ann Van Hoof kept this secret for a while, but Mary reappeared to her in her garden in May, and then starting making more frequent visits. Word got around, crowds gathered, and on August 15, 1950, some 100,000 people made their way to the Van Hoof farm near Necedah (Na-SEE-dah), Wisconsin.
Mrs. Van Hoof, the daughter of a spiritualist seer, had rocky relations with the local Catholic Church and the Diocese of La Crosse, but she was tenacious. Defying an official ban, she presented herself as a faithful Catholic and turned her farm into a shrine, the “Queen of the Holy Rosary, Mediatrix of Peace Shrine.” The shrine in turn became a place for pilgrimages, especially on “anniversary days” of Mary Ann’s original six Marian visitations. Some of the pilgrims stayed and eventually grew into a local presence of many hundreds of “Shrine people.”
I know about this because in the late 1970s I spent nearly a year among the Shrine people doing field research for my anthropology dissertation, Quoting Heaven. It was a heavy lift — nearly a thousand pages of trying to make sense of a tormented and fractious community in conflict with its neighbors, itself and, as they saw, the whole wide world.
Necedah, as it happens, lies about one hundred miles west of Appleton, Wisconsin, which was Senator Joe McCarthy’s hometown, and the region between was McCarthy’s turf. On February 9, 1950, McCarthy gave his famous speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he asserted, “The State Department is infested with communists. I have here in my hand a list of 205 — a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” Or something like that. There was no recording or transcript.
McCarthy, who was Catholic, had hit a rich vein. Populist Catholic anti-communism was an emerging force in American life. I never saw any direct evidence of a link between Mary Ann Van Hoof and Joe McCarthy. But after his death in 1957 and his interment in Appleton — attended by Robert F. Kennedy — Joe began to make spectral visits to Mary Ann, as one of the figures she called the Celestials.
Bobby Kennedy was a staffer on McCarthy’s committee. Really.
This made a good deal of sense. The Blessed Virgin Mary had sent numerous urgent messages through Mary Ann about the dangers of communist infiltration of the American government. A key principle of good communication is redundancy. Sending the same or very similar messages through Mary Ann and Joe improved the chances that Americans would listen.
I confess that I never found either of these figures admirable. Despite some recent efforts to rehabilitate McCarthy’s reputation, he remains in the eyes of most Americans a grandstanding bully who often just made things up. I realize that in the age of the 1619 Project, those are not necessarily disqualifications. But in McCarthy’s case, they were character flaws not redeemed by devotion to the cause of social justice. When it comes to Mrs. Van Hoof, she came across to me as devious, manipulative, ignorant and heedless of the harm she frequently inflicted on her followers. But apart from that, a breath of fresh air.
Some of Mary Ann’s Messages and Revelations, gathered in two thick volumes by the late 1970s, put her either beyond the fringe or way ahead of her time. Her worries over Soviet infiltration of the US government have long since been substantiated by scholars such as John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, who decrypted the Verona files; Allen Weinstein who unpacked the KGB’s WWII-era penetration of the US; and M. Stanton Evans, who further tracked down Stalin’s Secret Agents. Her warnings that urban blacks would tear loose in city and town-destroying riots came some 60 years before the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis set off exactly those conflagrations.
Even her predictions that we would be visited by beings from beyond the earth who would arrive in flying saucers is gaining traction from no less than the director of national intelligence, albeit we are now instructed to call them Unidentified Aerial Phenomena, UAPs, rather than UFOs. Mary Ann’s dire warnings that the Catholic Church would fall into the hands of the “enemy,” I leave for others to evaluate. But her general assessment of American society as sinking into a combination of moral license and authoritarian rule is looking better by the day.
It was a test of my anthropological sangfroid to devote years of my life to a serious examination of beliefs that I found preposterous. It would have been one thing had I followed through on my original plan to go to highland New Guinea, where it would be relatively easy to accommodate local beliefs that had never confronted Western rational thought. But the Shrine people were mostly college-educated Midwesterners, many of them from professional backgrounds. They could carry on extended conversations at least as well as the average East Coast secular humanist. Yet they were willing to attest to the presence of witches in their community; they claimed personal experience with miraculous events; and they invested profound moral authority in Mrs. Van Hoof, who seemed to me to have the IQ of a tree stump.
One thing that caught my attention was the fluidity of the community. Apart from a few stalwarts, Shrine people came and went, and when I interviewed those on their way out, they were plain in their assessment that Mary Ann was a fraud. Most stayed about three years, but there was continuous turnover as pilgrims transformed into the next cohort of Shrine people. I discovered that ardent belief sat side by side with ardent doubt. Professing the utmost credence in the Shrine was never without an undercoat of skepticism. But for a while, people were ready to suppress the skepticism in their pursuit of some deeper meaning.
And the center of that deeper meaning was disenchantment with American life. They were unhappy with their churches, the schools their children attended, the laws the government imposed on them and the careers they had forged. Necedah was a way out — but only temporarily. Most of them would re-engage after sojourning on what Shrine people called “The Island.”
That term deserves an explanation. The Shrine was not on an island, but in a scrub forest between the Wisconsin River and a minor tributary, the Yellow River. The Virgin Mary, however, had promised to put a dome of protection over this land when the Great Chastisement — a nuclear war — would be unleashed. When that happened, the inhabitants of the Island, Shrine people, would be the only survivors. Even before the Great Chastisement, leaving the Island was perilous. The ordinary world of village America, represented by the town of Necedah on the other side of the Yellow River, would be, alas, left to its fate.
Long ago I declined a couple of opportunities to turn my account of the Shrine people into a book, and I’ve seldom referred to them in writing. I fear it would be too easy or too tempting to reduce them to caricatures. They believed silly things; they sacrificed years of their lives and those of their families for an unworthy cause. Generally, I didn’t like them, though I forged some friendships which it would have been hard not to betray in telling the story.
The Shrine community had hidden dissenters, and even satellite counter-shrines. Rumors told of disaffected members killed in “hunting accidents.” I was able to watch an actual trial in which an older woman was convicted of witchcraft and thereupon ostracized in a community she could not leave. I mention it now because I assume almost everyone involved is long gone, through the Shrine itself still exists and has its own website. I haven’t been back in more than forty years.
The New York Times allows that “the Christian right has been intertwined with American conservatism for decades.” What’s different now, say reporters Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham, is that worship once “largely reserved for church” has moved into political life. That doesn’t fit with what I saw. The Shrine people, exiled from the Catholic Church, formed a separate entity under the interesting rubric “For My God and My Country, Incorporated.” What was “incorporated” was not just a state-recognized non-profit, but a sense of the unity of religion and civic life.
I argued back in the day that offbeat religious movements could be seen as leading indicators of important social changes. In effect, they explored the latent possibilities in American democracy and a free society, putting things together in unorthodox ways. But that willingness to venture outside the lines is, in fact, one of the perennial features of our national life, going all the way back to the Pilgrims’ and the Puritans’ “errand in the wilderness.” Usually these ventures, however they started — Mormons, Seventh Day Adventists, California communes — either become mainstream or send their participants onward to a more settled life elsewhere.
The New York Times’s report focuses mainly on an event in a Phoenix parking lot, but brings in other examples from Michigan, San Diego and Canton, Ohio. The point is that this “re-awakening” is not a local phenomenon, but a national movement. It will not, like the Shrine people, be sheltering in place on “The Island.” It means to send its message out, rather than prompt people to pilgrimage in.
So perhaps in that sense the New York Times is on to something. In a very Times-like way, however, the writers worry about “media-savvy opportunists and those touting disinformation” that are participating in this movement. “Disinformation,” of course, means any political opinion the Times disagrees with, and disinformation joins hands and sings “Waymaker” and other hymns with “conspiracy theories.”
In other words, the Times has spied the arrival of a new form of activism which dangerously combines belief in God with a sense among citizens of “authority over government.” I’d say that combination is as old as America. And while it can sometimes take strange turns, such as a detour into the scrublands of central Wisconsin, it generally turns out pretty well for us.
Tuesday started exactly as badly for Joe Biden as the White House knew it would. The Bureau of Labor Statistics this morning announced that consumer prices rose 1.2 percent in March and were up 8.5 percent over a year earlier. That is the fastest rise in forty years.
The numbers reveal the problem with the administration’s effort to blame inflation on Russia. “Putin’s price hike” is only part of the story. Prices for all items except for food and energy rose by 6.5 percent year on year. And even the more complicated story that the administration sometimes tells — one that cites Covid disruption and Chinese lockdowns as adding to rising prices for consumer goods — ignores the most awkward fact of all for this administration: the inflation problem is significantly worse in the United States than it is in other advanced economies.
Why is this the case? Recent research by economists at the Federal Reserve Board of San Francisco comes to a pretty clear conclusion: “Estimates suggest that fiscal support measures designed to counteract the severity of the pandemic’s economic effect may have contributed to this divergence by raising inflation about three percentage points by the end of 2021.”
Meanwhile, the president denies the existence of any trade offs when it comes to government spending and price rises. “The American people think the reason for inflation is the government spending more money. Simply not true,” he claimed in a speech at a recent retreat for House Democrats. This is not a throwaway line by a geriatric president but the statement of a delusion held across the Democratic establishment. (Thank God for Joe Manchin.)
The economic news keeps getting worse and the administration does very little to suggest it has a handle on the situation. Around the same time as the inflation figures broke this morning, Ron Klain was retweeting snarky jokes about turkey shortages at Thanksgiving. A small thing, but not the work of a man aware that he is on the frontline of a major crisis.
The hard truth for the White House is that there may only be so much the Biden administration can do about the problem. Today Biden will announce that he is waiving EPA regulations on ethanol to allow the sale of higher ethanol blend gas this summer, a small but welcome tweak. The most important thing within Biden’s control is the avoidance of further harm: don’t splash the cash on all manner of progressive policies that risk making things worse. And yet the Democratic feeding frenzy is only limited by votes in the Senate, rather than any sense of sensible economic stewardship. But even if Biden sees the error of his ways, the mess that he helped get America into may not be one that he can get America out of.
That unappealing job falls to Fed Chair Jay Powell. Reining in rapid inflation without tipping the economy into recession is, historically speaking, not something that many Fed chairs have managed to pull off. All the options the American economy now faces risk making people poorer. Just as there are costs to overheating the economy with taxpayers’ money, so too are there costs to fixing that problem. That’s one reason why stoking price rises is such an unforgivable offense. And, come November, why Biden may pay a deservedly high political price for this mistake.
An award-winning newspaper did a story about U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s coming to town. When asked whether government spending, specifically infrastructure bills, should be taking place given current inflation:
Baldwin said current inflation — reported at 8.5 percent Tuesday morning — is the result of “the stimulative effect that was experienced by the various resources that went to families to help cope with job loss or temporary income displacement … people had resources through that and tax cuts, etc., and the supplies were in very short supply because of supply chains and other things. So you saw that, and then of course with Russia’s immoral invasion of Ukraine, the shock effect of perceived shortness of petroleum shot up the gas prices, and so we have to also look at the possibility of price gouging, since there wasn’t a real shortage; it was the shock effect of a perceived future shortage. But those two, I think, account for the inflation we’re seeing much more than the infrastructure bill.”
If you can discern an answer in all that, maybe you should be a political speech writer,
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 