Why did Elon Musk, a 51-year-old celebrity entrepreneur who built the largest fortune in the world by capitalizing on the frontiers of science, embark on a $44 billion crusade to bring free speech to Twitter, and with it, a target on his back? Was he motivated by fame (which he already had)? By ego (which every billionaire has)? His desire to leave a political legacy (which billionaires can easily buy)? Or was there a more personal motivation that transcends the obvious reasons at the surface? The answer probably includes some mix of all of the above.
Before Musk took over the company, dissent from the new left-wing orthodoxy — which, among other things, dictated that one can defy biology and “transition” to the opposite sex — was forbidden. The second batch of “Twitter Files” revealed the company engaged in widespread shadowbanning to suppress accounts for whatever the platform’s ideological censors labeled as hate speech.
Other accounts, such as those of Federalist Senior Editor John Davidson and the conservative satirical website The Babylon Bee, were outright suspended in March for pointing out the obvious truth that President Joe Biden’s transgender-identifying assistant secretary for health, Rachel Levine, is actually a man. According to Twitter in the pre-Musk era, saying Levine is a man qualifies as “hateful conduct.” The Babylon Bee’s suspension was lifted in November while Davidson’s account remains in online purgatory.
In April, The Washington Times reported Musk reached out to the Bee as the Tesla and SpaceX CEO got serious about a complete takeover of Twitter.
“Babylon Bee CEO: Twitter’s Bee lockout may have been ‘last straw’ for Elon Musk,” ran the headline.
“[Musk] wanted to confirm that we had, in fact, been suspended from Twitter,” Babylon Bee CEO Seth Dillon told the paper. “He reached out to us before he publicly asked his followers if they think Twitter ‘rigorously adheres’ to the principle of free expression. He even mused on that call with us that he might need to buy Twitter.”
Musk sat down for a podcast with The Babylon Bee four months prior, where the rare Silicon Valley tech giant willing to rebuke modern leftism trashed “wokeness.”
“At its heart, wokeness is divisive, exclusionary, and hateful,” Musk said. “It basically gives mean people a shield to be cruel, armored in false virtue.”
In June, it was reported that Musk’s 18-year-old son, Xavier Alexander Musk, came out as transgender and filed to change his name to Vivian Jenna Wilson in April. In his petition to the court, he wrote that he requested the change because “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.”
Precisely when Musk’s son began to identify as a girl is unknown, but it’s clear that as Musk contemplated a buyout of the blue bird app, issues were brewing in the family.
In October, Musk told the Financial Times his son had been lost to “neo-Marxists” running the schools. Now, Twitter’s new chief executive is on a scorched earth campaign against wokeism by decapitating one of the central pillars of its censorship regime, complete with a series of exposés surrounding the platform’s decisions on content moderation while reopening the digital public square.
On Monday, Musk may have revealed the true intentions of his digital crusade with a morning tweet.
“The woke mind virus is either defeated or nothing else matters,” Musk wrote.
By labeling wokeness a “mind virus,” Musk isn’t just calling its adherents misguided. Musk is calling them sick, infected by a social contagion spread through schools and online platforms taken over by faithful followers of the new secular religion who have crushed dissent. Under the old leadership, Musk could have been banned from Twitter for referring to his son by his proper pronouns.
Musk doesn’t tweet about his children much, but his activism speaks to a broader point. The content moderation across modern platforms that is manipulated to amplify the transgender craze has caused calamity for teenage boys and girls. Trapped in social media’s echo chamber, a new generation of sexually confused adolescents are reaching adulthood convinced they were born in the wrong body. If Musk couldn’t save his son from the transgender hysteria brewing in schools and fostered by the left-wing takeover of the internet, then perhaps it was time to start buying the internet himself and save others from the same loss.
The Independent Women’s Forum has been chronicling the stories of victims of the transgender movement in its “Identity Crisis” series here.
Tristan Justice is the western correspondent for The Federalist. He has also written for The Washington Examiner and The Daily Signal. His work has also been featured in Real Clear Politics and Fox News. Tristan graduated from George Washington University where he majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.
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