Elon Musk on Thursday evening temporarily suspended the Twitter accounts of a handful of high-profile journalists who shared real-time location data about him. Good. Musk was right to suspend these accounts. I’m glad it happened, and I hope it keeps happening.
And I say that as someone whose Twitter account has been locked since March simply for saying Rachel Levine is a man. I have no illusions that Musk is some savior for conservatives, or that under his watch Twitter will become a haven for free speech. But I do think it’s about time the leftist corporate media got a taste of their own medicine, in part so their hypocrisy, mendacity, and craven power-grubbing can be exposed to a watching world.
And boy are they obliging. On Friday morning, nearly every corporate media outlet lead with breathless stories (“unprecedented,” Axios called it) lamenting that Musk was attacking “journalists who have criticized him,” and pretending that what they were engaged in didn’t count as doxxing — as if this is about freedom of the press and not ensuring the safety of Musk’s family, or anyone else who might be targeted in real life by radical left-wing ideologues.
And make no mistake, that’s exactly what these suspended “journalists” are — their ranks include former Vox journalist Aaron Rupar, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan, New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, and the absolutely ridiculous clown Keith Olbermann.
But being a member of the corporate media doesn’t give you a special privilege to target people. As Musk said to a group of journalists in a Twitter Spaces chat he crashed on Thursday night, “You’re not special because you’re a journalist.”
There can be only one reason to promote or retweet real-time location information about a person or their family: You hope something bad happens to them. You hope someone acts on it. In this case, these reporters were amplifying a Twitter account that was posting location data about Musk’s private jet, and doing so on the heels of a disturbing incident in Los Angeles involving a stalker targeting a car that was carrying Musk’s toddler son.
In other words, the media elite who for years absurdly claimed that “speech is violence” actually engaged in the promotion of violence and got caught doing it — and we’re supposed to feel bad for them? I don’t think so.
Media leftists who for years have demanded online censorship of conservatives, don’t care at all about free speech, and in fact actively work to quash it however they can are suddenly alarmed at Musk silencing their own?
To quote Sen. Tom Cotton’s recent remark to the woke CEO of Kroger, a company that fired Christian employees for not endorsing the grocery chain’s LGBT advocacy but now wants Republican help with a proposed merger: “I’m sorry that’s happening to you. Best of luck.”
Corporate media didn’t care when the woman behind Libs of TikTok was doxxed by The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz — in fact they defended it, calling it “accountability.” They didn’t care when pre-Musk Twitter shadowbanned prominent conservative accounts like The Federalist’s own CEO, Sean Davis, or locked accounts like mine and others for pushing back against trans ideology. They thought it was justified. They cheered it on. The recent reporting on the “Twitter Files” exposed the blunt truth behind the banning of former President Donald Trump: It wasn’t because he violated Twitter rules, but because the leftists who were running Twitter hated him.
Like Twitter’s erstwhile left-wing censors, elite reporters at corporate media outlets grew accustomed to thinking of Twitter as their own personal possession, a platform for people like them — left-wing, woke, espousing all the right opinions and denouncing all the supposedly fascist, bigoted, ignorant opinions of conservatives. Twitter was a tool that enhanced their power and influence, nothing more. They care as much for free speech and an open public square as they do about reporting the truth.
As George Orwell once wrote, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” By suspending these accounts, Musk is telling us the truth about the media: They are hypocrites and liars who care only about power — and will do anything to cling to it. They’re a cancer on our civic life, and I hope they’re suspended indefinitely.
John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.
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