"X" Marks the Spot
Where free speech used to be... Brazil pulls the plug on Elon Musk's social media giant
“A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime, whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, (or by any other name indicating his true character,) or by millions, calling themselves a government.”
~ Lysander Spooner, from No Treason: the Constitution of No Authority (1870)
Joel Bowman, with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
Tide comes in... tide goes out... tide comes in again. Same as it ever was...
Down in South America, as elsewhere on this little blue dot, the vital course of liberty ebbs and flows.
On the one hand, here in the “libertarian hellscape” of our beloved Argentina, the country is gradually opening up. Onerous regulations are being lifted... taxes are being rolled back... the whole economy – and the people who comprise it – are gradually being liberated from the heavy hand of The State.
It’s something we’re following carefully, unreconstructed anarchists that we are. It’s also part of the whole Free Markets, Free Minds, Free People tagline for this very publication... which you are, dear reader, free to support right here...
Liberty Recedes
Alas, the same cannot be said for our long-suffering, Brazilians neighbors to the north, who are at present watching their own tide of freedom fast recede.
Last week, Brazil’s Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes dropped the hammer on social media giant, X, announcing the “immediate, complete and total” suspension of the social media platform across the whole of Brazil.
What was X’s crime, exactly, that would cause it to be “immediately, completely and totally” shut out of a national market, where it has over 40 million active users? And what, exactly, did those tens of millions of users – one fifth of the country’s total population – do to deserve being deprived access to their own accounts, including any livelihoods they might derive therefrom?
In a Brazil Nut shell: X (and by extension its wallflower owner, Elon Musk) repeatedly refused to banish the socialist government’s political opponents who, ipso facto, are far-right lunatics bent on disseminating “mis- and disinformation,” from which the helplessly infantilized Brazilian population must be coddled and protected at all costs. Naturally.
Oh, and the platform (and owner) ignored a 24-hour deadline to name a new legal representative after the social media company closed its local office – presumably in disgust – back in mid-August. That, and some mean (and hilarious) Tweets from Mr. Musk himself.
“Justice” de Moraes also ordered the freezing of all Starlink’s assets in Brazil, including cars and aircraft, despite the fact that Starlink is a separate company entirely, with separate shareholders (many of whom, presumably, may care not a whiff for X at all).
Predictably, demand for Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) soared in the days following the ban, even as authorities (always looking out for the rights of dear citizens, of course) threatened to fine anyone caught using one to access X a hefty $9,000 per day...an amount equal to about 5-6 months average wage. (The equivalent of a $32,000 fine per day in the US... for the “crime” of accessing your social media account.)
Following the move, 23 senators in Brazil have voted to impeach Moraes, whom Musk nicknamed “Brazil’s Voldemort.” 16 voted against impeachment, while 43 remain “undecided.”
Lu… Lu… Luserism
To the surprise of nobody, Brazil’s radical leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, whom many suspect of playing puppeteer to the nation’s Kangaroo Supreme Court, came out in favor of the ban, which was upheld this Monday. Like a good Marxist, Lulu was quick to play up the “owner of the means of production vs. exploited masses” angle.
“The Brazilian justice system may have given an important signal that the world is not obliged to put up with Musk’s extreme right-wing anything goes just because he is rich,” the president remarked to CNN’s local comrade-in-arms network, CNN Brasil, on Monday.
Left-wing congresspeople, no doubt thrilled to send a chilling message to their political opponents, nonetheless used X to announce their goodbye messages before departing to a rival network. From Erika Hilton, who counted herself among the brave censors:
“If billionaires want to have companies that make billions in these parts, they need to learn to respect the laws. Long live the rule of law and national sovereignty.”
Of President Lula da Silva himself, Musk tweeted:
“The current Brazilian administration likes to wear the cloak of a free democracy, while crushing the people under its boot.”
No surprise there. Under his own bizarre ideology of “Luluism,” Lula da Silva has long been a staunch supporter of the “Socialism of the 21st Century” movement here in Latin America, a radical interpretation of socialist principles that denounces free market capitalism and which borrows heavily elements of Marxist revisionism.
Other luminaries to march behind the movement’s big red banner include such delightful dictators and degenerates as Rafael Correa of Ecuador (now living in exile in Belgium), Evo Morales of Bolivia (close amigo of Fidel Castro) and all round good fella, Hugo Chavez, of Venezuela, who impoverished his dirt poor nation but somehow managed to bequeath a handsome $4.2 billion fortune to his daughter when he finally went over to the shades in 2013, not one second too soon.
Nice guys, in other words... to avoid.
Contra Censors
Of course, this is not the first time Mr. Musk has run afoul of the authoritarian censorial class. Not even the first time this year!
Over in Europe, Musk is presently fighting against the continent’s Ministry of Truth, a.k.a. European Commission, which is investigating whether X “breached rules designed to limit illegal content and disinformation.” (Read: Allowing users to publish and share information freely, even if – and especially when – it is not approved by the powers that be).
Commissars Commissioners Thierry Breton and Margrethe Vestager are on the case over on the continent. (Do feel free to drop them a kindly message on X – @ThierryBreton and @vestager – where they regularly keep the sheeple informed of what they are – and are not – allowed to read/know/share etc.)
In Britain, meanwhile, a whole raft of academic lickspittles, government overlords and legacy media dinosaurs are clambering to shutter X, many of whom are calling for personal liability charges against Musk, its self appointed Chief Troll Officer. From Londistan mayor Sadiq Khan to Prime Minister Two-Tier Keir Starmer to the spooky members of the Orwellian-named ministry OfCom, practically the entire establishment elite has declared open season on people’s right to say things they don’t like or deem “offensive.”
Censored Down Under
And in Australia, where Musk faces rolling fines for refusing to “properly police online content,” (do these people still not know how “The Internets” work?), the Prime Minister there took a moment out of his apparently not-very-busy schedule to call the naughty CEO an “arrogant billionaire,” who “thinks he's above the law but also above common decency.”
The content Musk (and X) did not properly “police” (read: censor)? According to multiple news reports:
“Viral footage of an assailant wearing a black jumper entered Christ The Good Shepherd Church on Welcome Street, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar,’ and attacked several people with a knife, starting with the presiding bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, who was preaching and being live-streamed to the internet.”
Said PM Albanese in relation to Musk’s refusal to issue a worldwide takedown of videos (X did comply with a “geo lock” on the content being shared immediately after the incident in Sydney):
“He’s a billionaire over there in the United States who thinks he’s above Australian law. And he’s fighting for the right to show violent videos on his platform, something that can cause damage to young people, we know, and a great deal of distress. Something that will add to social division.”
The spineless PM was, of course, conspicuously reserved on his comments regarding that other thing known to cause “damage” and “distress” to young people (sometimes known as “psychos with knives.”)
And yet, according to know-it-all governments and their petit fonctionnaires across the entire Censorship Industrial Complex, from Canberra to Brasilia, London to Brussels and beyond, it’s not about citizens having free and open access to information – good, bad and ugly – in order to make informed decisions for themselves.
It’s about the State “pwotecting” them, womb to tomb, by censoring what they may and may not see. Unfortunately, right now the tide of liberty appears to be ebbing on more than one shoreline. To be continued...
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. Ban the Book… Banish the Author!
Dear readers of these Notes will not be surprised to learn that the censorial impulse of mankind is nothing new.
In fact, busybody authoritarians have been trying to suppress the free flow of information going back millennia, often under the nonsensical reasoning that it is some toxic combination of “wrong,” “harmful” and/or “offensive.”
From the trial of Socrates to the banishment of Ovid, the imprisonment and death of Galileo to the persecution of Julian Assange, it is a lamentable practice that continues to this day.
But what can we learn from the history of censorship and its repercussions, both for individuals subjected to it and the societies in which it is allowed to flourish?
As it so happens, our friends over at are hosting a live event to examine this critical topic… and they have an epic line-up of speakers to boot!
Click the link below to register for this special event – Ban the Book Banish the Author – and hear professors from top universities and leading free speech organizations delve into this most important subject… while they still can.
Admission is FREE and, if you can’t make it on the day, don’t worry… as long as you register above, you’ll be sent a recording of the event to watch and enjoy at your leisure. Cheers ~ JB
Excellent piece Joel. While I personally have no time for tweeting or X-ing, I find great joy observing the leftist elite's discomfort at trying to hold X to account for not censoring what people post thereon. The chief motive for Musk's purchase (an overpayment) of Twitter was his stance against it's censorship. Why would he now change his mind?
While not a perfect analogy it would be like the government holding the owners of telephone companies responsible for what people say on their telephone network.
Joel: Having to confirm that I am who I am is in itself a bit of irritation that I don’t appreciate, even if it is necessary. But setting that aside for another day, I feel I need to respond to your essay on censorship that is happening around the world. I am an American and as such I take for granted my Bill of Rights freedoms including my Second Amendment, which I’ve always assumed was the most important right and my First Amendment, which I’ve always assumed was basically carved in stone. However, I now see that my placing of importance on the right to be well armed is not the most important right I have. Instead, the right of free speech is the right that is both most significant and most vulnerable to loss. i have always assumed that my right to have firearms protected all my other rights. Not so. I see the right to speak my mind freely is much easier lost without taking away my guns, and which becomes the right that protects my other rights. The people of America are sheep that can be easily persuaded to give up everything if spoken to by persons who are glib and charming. Americans have been “educated” in our schools to believe whatever they are told by persons of charm and they simply fall into line like sheep. Keep ringing your bell and ring it louder. The world is sinking into socialism and our people seem to be following the piper with their eyes wide open. God help us for we know not what we do.