Much of the commentary has framed Musk's move for a Twitter buyout, which began last month, as part of a right-wing revolt against perceived left-wing social media bias. (The suspension of the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical site, for a tweet dubbing Health and Human Services Secretary Rachel Levine, a transgender woman, "Man of the Year" was presumably the proximate cause for the Tesla CEO's serious investigation into Twitter ownership.) Musk's politics, on the other hand, are not very right-wing. Unlike his erstwhile competitor turned colleague Peter Thiel, Musk, at least based on his public remarks and actions, does not want to empower a weird blend of extreme libertarian and ultra right ideology. Musk, along with then-Disney CEO Bob Iger, resigned from Trump's two White House commissioned business advisory councils in June 2017 as a result of Trump's decision to withdraw from the Obama-era Paris climate accords; Musk had previously justified his participation in the councils by claiming that he and other business leaders could do good by helping shape the White House agenda.

Musk was still in the good graces of the mainstream media at the time. This appears to have changed in May 2018, when Musk responded to bad media reports about Tesla by attacking the media's legitimacy on Twitter.

Going to create a site where the public can rate the core truth of any article & track the credibility score over time of each journalist, editor & publication. Thinking of calling it Pravda …

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 23, 2018

Musk was most likely being thin-skinned and attempting to redirect attention away from the company's troubles. Despite this, he wasn't the only one with thin skin. In the age of Trump and right-wing trolls, it was easy to dismiss any criticism of the media as aiding and abetting the Troll-in-war Chief's on "fake news" and "enemies of the people." The following was a typical exchange between Verge transportation editor Andrew Hawkins and Musk:

Musk continues his slow transformation into a media-baiting Trump figure screaming irrationally about fake news. Hope it works out for you dude! https://t.co/CtHkOip747

— Andrew J. Hawkins 🚇🚌🚲🛴 (@andyjayhawk) May 23, 2018

Needless to say, the media's retaliation had the usual Streisand effect of bringing greater attention to Musk's attacks while also politicizing them. Musk made some unavoidable mistakes, but he was still concerned about maintaining his mainstream credibility at the time; when he inadvertently recommended a media criticism piece from a site affiliated with the sex cult NXIVM, he quickly removed it after the shady provenance of the website was revealed. Despite all of Musk's deserving criticism, his detractors in the media engaged in their own underhanded tactics, such as when the Daily Beast published a piece by science journalist Erin Biba claiming that female journalists who criticized Musk—such as herself—were subjected to particularly vicious and sexist abuse by Twitter "MuskBros," with unmistakable innuendo of misogyny-by-association—despite the absence of any evidence that Musk himself had (For that matter, Biba's main proof that female journalists were singled out for harassment came from a male journalist who said despite going after Musk, he didn't get much backlash; such gender-based narratives tend to rely on skewed and cherry-picked facts.) Anti-Semitism allegations also surfaced around the same period. "Do you think it's in the interest of powerful people to A: encourage a free press that exposes their lies, or B: tear it down so their lies are easier to tell?" asked Verge co-founder Joshua Topolsky in response to Musk's idea for a media rating site. "Who do you think *owns* the press?" Musk responded with a tweet. Hello.” As I stated earlier in the post, Musk clearly meant "powerful individuals" in context. However, many people, including journalists like NBC News writer Ben Collins, immediately assumed Musk was implying the "Jews own the media" trope:

Who do you think *owns* the press? Hello.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 27, 2018

Alt right trolls jumped on the bandwagon as well, but it was difficult to know whether they were drawn to Musk's initial tweet or the accusing answers. It didn't help matters that Topolsky eventually erased all of his tweets from the thread, removing all context. Collins, who was the first to pounce on Musk's tweet, launched a thread a year later pointing out that it was still being circulated out of context by neo Nazis and other baddies, and implying that Musk was to blame for not removing it (even though the example Collins gave was a screenshot which Musk could not have stopped anyone from using).

In essence, I believe Musk's latter online persona—connected to the "anti-woke" counterculture, prone to "shitposting" and "lib owning," and occasionally even Trumpy—has been a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy for Musk detractors. This is not to imply that Musk is unaccountable for his actions. He's an adult, but he's also prone to thin-skinned, juvenile outbursts (as evidenced by the iconic "pedo guy" spat with a British cave rescuer in Thailand in June 2018). His feud with the progressive commentariat, on the other hand, has clearly taken two.

Today, as Musk appears to be on the verge of acquiring Twitter (talk about lib owning! ), there are compelling grounds to doubt Musk's plans to overhaul the social media network. I believe he undervalues the challenges of sustaining a "free speech" commitment—a commitment to allowing maximum self-expression and exchange of ideas—on a worldwide site with 330 million active users while weeding out the toxic content that would render it worthless if allowed to expand unchecked. Given that several of those nations have extremely restrictive regulations, his recent comment that he would "hew close to the rules" of the countries in which Twitter operates raises a whole new can of worms. And his eagerness to engage a venomous alt-right troll like Michael Cernovich in the same tweet raises serious doubts about his judgment.

Twitter obv has a strong left wing bias

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2022

Musk's rash anti-lockdown posts at the height of the COVID-19 outbreak, in my opinion, raise similar problems.

But it is also true that some of the recent attacks on Musk have been intemperate, ill-informed, and patently unfair, not only from individual Twitter users but also from the mainstream media. The most egregious example so far is John Eligon and Lynsey Chutel's May 5 New York Times "deep dive" into Musk's South African background, which began by implying that Musk had largely kept quiet about "how growing up as a white person in South Africa under the racist apartheid system may have shaped him." The evident suggestion was that Tesla's CEO was concealing nefarious racist secrets. Further down in the piece, it was found that Elon had black friends (rare in his environment), questioned his father about the country's racial inequities, and was once humiliated at school for chastising a classmate who had used a racial slur. Internet sleuths like Tom Gara (of Meta/ Facebook, formerly of Buzzfeed News) soon deduced that the Times story had been secretly changed from a more critical version. Furthermore, Eligon's first tweet linked to the piece oddly implied that apartheid South Africa, with its vast system of censorship, highlighted the perils of Musk's "unchecked speech." The "unchecked speech" in question, however, was apartheid propaganda from the government.

Elon Musk grew up in a South Africa that saw the dangers of unchecked speech: Apartheid govt propaganda fueled violence against Black people. Musk didn't experience that. He grew up in a bubble of white privilege. @lynseychutel & I explored his early life https://t.co/jixQoCriv5

— John Eligon (@jeligon) May 5, 2022

what was your favorite day on twitter

— Marisa Kabas (@MarisaKabas) April 25, 2022

What Quigley was referring to (along with several other "blue check" Twitter users) was one of the most heinous episodes of mass harassment in Twitter history: Justine Sacco's mobbing in December 2013 for a tweet she sent just before an 11-hour flight from London to Cape Town that read, "Going to Africa. I'm hoping to avoid contracting AIDS. Just joking. I'm white!" Sacco, a 30-year-old director of corporate communications at the IAC media firm, was mocking a naive "white privilege" mentality, but when her tweet went viral, some assumed she was being literal rather than humorous. People eagerly anticipated the surprise on her face when she landed and checked her email and social media accounts, fueled by the fact that IAC had published a statement saying Sacco was in flight and inaccessible. By the time she arrived, she was not only unemployed, but also so well-known that hotels had to cancel her reservations, and her own relatives had rejected her. Yet, when an effort was finally made to clear the air (thanks in part to Jon Ronson's coverage of Sacco's story in his 2015 book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed), a progressive academic, Patrick Blanchfield, felt compelled to write a Washington Post column griping that Sacco was an undeserving "poster child" for online abuse because 1) her ironic tweet could have still caused "hurt" and somehow compounded or trivialized the tragedy of AIDS

If you don't think Sacco's mobbing was an egregious case of Twitter harassment, your definition of "harassment" is likely to be political. If you think that was a fantastic Twitter moment, you're probably not against online harassment. There are numerous such instances of online harassment masquerading as social justice advocacy. Consider the years-long smear campaign against journalist Jesse Singal, which included terrible slanders and threats, many of which came from blue-check progressive journalists rather than anonymous trolls. Singal has questioned several aspects of progressive conventional wisdom on transgender matters, therefore this hounding is sheer political revenge.

Consider those who have been falsely labeled as bigots as a result of a viral video. After example, in October 2018, a woman from Portland, Oregon was dubbed "Crosswalk Cathy" on social media and in a Portland Mercury article for allegedly contacting the cops on a black couple over a lousy parking job. In fact, as the Mercury eventually admitted, the woman seen in a 30-second video clip was reporting a car that was partially obstructing a crossing while its owners were picking up takeaway food nearby (and had no means of knowing the owners' racial identification until they returned and challenged her). After the video went viral, at least one activist used Twitter as a means of retaliation, saying, "Twitter, do your thing and identify this woman." Others published identifying information, encouraged people to contact the data management school where the woman worked, and boasted about writing to demand her dismissal. While Crosswalk Cathy did not lose her job, she did clean up her online reputation for at least a year. Should recommendations for preventing online abuse be included in strategies to combat the problem?

"Disinformation" involves equally laden definitional difficulties, as evidenced by the current controversy surrounding the planned "Disinformation Governance Board" of the Department of Homeland Security. Do we merely place the "disinformation" sticker on Donald Trump's "stolen election" falsehood, or should we also put a "misleading" or "partly untrue" label on Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams' comparable claims? Should Twitter's disinformation crackdown have caught the many viral tweets in March 2021 claiming that a Georgia police official casually excused Robert Allan Long's fatal shootings of eight people (six of them Asian women) at several Atlanta spas and massage parlors as "yesterday was a really bad day for him, and this is what he did" based on a blatantly out-of-context quote? (In truth, Capt. Jay Baker was simply responding to a query regarding what the suspect had told interrogators.) Would it apply to a viral tweet earlier this month that misrepresented a footnote from Justice Samuel Alito's draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, claiming that Alito and Justice Amy Coney Barrett were arguing that abortion should be prohibited because the US requires a "domestic supply of infants" for adoption?

The same issues arise when it comes to "hate speech." Does the definition cover insults directed towards white people or men? Do "gender-critical feminists" have a right when they suggest that Twitter's rules on "misgendering" (which can refer to anything from specific abuse of transgender people to broad statements about sex, gender, and identity) unfairly favors one side in an ongoing and unresolved debate?

Because Twitter is such a large site with relatively ambiguous rules and norms, as well as inconsistent enforcement—based not only on user complaints but also on individual staffer decisions—drawing any type of conclusion concerning bias trends is extremely difficult. The point isn't whether Twitter is biased towards conservatives or progressives. It's more that those who believe Musk will unleash the forces of evil on Twitter have a massive blind spot when it comes to the existing toxicity, especially toxicity among progressives, and they want social media to be regulated in a "no enemies to the left" mindset.

***

Even if Musk does purchase Twitter, it is far from guaranteed that he will improve things. He doesn't seem to have a right-wing goal, despite his nods to the "countercultural" right; he's no serious political thinker, but he's flexible enough to provide some alternatives to kneejerk divisiveness. (Is Trump's proposed unban a hint of where things are heading? Not necessarily—and some argue that the decision will hurt Trump.) Even if his ego is likely to get in the way, Musk appears willing to talk across party lines. Making him the enemy ahead of time is not a good idea.

At the very least, a Musk buyout, or even the possibility of one, would shake things up and force us to reconsider a variety of issues, including the political and ideological framing of terms like "harassment," "disinformation," and "hate speech" on Twitter. Perhaps the uncomfortable debates will also address Twitter's disproportionate influence in the media and politics. Is this a public plaza? A collective consciousness? Unrepresentative opinions in an imperfect cross-section? Or is it simply a hangout for journalists, pundits, and activists, whose importance they tend to exaggerate?

We're having that discussion right now, which is a good start.

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Anti-liberal talk on the right has been around for a long time, but it has become more popular thanks to the success of Patrick Deneen's book, Why Liberalism Failed, in 2018. In Deneen's book, he attacks liberalism in a much more sophisticated and civil way than Leibovitz did. Deneen argues that liberalism, which emphasizes personal autonomy, leads to the dissolution of communal and familial bonds, atomization, moral nihilism, political alienation, and the hollowing out of culture and education because it emphasizes personal autonomy over community and family. It didn't fail because it didn't live up to itself, but because it was true to itself. There's a reason it didn't work out: "It worked out because it worked out." Provocatively, he said that the Founding Fathers were to blame for the bad things that liberals did in the United States.

The next year, the religious conservative magazine First Things ran a lot of articles against Enlightenment liberalism and old-style American conservatism that was too focused on individual liberty, tolerance, and pluralism. "Conservative Democracy" by American-born Israeli political scientist Yoram Hazony, the author of the controversial 2018 book The Virtue of Nationalism, was one of the most well-known. Hazony, like Deneen, says that liberalism has failed. Deneen, on the other hand, only offers vague and localized alternatives. Hazony, on the other hand, proposes an alternative form of democratic government that explicitly rejects the liberal Enlightenment tradition based on reason, "the free and equal individual," and "obligations arising from choice." This is not what conservative democracy is all about. The main values of this type of democracy are state-sponsored majority religion and immigration restrictions, while individual freedoms are only allowed if they are part of national tradition and custom. Hazony, on the other hand, wants to turn the American founding into a conservative movement by getting some of the founding fathers to join. He does this by reducing the Lockean roots of the American Revolution to some "Enlightenment rationalist phrases" in the Declaration of Independence, which he thinks are not very important.

Hazony and Deneen, on the other hand, are some of the more moderate critics of the Enlightenment on the right, and they should be pointed out that way. Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule is one of the Catholic integralists, who believe that the law should be changed to make sure that everyone is treated equally. They say that conservative Catholics in the United States should work to build a political system in which the state is spiritually subordinate to the Catholic Church and is based on its tenets and values, which is why they say this. If you live in the United States now, you might think this is a crazy idea because only one-fifth of the population is Catholic. Sohrab Ahmari, a conservative Catholic, says that "a public square re-ordered to the common good and ultimately the Highest Good" is far more appealing to conservatives. There's also the fact that integralists have been having something of a comeback in mainstream conservative venues (like the Law and Liberty website, where Ave Maria University professor James M. Patterson wrote about it last year).

ROLLING THE CLOCK BACK

Right-wing critics of the Enlightenment often say that modern progressivism is a continuation of the radical individualism of the Enlightenment. This is a paradox. In a First Things article in 2019, Ahmari wrote that "the movement we are up against also values autonomy above all; indeed, its ultimate goal is to secure for the individual will the widest possible berth to define what is true and good and beautiful, against the authority of tradition." This is what he meant. Ahmari says that the goal of this quest is to make sure that everyone agrees with everyone else's choices. People who have traditional religious views should help with same-sex weddings as bakers or florists, and sexually active gays should be able to serve in religious groups on college campuses. Ahmari says that conservatives who value individual freedom have no defense against that logic. There is, of course, a strong counterargument that individual autonomy also protects religious freedom, and in fact, French has always been in favor of it.

Today's left-wing progressivism only values individual autonomy and self-determination in certain situations, like when people can live their lives the way they want to. In general, it has a very negative view of these things. Indeed, classifying people by their racial, ethnic, and sexual identities is at the heart of the progressive worldview, which says that universalism is an imposition of white European and patriarchal values on people who aren't straight white males or white European and patriarchal people. In social justice circles, it's common to think that individualism, rationality, objectivity, and other Enlightenment values are traits of "whiteness" or "white supremacy culture." This idea has been used in "anti-racist" training workshops. It's hard for them to see how this view is similar to one that white supremacists have been making for a long time.

On the left, direct attacks on the Enlightenment have become more common. They mostly focus on the idea that Enlightenment-based philosophy and science have been involved in, and tainted by, racism. "The Enlightenment has been tarnished by its association with European colonialism, and the Enlightenment universalism is a sham because 'the rights of man' are really 'the rights of white men.'"

If you read the Daily Beast article, you'll see that it points the finger at Locke, but there have been many more sophisticated critiques of this idea, like the work of the recently deceased Jamaican American philosopher Charles W. Mills and the Slate article by journalist Jamelle Bouie in 2018 that said that people who point to the Enlightenment as a beacon of freedom, progress, and humanism have to deal with its dark side. The Enlightenment and its thinkers are not only guilty of supporting slavery and colonial oppression, but they also made scientific racism and racial classification. Race as we know it is a product of the Enlightenment, says Bouie. Racism came about because thinkers who advocated liberty but also supported slavery had to find a way to classify enslaved people as "subhuman," which is what race is all about, he says.

This is the dark side of the Enlightenment

There is no doubt that the Enlightenment and its legacy have a dark side, just like everything else in history. Because they were not included in the Enlightenment liberals' ideal of a free, self-reliant person (women, blacks, and other minorities), or because they didn't want to join in (they didn't want to be a part of the group) (religious and cultural traditionalists). Immanuel Kant and Thomas Jefferson, two people from the Enlightenment, explained why nonwhite people were treated as less important than white people. Enlightenment thinkers didn't like some of their spiritual offspring, such as the Jacobins of the French Revolution. They didn't like rich people and "fanatical" peasants who were very religious. In terms of race relations, the American republic did a lot worse than the French republic did. This is partly because France's racial problems were sent to its colonies. But when it came to religious and political pluralism, the American republic did a lot better.

Yet, it's important to point out that the Enlightenment was not nearly as one-dimensional as critics often make it out to be. This is a common mistake in pro-Enlightenment narratives, like the one written by linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker in his 2018 book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason. Even in one country, France, it had people who were deists, theists, believers in "natural religion," and a few atheists. Also, the Age of Reason was also the age of sentiment and a time when people were very interested in the study of human nature and passions. The Enlightenment was "a revolt against rationalism," cultural historian Peter Gay said in his 1966–1969 book The Enlightenment: An Interpretation. Gay also said that the Enlightenment was "a rejection of religious anti-rationalism." It also praised the virtues of family, domestic happiness, and community, not radical individualism. This is what the Enlightenment thought about.

Enlightenment views on race and slavery were at least as complicated as they are now. In the past, people used religious, legal, and economic reasons to justify racial subjugation and exploitation. But now, people are using pseudoscience to justify these practices, and they don't like it. Diderot, the French Encyclopedist, was one of many Enlightenment philosophers who were against colonialism and slavery. He was one of the authors of A History of the Two Indies, which was a best-seller and at one point was banned. It was written by Abbot Guillaume Raynal, and it was critical of Europeans' behavior in the Americas, coastal Africa, and Asia. Vartija says that these thinkers didn't use race to make human rights and chattel slavery work together. Instead, they were disgusted by the slave trade and colonialism, which made them want to fight for human rights. Holly Brewer, a history professor at the University of Maryland, says in Aeon magazine that "slavery's roots were in absolutism, not liberalism," and that "liberalism came about because of slavery." Brewer says that the Enlightenment's attack on the idea that a person's place in society was set by God when they were born led to the end of slavery.

Enlightenment-style scientific exploration also led to attempts at racial classification, which played a role in the rise of scientific racism in the 1800s. Even if this classification was made by Enlightenment people, like Comte Georges Louis Leclerc deBuffon, it did not rely on the idea that races were set in stone, did not assume that white people were better than other people, and did not try to justify racial oppression.

Ad hominem attacks against the Enlightenment can come from both the right and the left, and they can be very inaccurate. Accused of hypocrisy and collusion in slavery: Locke briefly owned stock in the Royal African Company (which was given to him as payment), and he is said to have written the 1669 Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina, which made slavery more legal and strong. This is not true. Yet, there is a lot of debate about how much of a role Locke played in drafting the constitutions as a secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina. It's clear that Locke didn't just oppose slavery in his seminal work, Two Treatises of Government. He also backed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 in part because the king it overthrew, James II, was a supporter of slavery.

Hazony, on the other hand, says that Locke, Spinoza, Kant, and Descartes, along with Spinoza, Kant, and Descartes, are childless bachelors who believe in a free, atomic individual because of their narrow perspective. Locke didn't just think the family was important to civil society and the development of the individual. He was also a pediatrician who advised friends on how to raise their kids. In the same way that Hazony is attacking a cartoon version of Locke and the Enlightenment, he is attacking a cartoon version of Locke.

CIRCLE OF LEFT AND RIGHT THAT IS NOT LAWFUL

As it turns out, there have been Enlightenment wars before. In 2000, a political scientist at Boston University wrote an article in the journal Political Theory called "What Enlightenment Project?" In it, he looked at two common criticisms of the Enlightenment: from the right, that the Enlightenment is too focused on the individual at the expense of family and community; from the left, that the Enlightenment's concepts of freedom and human rights are Eurocentric and racially exclusionary. But the arguments have become much more bitter, extreme, and public.

During the 20th century, fascists and communists often used their arguments to say that they didn't like or didn't agree with Enlightenment liberalism. It was before that, both the Progressive Era reformers in the United States and the pro-slavery secessionists in the Confederacy framed their goals as a rejection of Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism was said to be out-of-date, wrong, or made up to be used as a tool of oppression. These anti-liberal arguments led to some of the worst things that have happened in the modern world.

Because liberal democracies are defined by their history of the Enlightenment, attempts to find good alternatives to classical liberalism have often failed. Deneen's book, Why Liberalism Failed, from the right, says that liberalism's positive gains must be preserved, but it doesn't really offer any programs or solutions. Instead, it encourages people to build cultural enclaves outside of the liberal consensus (he cites the Amish as an example). Ironically, liberal pluralism is the thing that makes it possible to do that. In Charles Mills's critique of the Enlightenment's "racial contract," he says that the Enlightenment's own intellectual tools should be used to get rid of racism in liberalism. This is how it works:

Such critics of the Enlightenment show how deeply we all have liberal ideas about morality. It's hard for them to explain their critiques without referring to liberal ideas. A different way of looking at things would be so disgusting that it's almost impossible to defend, and many of its own supporters are afraid of it.

However, in the last few years, solutions that are openly authoritarian have become more popular in both camps. Among the right-wingers, Hazony wants conservative democracy and religious diktat, Ahmari says that accepting Trump's populist leadership should be a conservative credential, and the nationalist right is in love with illiberal foreign leaders like Hungary's Viktor Orbán, which is why Hazony and Ahmari are on the same page. People on the left are trying to get "wrongthink" out of academic, cultural, and corporate institutions. There are also more calls for government power to stop people from saying what the left thinks are bad ideas. Hate speech bans are getting a lot of attention again, as well as proposals for a "antiracist constitutional amendment" and a federal "department of anti-racism." When people start flirting with communism again and make excuses for the Soviet empire, this is also a sign that people are still interested in it.

One could argue about "both sides' ism" and keep debating which kind of authoritarianism is more dangerous. While this is going on, each side points to the other's authoritarian excesses as a reason to give up liberal tolerance in the fight against the evil enemy.

Remember that even though Enlightenment liberalism had its flaws, it was also trying to break with an oppressive order based on political, religious, and social tyranny. And when people tried to replace it with something else that was better, they kept getting new forms of tyranny. When we get past the caricatures, the Enlightenment is complex enough to have a lot of different ideas. Before we call it a failed experiment or a tool for oppression, we should know its history and how important it is to huge leaps in moral progress.

Trying to get rid of those foundations has led to things that aren't as bad as people complaining about secularization, individualism, and free markets. A new and better anti-Enlightenment political philosophy hasn't been able to show that it isn't just repeating the same mistakes, which could lead to disaster.

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