Moderate Elon Musk Drives the Blue Checks Mad

CLAY: Elon Musk’s pursuit of Twitter continues. And I think it’s super important still because all Elon Musk is doing is advocating for content-neutral policies. That means basically, as he says in his meeting that he had yesterday, he wants the far left and the far right to be equally angry at him sometimes, based on the policies that he puts in place. The far left has never really been angry at Twitter because all of their policies are so far left wing.

But in his meeting… I just want you it was not this audio. This has been leaked from inside of Elon Musk’s all-hands meeting. I want you to listen to it, and I want you to think about how rigged Big Tech is because everything that Elon Musk says here… By the way, Elon Musk made his first ever Republican vote. He voted for the congresswoman who won in the 34th District down in Texas. He tweeted about it. Elon Musk is a very moderate guy. I want you to listen to how moderate all this is, and yet it makes the Blue Check Brigade, the far left-wing lose their mind just to have neutral policies in place as it pertains to free speech. Listen.

CLAY: Buck, none of that is remotely controversial, what he said. Now, the way that it will be covered by the media will be covered as if he has said things that are controversial, but you know the rig job is in full effect. You just listened to that; everybody out there just listened to it. That’s leaked audio from his meeting with all of the Twitter employees. This is how broken Twitter is right now that everything he just said is considered to be radical by left wingers.

BUCK: What he is letting everybody see is a few things, really. One, you cannot be a person who is willing to think for yourself and process new information and be a true leftist Democrat. You cannot be a part of the movement, the vanguard of the Democrat Party today, period. I sound like Biden now, “Period!”

CLAY: No, you sound way too cogent to be Biden, by the way.

BUCK: Well, thank you, sir. I appreciate that. And it’s just true, though. The way that you see so many of the arguments of the left broken down these days, they have no interest in engaging. And this has been going on for years, but it’s become, I think, more apparent. “Speech equals violence. Platforming the opposition means that you’re conceding to them on issues of important public debate.” They don’t want to engage.

They don’t want to discuss. And the social media platforms really more than anywhere else I think is where that mentality has not only been on display but has unfortunately had a major impact on the national political conversation. I’m sure you saw they leaked… So Slack… I don’t use Slack but it’s big in a lot of companies have you ever used Slack before.

CLAY: We use it in a lot of our OutKick-related editorial processes but I don’t spend a lot of time in Slack but it is very popular.

BUCK: It’s kind of like the internal AOL Instant Messager from back in the day.

CLAY: For people who remember that.

BUCK: “You’ve Got Mail!” It’s kind of like from way back where everybody can chat with each other inside the company, and there were leaked screenshots of the internal Twitter employee Slack while Elon Musk is saying (impression), “I don’t think we should push a narrative. I think we should probably just be open to free speech.”

CLAY: That’s pretty good Elon Musk.

BUCK: Thank you. Did you see it?

CLAY: I haven’t even seen it.

BUCK: Oh, my gosh. “Oh, whatever. He’s erasing trans people!”

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: He’s not even talking about that! What are you talking about? You look at the internal thing, it’s almost like the closest thing you can get to being in the minds of Twitter employees is the running, real time, Slack channel discussion during Elon’s speech whether it’s just (summarized), “Oh, he’s the worst.” He’s gonna destroy everything that matters in our society!” He’s saying, “Can we share ideas and exchange thoughts and maybe try to defend the First Amendment?” They were in full on, “He’s not even announcing his pronouns!” meltdown.

CLAY: I don’t know — and this is a big, interesting debate question, I would think, in the years ahead. How does the Democrat Party get back to ever embracing free speech again? Because if you consider the history of free speech, it’s not one party that owns it. It constantly is kind of shifting and cyclical. And there’s zero doubt that if you believe in free speech, you have to vote Republican now. I don’t even see that as a remote argument that you could make in favor of Democrats.

Covid has accelerated it, but Democrats believe that you have to have certain opinions on a variety of issues, and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be allowed to share that. Buck, how do they ever get out of that dogma? How do they return to that, because it seems to me that they are continuing to paint themselves into a more and more remote corner and restricting speech for every single day; so how do they ever become… They like to claim initially they were the party of science.

No, you’re the party that says you can pick your gender. Maintenance Democrat orthodoxy now to believe — this is real — that when a baby is born, trans activities say that sometimes doctors get it wrong when they say, “Oh, it’s a boy,” or, “Oh, it’s a girl.” Biology is real. Mainstream Democrat, progressive thought requires you to believe now that biology isn’t real. I don’t know how they return to sanity because they have left their faculties so far behind. Do you have any idea? How do they get to a point where they’re not — uh, I’m trying to void cursing — totally and completely crazy?

BUCK: They have been kicking at the load-bearing walls of our civilization now for many years, and they’ve been going after many of the day-to-day mechanisms we have to maintain a free society – speech, obviously, being one of them — the mobilization of people behind things that they don’t understand at all and they explicitly are being lied to about it. Covid and all the lockdown procedures is I think another example of that.

But now the allegiance is to an authoritarian and absolutist mind-set. The allegiance has to be, “We tell you,” and there’s almost as a leftist a mechanized expectation of the responses exactly what is being dictated. There is no thought process allowed, and that’s why you get people… We played yesterday, people want to ban AR-15s. They don’t even know what is an AR-15 is. Who cares! They want to ban it because they were told that they should ban it to save lives, right? People should wear two masks, maybe they should wear three. Should they get two shots or should they get five?

No independent thought allowed because the way they’ve set this up, the moment that you allow for independent thought and the processing of new information… I keep saying leftist, but it’s really as a Democrat who wants to be in the center of the party or wants to be at the center of power in the party, if you break from them on anything, you’re conceding to Trump, to MAGA, to white nationalism. That’s the way it’s all set up now. So they’ve created an absolute binary where if you don’t accept everything that the apparatus tells you to you are playing into the hands of the other side, and that I think has been growing over time. I think social media has played a large role in creating that that mind-set

CLAY: Thought police.

BUCK: — and I think covid has supercharged it in some ways so the state was finally able to be truly authoritarian it happen and it was an experiment that I hope we never repeat — I’m afraid we will at some point repeat it but an experiment that shows how much time with willing to. I can never think of the mass American psyche the same way after what we saw just with covid and now what we see is that that extends to other areas too. That keeps on… Whatever I’m told I will do, doesn’t end with covid.

CLAY: And I’ll point this out. Remember that Democrats were trying to accuse Trump of being a dictatorial authoritarian. There was never a better time if you actually wanted to do that than the early days of covid. And remember what Trump did: He deferred almost exclusively — probably, you can argue, too much — to local authorities rather than federalizing anything. And Biden came in and took complete control of the government.

BUCK: Absolutely critical. It’s a distinction that we should continue to hammer as well ’cause sometimes people will say, “Oh, well, you keep pointing out how bad covid was how bad spending was and the shutdowns of the economy.” I met with the president in May of 2020 really just to talk about covid. This was May of 2020. This was early on. He says we’re not doing lockdowns, we gotta get opened up, we gotta get going. It was the CDC apparatus and the Democrat blue states that kept getting crazier and crazier and locking down and pushing. And then when Biden came into office, it added the federal layer on top of that. But it really… Trump only listened to Fauci for about two months.

CLAY: Yeah, and that’s where, honestly, I listened to Fauci. I think a lot of people did initially in those early days, and then we started to see that the emperor was wearing no clothes. But I just want all of you to recognize that if Trump had truly been a dictator, covid offered him an opportunity to be a dictator the likes of which we have not seen in generations in this country. And what did he do? He diversified to state and local governments rather than do what Biden did, which is mandate that you get the covid shot or you don’t get to work. I mean, I’m still furious about the fact that reasonable, intelligent people don’t make that argument.