Editorial on Trump et al's utter hypocrisy over "free speech". (Some of the photo captions are quite funny though).
‘They deserve prison’: Elon Musk’s dissonance, and Donald Trump’s free speech hypocrisy
Two tweets from Elon Musk, sent a mere 20 minutes apart, lay bare the hypocrisy at the heart of his worldview.
https://www.news.com...461ff8a3ff6af34
Comment
Sam Clench February 18, 2025 - 11:13PM
Two Elon Musk thought bubbles here, posted a mere 20 minutes apart.
“One of the first things Hitler did upon gaining power was apply aggressive censorship.”
“60 Minutes are the biggest liars in the world! They engaged in deliberate deception to interfere with the last election. They deserve a long prison sentence.”
The dissonance is strong in this one.
I’ll give you the context for both quotes. The first was in response to a clip from CBS host Margaret Brennan who claimed, during an interview with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, that “free speech was weaponised to conduct a genocide” by the Nazis.
Mr Musk was actually replying to Vice President J.D. Vance, who had wondered: “Does the media really think the Holocaust was caused by free speech?”
I’ll admit to being an outlier here, judging by the sheer breadth of gobsmacked reaction to Ms Brennan’s remark, but I thought her point was fairly plain and defensible.
Adolf Hitler and other top Nazis spent years saying the most horrendous things about Jewish people, thoroughly dehumanising them, and blaming them for all Germany’s ills. They did this so successfully that Germans were willing to look the other way, if not actively participate, as Jews were stripped of their rights and, eventually, systematically murdered.
So no, free speech didn’t “cause” the Holocaust, not directly. But Hitler exploited his freedom to say such monstrous things to sow the seeds. If Anthony Albanese started to round up say, Muslims, starting tomorrow, and sent them to death camps, Australians wouldn’t accept it, would they? But if Australia had been drowning in virulently anti-Muslim rhetoric for a decade? The tolerance level would be higher.
That’s not necessarily an argument against greater freedom of speech – each society has to figure out where to set the line of what’s legally acceptable and what isn’t – but I’d argue Ms Brennan’s critics have completely missed her point. Which is that entirely unfettered freedom of speech can be exploited by the cynical, or the downright evil, for ruinous ends.
Anyway, the second Elon quote. In this case he was blasting America’s 60 Minutes, also on CBS, for having interviewed the former head of America’s international development agency USAID. Andrew Natsios is a lifelong Republican, who served in that position under George W. Bush. He has been fiercely critical of Mr Musk’s DOGE team for gutting the agency.
Mr Musk clearly isn’t happy about the interview; hence his reflexive attempt to discredit 60 Minutes, and rather shrill assertion that its staff deserve to be in jail.
He was alluding there to a lawsuit, brought against CBS by Donald Trump, which is worth running through in some detail. Because it’s illustrative of what the President has been doing, in the legal realm, since he won the election.
In brief, Mr Trump has accused CBS of damaging him, during last year’s campaign, by “deceptively” editing a prerecorded interview with his opponent, the then-vice president Kamala Harris.
Here is how the controversy unfolded. 60 Minutes interviewed Ms Harris. And these big interviews are always promoted on the network’s breakfast show (the equivalent of Sunrise or Today here in Australia). So, the team at 60 Minutes sent Face the Nation a slice of the interview to use in a preview segment.
Face the Nation’s crew edited it one way, airing the interviewer’s question and then part – not all – of Ms Harris’s answer. Here is the transcript of what viewers saw.
Interviewer: “But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening. The Wall Street Journal said that he – that your administration has repeatedly been blindsided by Netanyahu. And in fact, he has rebuffed just about all of your administration’s entreaties.”
Harris: “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region, by Israel, that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region.”
When 60 Minutes aired its edit of the interview, the same question was followed by a different answer. Here is that transcript.
Interviewer: “But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening. The Wall Street Journal said that he – that your administration has repeatedly been blindsided by Netanyahu. And in fact, he has rebuffed just about all of your administration’s entreaties.”
Harris: “We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
“Aha!” said the MAGA sleuths. Stone cold evidence that CBS had manipulated the footage that aired on 60 Minutes to make Ms Harris seem ... more coherent? Better? I mean both of the quotes above were delivered in her characteristic meaningless word salad style. Neither was ever going to impress anyone.
We now have access to the full transcript of everything 60 Minutes recorded, before any edits – something CBS really should have released when the controversy first broke out. Here is the full answer.
Interviewer: “But it seems that Prime Minister Netanyahu is not listening. The Wall Street Journal said that he – that your administration has repeatedly been blindsided by Netanyahu. And in fact, he has rebuffed just about all of your administration’s entreaties.”
Harris: “Well Bill, the work that we have done has resulted in a number of movements in that region, by Israel, that were very much prompted by or a result of many things, including our advocacy for what needs to happen in the region. And we’re not going to stop doing that. We are not going to stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.”
So Face the Nation picked one half of the answer and 60 Minutes picked the other. That was the catalyst for all the online furore, and for Mr Trump’s lawsuit, and for Elon’s argument that everyone involved deserves to rot in a cell.
We now have a great number of people pretending not to know how television works, including Mr Trump himself, who has no small amount of experience in the medium.
60 Minutes spoke to Ms Harris for 40-odd minutes. It had 21 minutes of airtime for her interview. Square peg, round hole. Edits for brevity and clarity were necessary. This is how prerecorded broadcast interviews have worked for decades.
So a long, rambling and ultimately quite pointless answer on Israel, for example, had to be chopped down. There was no “deception”. No attempt to make Ms Harris look better. Go and read the full transcript for yourself, or look up the raw, unedited footage.
(Frankly it wasn’t possible to make her look better, even if that had been one’s aim. Not a great performance.)
The same problem exists in print or on the internet, by the way. If I spend 20 minutes chatting to some academic for news.com.au, to get their analysis on tariff policy or whatever, guess what? I don’t publish every single quote. I’m not going to spam you with 5000 words and a bunch of irrelevant answers.
Have you ever seen a newspaper? There are finite column inches. Strict word limits. Copy is cut down to fit the space available.
And it’s even more frustratingly brutal in television. You have a limited amount of time. Significant edits cannot be avoided. Every time you watch the 6pm news, you are not seeing a heap of decent content that just couldn’t be squeezed in.
So, the lawsuit. Mr Trump alleges CBS edited the Harris interview for political reasons, because it wanted to make her seem more competent, or presidential, or something. Better. And he alleges this caused him immense financial damage.
I fool you not, this is the argument: that if not for 60 Minutes’ “deceptive” edits, Mr Trump would have been able to raise more money for his presidential campaign. A lot more money. He was seeking damages of $US10 billion, before he upped that to $20 billion this month.
Do take a moment to digest the ludicrous scale of that claim, please.
Throughout the entirety of the presidential campaign, Mr Trump raised less than $400 million. His lawsuit rests on an assertion that, absent the 60 Minutes edits, he would have brought in a further $10 billion. In the single month that remained before election day.
We haven’t even discussed the laws he claims were violated, which very obviously do not apply to this case, but hey, that would require at least another 500 words.
The point is it’s an absurdly, laughably spurious lawsuit. But it’s going to pay off!
Why? Because Mr Trump is now President, and thus he gets to appoint the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) – the agency that regulates broadcast media. The man he chose for this role is Brendan Carr.
Coincidentally – oh, what timing! – there is a pending merger between CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, and the film production company Skydance Media, worth a cool $8 billion. The parties have agreed to it. They’re just awaiting approval from ... the FCC. From Mr Carr.
Here is a recent, pertinent quote from him: “There’s a news distortion complaint at the FCC, still, having to do with CBS. CBS has a transaction before the FCC. I’m pretty confident that news distortion complaint over the CBS 60 Minutes transcript is something that’s likely to arise in the context of the FCC’s review of that transaction.”
The message there is unmistakeable. The proposed merger is inextricably linked to Mr Trump’s complaints about the 60 Minutes interview. So, hint hint CBS, if you want your lucrative merger to go through, you will bring the Trump case to an, ahem, satisfactory conclusion.
Lo and behold, we now hear reports that Paramount is negotiating a settlement, with Mr Trump, worth $100 million or so, having previously dismissed the lawsuit as nonsense.
What do we call this other than naked corruption? Other than Mr Trump using the powers of the presidency to metaphorically dunk his enemies’ heads in a toilet and enrich himself in the process? A garbage lawsuit will earn him more money than most people will ever see in their lives, because his appointed yes man has the authority to block a merger on a whim.
This is not an isolated case. Mr Trump extracted $25 million from Facebook and $10 million from Twitter for suspending his accounts in the wake of the January 6, 2021 riot. Those cases were almost as baseless. But Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, one man already in his orbit and the other desperately seeking a place in it, decided to pay up.
Mr Trump also got an easy $15 million in a settlement from America’s ABC News, having sued it over comments by anchor George Stephanopoulos after he was found, in court, to have sexually assaulted the writer E. Jean Carroll.
In his coverage of the ruling, Mr Stephanopoulos said Mr Trump had been found “liable for rape”. He was echoing comments from the judge in the case, who’d said Mr Trump’s conduct fit “the common definition” of rape.
Again, it was a trash case, doomed to fail if it ever reached trial. But ABC News, seeking to make peace the new President I suppose, decided it was better to cave beforehand.
We have an American President firing out trash lawsuits like a sprinkler gone haywire, and cumulatively getting tens of millions of dollars for himself. We have him holding those cases over media organisations as leverage.
There is most certainly a critique to be made of the media companies here, for acquiescing instead of fighting Mr Trump in court. The owners of these businesses quite clearly care more about their profits than any principle at play.
But do keep this stuff in mind the next time Elon, or J.D., or Donald himself pretends to be a champion of free speech.
They love the concept when it lets them parrot whatever they read from Catturd on Twitter. When their political opponents exercise speech, though, in a way they don’t like? Then they launch lawsuits. Then they talk about prison. Utter, flaming hypocrites.
"Fortune favors the bold, though statistics favor the cautious." - Indomitable Courteous (Icy) Fist, The Palace Job - Patrick Weekes
"Well well well ... if it ain't The Invisible C**t." - Billy Butcher, The Boys
"I have strong views about not tempting providence and, as a wise man once said, the difference between luck and a wheelbarrow is, luck doesn’t work if you push it." - Colonel Orhan, Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City - KJ Parker
Lady Bliss 
Abyss, on 18 February 2025 - 04:35 PM, said:
Tsundoku 
Help
