By Matthew Delaney
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
To understand the hysteria over Elon Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, you need to understand one thing: the blue check mafia has nowhere else to go.
There is no fallback position, no other social media site where they can marry their intellect with their influence once again. The 10-year run as judge, jury and executioner of what is and isn’t worthy of discussion is coming to an end. Progressives, SJWs, the woke, whatever you want to call them, they know this. That’s why they’re fighting tooth and nail to keep Twitter in their hands.
It is their Alamo moment.
I get that may sound ridiculous to say out loud.
Dude, it’s an app that barely one-fifth of the country uses, and the only top 1% of users produce most of the content. People in the real world don’t care about Twitter or what’s going on there. You’re being dramatic.
A few years ago, I would’ve agreed. But maybe my own story with Twitter can help illustrate its importance.
My friends signed me up for Twitter when I was a junior in high school and advertised it as “Like Facebook, except you post statuses all the time.” Great, another platform where people can share their thoughts. Just what the world needed. When Black Lives Matter and #Hashtagtivism came around, I didn’t buy it. Kids that were afraid to show their parents their report cards back in the day could now post a magical phrase online and be seen as enlightened? What a crock of shit.
But those tweets leaked off the screen and into real life conversations. Fighting “systemic racism” and “rape culture” were terms I heard more and more. Ending those were necessary to achieve “social justice” according to the blue check betters I followed. I won’t lie, I bought into it…slowly. “They cared,” I thought around 2015, “they must know their stuff.” Then, Donald Trump won the presidency. Every one of my trusted voices on Twitter, who were so sure they had the answers just hours earlier, suddenly thought half the country was incurably racist.
Really? They didn’t get their way, and now anyone who disagreed with them was basically Jim Crow reincarnated? Yeah right. It was during this time that I asked myself, “What did I get wrong about the election?” It didn’t take me long to realize that the Twitter experience I knew didn’t represent the real world, and I wanted to find people on there who did.
That was when I found Dave Rubin, who led me to Jordan Peterson, who led me to Joe Rogan, and then the Daily Wire guys, and Tim Pool, and yes, Curtis “The Snake Charmer” Scoon, among countless others. People with common sense who could name the bad actors — blue check activists, thinkers, and most egregiously, journalists — that were trying to contort reality to their fantasy.
The collective wisdom of those accounts had “red-pilled” me by about the middle of 2017. Because of them, I was able to see the “fine people” hoax for what it is, just like I did with the “kids in cages” lie, the contrived nature of Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual assault allegations, and of course, the utter sham that was Russiagate. Trump wasn’t perfect by any means, but he was definitely not the Hitler-esque figure I was expecting on Election Night 2016. However, I was still watching the rest of the country play catch up — and that was a painfully slow process.
Covid-19 changed that. The entire world froze in place, so the entire world went online to follow what our Tweeter-in-Chief had to say. To balance it out, the “normies,” as we like to call them, also signed up for the standard blue check experience on Twitter that I did years earlier. I’m sure they weren’t expecting to need to fact check the fact checkers.
When blue checks called Trump irresponsible for saying we needed to “Liberate Michigan!” but then cheered on BLM protests, people took notice. When Trump wanted kids back in school for Fall 2020, but blue checks advocated to keep them closed, parents online and at my local news job felt it was a reflexive anti-Trump reaction. When the Hunter Biden laptop story was smothered, more alarm bells were raised.
It didn’t get much better once Trump was banned and blue checks had their run of the place. You thought getting vaccinated would let you take off your mask? Think again, science denier. You want to criticize your local school board? Sounds like something a domestic terrorist would do. You think inflation is Joe Biden’s fault? Lucky for you, inflation is actually a good thing! The red-pilling that had taken me four years to embrace was being accepted by others in barely 14 months.
Twitter’s power over the last decade has come from its ability to influence the conversation among the elite, who then dictates the conversation for the rest of us through the various communications, medical, and tech institutions they control. Now that the elite has the puppet Biden in office, it essentially has unilateral control over the administration. Twitter acts as the backroom where they hash out ideas.
There’s just one problem: we have Twitter, too. We can see phony narratives form in real time, whether it’s silly ones like the Border Patrol agents whipping migrants or the more consequential ones like Kyle Rittenhouse’s murder trial. We can see the double standards that let Chinese government operatives and Iran’s Ayatollah have accounts, but the Babylon Bee can’t because they mocked transwoman Rachel Levine for being their “Man of the Year.”
Allegedly, that last example got under Musk’s skin. That’s when the world’s richest man bought his initial stake in the company, and then upped the ante with his offer to buy the company outright soon after that. The fact that the opposition to Musk’s offer is a Saudi businessman and asset-manager Vanguard Group told us all about how sincere the “social justice,” and now “equity,” focus of Twitter ever was.
Jen Psaki, Biden’s spokeswoman, can try and downplay Twitter’s importance all she wants. However, the collective shrieking of blue checks when news of Musk wanting to refocus the site’s commitment to free speech came out said it all — they don’t want you to have free speech on their platform.
If they lose Twitter and threaten to pull the social media equivalent of “I’m moving to Canada if Trump wins,” they know no one will follow. They know no one will subject themselves to being canceled or being called Nazis or being lied to — openly — anymore. We’ve seen how these people behave when they control not only the medical, educational, and political establishment, but the narrative-making machine that guides each of those institutions, too. They serve themselves above all, and if you don’t think that’s what’s best for the country, then you’re the problem.
Holding onto Twitter for dear life is the only way the blue checks can make sure that its current thought leaders don’t become just another band of shitposters. They must defend their Alamo, unless they want us to verify how little relevance they have left.
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