Free Speech Frauds

Charlie Kirk’s assassination has become the pretext for the Trump administration to punish liberals for saying mean things.

by Ben Cohen

One of the myths fueling the ‘vibe shift’ under Donald Trump was the idea that free speech had been under attack during the Biden administration. The evidence for this came primarily from the notorious ‘Twitter Files’ story that new owner Elon Musk handed to journalists like Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger.

The Twitter Files allegedly proved that Democrats had been forcing social media companies to censor opinions they didn’t like — from the Hunter Biden laptop story to Democratic officials and agencies under Democratic control pressuring Twitter to remove or down-rank posts.

There were two main problems with the Twitter Files story. The first was the source of the story — Elon Musk. At the time of purchasing Twitter, the tech billionaire was rapidly repositioning himself as a hard-right culture warrior determined to ‘kill the woke mind virus.’ Musk handpicked the files and leaked them to selected journalists who had made names for themselves in the anti…