The Free-Speech Hypocrite and His MAGA Bullhorn
Plus, Vance works the refs, and mainstream media whitewashes Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.
Elon Musk is, for lack of a better term, full of shit.
When the conspiratorial tech mogul purchased X (then Twitter) in 2022, he promised to run the social media site as a “free speech absolutist.” Musk, who was highly critical at the time of the platform’s temporary restriction of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just ahead of the 2020 election, suggested similar acts wouldn’t happen under his leadership.
“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” he fumed at the time.
Musk even launched the so-called Twitter Files to prove that the suppression of the laptop report was part of a government effort to help the Biden campaign. While the investigation never revealed evidence of government interference, his followers were still left with the impression that censorship on behalf of a political candidate or party would be verboten on Musk’s X.
Well, the joke’s on them.
Hours after sharing his newsletter that contained the Trump campaign’s purported vetting document of JD Vance, investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein was banned from X. The 271-page dossier is apparently the same one that an anonymous source provided to several mainstream media outlets – which all passed on it – and is supposedly connected to Iran’s hack of the Trump campaign. (We won’t even get into the whole double standard of refusing to report on these hacked materials after the feeding frenzy we witnessed in 2016 after WikiLeaks released stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s team.)
In a rare press statement, an X spokesperson told me that Klippenstein was only “temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information,” including Vance's home address and partial Social Security number. The spokesperson added Klippenstein wasn’t punished for posting the document “as a whole” since the company ultimately got rid of its “hacked materials” policy following blowback from its handling of the laptop story.
“Two-Step Dance”
A full-throated Trump supporter, Musk called the publication of the document “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen,” while suggesting Klippenstein had put Vance’s children’s lives in danger. In reality, anyone can easily find Vance’s home address and contact information online, and the dossier was compiled from “readily available and relevant electronic and online records,” according to the document’s authors.
Klippenstein soon revealed on his Substack that, despite what X’s spokespeople were saying, the suspension wasn’t temporary, and his 500,000-follower account had been nuked forever.
 | A guest post by
|