No, liberals and leftists are afraid of Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter not because they think it will contribute to right-wing extremism, which exists and always has and always will but which is also far more marginal than they like to pretend. They’re afraid because Twitter is where they perform the personalities they lack in real life, where they act like the confident and clever people they patently aren’t, and where they pretend to do politics by telling the same terrible jokes, over and over, while the political “movement” they represent remains totally powerless and reviled. Twitter, in other words, is where they wage busy little PMC lives. And they’d prefer that space be pleasant for them. They have eliminated the existence of any contrary opinion in their personal lives and private lives, and now they want to do the same in Twitter, which as sad as it is to say is the center of their emotional lives. Which is why it’ll never stop at “the really bad stuff.” The things that liberals believe should be eliminated from social media have grown and grown as time has gone on, and will continue to grow. Eventually people will say that those who disagree with them about the correct size of the Earned Income Tax Deduction are literal fascists.
...I need free speech because I don’t have the faith this army of sneering white dudes has that I know everything, that every debate has already been settled and we just need to let the goodies rule over the baddies. I don’t think everything is obvious. I don’t think all political questions are easy. So I need free speech in order to be exposed to all kinds of ideas, including ones I find deeply offensive, because it’s through the friction of philosophical conflict that new and better ideas arise. And I need free speech because the socialist politics that are core to my identity are at present vastly unpopular in this country, despite what you might hear in Brooklyn or on the NBC News Slack, and the only way that changes is through the long, slow, uncool work of gradual persuasion. Collins and his coterie are content to lol and giggle and sneer and pose because for them politics is only a means through which they position themselves socially, a way to be somebody. Well, I want to be somebody too - I want to be somebody whose politics can win. The preening, loling default of leftist politics Collins represents is a cul de sac. People like that want to hide on Twitter and laugh at it all while their enemies run up the score. And what they care about most is keeping it a fun place to hang out.
