[mullingitover]

Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis.

Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.

[quantadev]

None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.

About Musk, once he took over Twitter, that mostly solved the Social Media "Free Speech" problem, because as long as the most popular gathering place in the world is free we're [mostly] all free. So you're right, there's lots of reasons for Conservative optimism.

[mullingitover]

> None of that is evidence conservatives aren't under attack, it's evidence that we're winning the culture war.

None of those businesses are part of the culture war, or if anything they're 'woke' businesses.

Thiel doesn't make money being conservative, he makes money on venture capital and running a big government surveillance business. Larry Ellison makes money price gouging on licensing. Elon Musk's main source of income is a 'woke' EV business. Rupert Murdoch makes money on tabloids, of which Fox News is just one flavor - and the tabloids are arguably 'woke' as they mainly pitch conspiracy theories that the 'normies' don't know about.

Twitter under Musk is no more free speech than it has ever been. They comply with the vast majority of censorship requests from authoritarian governments[1]. They most recently rolled over for Brazil's demands and are now fumbling their execution on paying the fines Brazil levied against them. Musk also censored Ken Klippenstein's account when he published a link to his Substack article about the JD Vance opposition research dump. So no, "free speech" on Twitter is just a slogan and a marketing campaign for low information news consumers, and it's working.

[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-05-24/under-el...

[quantadev]

I wasn't classifying those businesses as "part of culture war" or not. I'm just saying it's a fact that conservatives have been, and still are, under attack, and are nonetheless "winning".

Insofar as Musk not being a Free Speech Absolutist (which I'm not either), that's not news to me or anyone else who knows and respects him like I do. Musk is doing everything he can to keep legal speech from being censored, whereas the prior owners would cancel people permanently for trite trivial things like a mis-gendering (that wasn't even done out of malice), or simply claiming there's two genders.

Regarding Democrats getting censored themselves: While I'm a strong advocate of Free Speech as a general rule, I think after what the Democrats did for a decade (on censorship) they SHOULD be forced to reap what they sowed. So for example, I would've been perfectly in favor of Musk, as a one time act, permanently cancelling everyone who had in the past called for censorship of others. Those people didn't want Free Speech when they held power, and thus they are the ones who don't deserve to have Free Speech after they've lost their power.