What Did You Say?

Get Musk: Leading Investor Calls for the Prosecution of Elon Musk for “Undermining” the Federal Government

By: Jonathan TYurley | September 9, 2024

Read more at https://jonathanturley.org/2024/09/09/get-musk-leading-investor-calls-for-the-prosecution-of-elon-musk-for-undermining-the-federal-government/

Silicon Valley investor Roger McNamee this weekend went on MSNBC’s “Last Word” and called for the arrest of Elon Musk for “undermining” the federal government by sharing his opinions on X.

McNamee is the latest denizen of the global elite to call for criminalizing speech to silence those with opposing views. McNamee is the founding partner of Elevation Partners and has a colorful history as a band member, a volunteer for Eugene McCarthy and a protester against Vietnam.

As discussed in my book “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage”, he is like many liberal baby boomers now joining the anti-free speech movement. They have decided that free speech, once the defining right for the left, is now an existential threat.

McNamee’s rationale for criminalizing speech is chillingly shallow and irrational. He declared that somehow Musk’s political views made him a danger as the head of companies of major importance to the United States. It does not bother him when CEOs adopt far left views, just Musk opposing some of those views:

“You have somebody who runs a really strategic defense and aerospace projects for the federal government who’s actively undermining the government that’s paying him. And somewhere in that is a legal case that needs to be prosecuted.”

Perish the thought that a CEO might undermine the government. McNamee is using the government contracts with SpaceX as a reason to censor Musk’s political and social views.

“The critical element in thinking about Elon Musk is that, like any American, he has a right to his own opinion, and he has a right to express his opinion. However, that right is not unlimited. He is under some special limitations that would not apply to normal people because his company, specifically Starlink and SpaceX are government contractors and, as such, he has obligations to the government that would, for any normal person, and should for him, require him to moderate his speech in the interest of national security.”

So, according to McNamee, if your company makes something that the government wants (including rescuing the currently stranded astronauts in space), he must give up his right to express political views, including against censorship.

McNamee embraces the power of the government to dictate viewpoints or at least silence certain views as a matter of national security. It is no accident that the overriding objective is to “get Musk.” Musk has proven the single greatest barrier to the global anti-free speech movement.

As with the effort in Brazil to block X entirely for refusing to censor political opponents of the government, McNamee’s call for state-driven censorship is where the movement is going next.

Notably, after Musk purchased Twitter, Hillary Clinton called upon European officials to force him to censor American citizens under the infamous Digital Services Act (DSA). Recently, Democratic leaders like Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison praised Brazil for its action to prevent citizens from having access to unfettered news sources.

What is most striking about these efforts is that they occurred after the failure of Plan A: to get Americans to embrace censorship.  Facebook even ran a creepy campaign to try to get young people to accept censorship, or “content moderation.” The commercials show people like “Joshan” who says that he “grew up with the internet.” Joshan mocks how much computers have changed and then objects how privacy and censorship have not evolved as much as our technology. As Joshan calls for “the blending of the real world and the internet world,” content moderation is presented as part of this not-so-brave new world. Joshan and his equally eager colleagues Chava and Adam were presented by Facebook as the shiny happy faces of young people longing to be content modified.  They were all born in 1996 — the sweet spot for censors who saw young people as allies to reduce free speech.

It did not work. Despite some erosion of free speech among young people, it takes a great deal to get a free people to give up their freedoms. Plan B is now to accomplish this objective of speech controls through national and global regulation. Figures like McNamee and Bill Gates are ready to support this brave new world of speech regulation by global censors.

While claiming unprecedented threats from “disinformation,” these are the same voices and rationales discussed in my book that have been used for centuries to limit the speech of others. They are selling the same defective product with the promise that less freedom will lead to a better life.

For global elites like McNamee, free speech is not just dispensable but distracting. Only fools would listen to these voices in trading away our indispensable right.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”