BBC Musk

There is a whiff of desperation in the air and it is emanating from the BBC. In a car crash of an interview, reminiscent of Kathy Newman’s self-immolating attempt to shoot down Jordan Peterson for Channel 4, the BBC’s North America Technology reporter, James Clayton, similarly imploded in the face of perfectly reasonable questions from Elon Musk.

Elon Musk is supposedly one of the richest people on Earth. His purchase of Twitter has brought some public attention to the issue of free speech in so-called democracies.

Musk initially became fabulously wealthy thanks to the unwavering support of a clique of globalists and accelerationists, alongside governments, that kept Musk afloat whenever his businesses failed, often by pouring enormous taxpayer subsidies into his speculative ventures. He holds the world record for loosing a largest ever personal fortune when he dumped Tesla stock to finance the Twitter deal.

Musk was reportedly a WEF young global leader and launched his Space-X business with the support of Mike Griffin, then the president and Chief Operations Officer for the CIA’s investment firm, In-Q-Tel. Having started his entrepreneurial life in the 1990s, by 2008 Musk was flat broke and, despite considerable taxpayer investment, Space-X was bankrupt.

Luckily, by then Griffin was the NASA Administrator and he awarded Elon a $3 billion USD space station resupply contract. Musk’s company was yet to successfully launch a single rocket, but Griffin bailed it out anyway. NASA is funded by US taxpayers.

Despite initial claims of charity, the CIA front organisation, USAID, is paying Space-X handsomely to provide the Ukrainian military and citizens access to its Starlink satellite communication system. Safe to say, Musk has a working relationship with the US intelligence community and the CIA in particular.

The grandson of a leader of the Technocracy movement, Musk is a transhumanist who wants to insert computer chips in our brains and insists that we just have to physically merge with machines, thereby eradicating humanity as a species. He promotes Universal Basic Income (UBI), carbon taxes, mRNA vaccine technology and pretty much every other globalists ambition you can shake a stick at.

Musk is a big fan of the idea of an everything app like China’s WeChat or Ukraine’s Diia. He is making moves to turn Twitter into such an app.

Despite all of this, Musk is being promoted by many as some sort of champion of the people, dedicated to free speech. Meanwhile, Twitter continues to censor journalists and also appears to be throttling the sharing of Substack posts, including my own.

The BBC is a state broadcaster which the proposed UK internet regulator, Ofcom, likes to refer to as Public Service Broadcaster (PSB). Claiming that PSB’s deliver “impartial and trusted news,” the fact that the BBC is funded at the discretion of the government and is controlled by the government is a conflict of interest that Ofcom suggests we should just ignore. Instead, according to Ofcom, we can simply “trust” whatever the BBC tells us.

Following Musk’s take over, the BBC was listed on Twitter as “government funded media.” While this is an accurate description of the BBC, it subsequently appealed to Twitter which agreed to change the description to “publicly funded media.”

“Publicly funded” makes the BBC sound a bit more like the commercial or independent media that is voluntarily supported by its audience. But no one funds the BBC voluntarily. Even those who want to fund it are coerced into doing so.

UK citizens are legally compelled to pay the TV license—fund the BBC—if they want to watch live television broadcasts. Increasingly, the British are choosing not to fund the BBC and are legally barred from watching TV.

The BBC’s need to describe itself as “publicly” funded, intentionally misleads Twitter users. We are simply told that the BBC is trustworthy despite that evidently not being the case.

To his credit, Musk had no problem offering a coherent definition of free speech. Providing it stays within the law—doesn’t incite violence or any other crime—he described it well:

Free speech is meaningless unless you allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like. [. . .] At the point at which you loose(sic) free speech, it doesn’t come back.

Clayton appeared incapable of grasping this concept, and simply returned to ill defined concepts like “misinformation” and “hate speech.”  Musk asked Clayton who the arbiter of these selective restrictions on free speech should be.

Musk made the BBC’s James Clayton look particularly silly during their discussion about Clayton’s allegation that “hate speech” had spiked on Twitter since Musk took the reigns. When Musk asked Clayton to define “hate speech,” after fumbling about for a bit, he offered “something that is slightly racist or slightly sexist.”

Herein lies the crux of the the arguments of those who would see so-called “hate speech” used as a pretext to censor free speech. They either have no concept of the importance of free speech in a supposed democracy and do not, or cannot, accept that it inevitably comes with risks, or are willing to cast it aside in order to silence opinions they don’t like.

A somewhat perplexed Musk, presumably wondering what subjective criteria Clayton had applied to decide that something was “slightly” racist or sexist, quite reasonably asked Clayton to give him an example. Clayton couldn’t cite one.

Clayton’s response was to point out that there are “many organisations that say that, that kind of information is on the rise. [. . .] for example the Strategic Dialogue Institute [Institute of Strategic Dialogue (ISD)] in the UK, they will say that.”

Clayton’s “investigative journalism” is evidently reliant upon whatever he is told by these other organisations. This is seemingly typical for censorship advocates.

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