Factually! with Adam Conover - Elon Musk Killed Free Speech

Episode Date: October 22, 2024

(In addition to your weekly Factually! episode, this week we're bringing you a monologue from Adam. This short, researched monologue originally aired on the Factually! YouTube page, but we are sharing audio versions of these monologues with our podcast audience as well. Please enjoy, and stay tuned for your regularly scheduled episode of Factually!) Elon Musk is not a champion of free speech, and never has been. Here's why.Visit https://groundnews.com/factually to stay fully informed, see through biased media and get all sides of every story especially during this election season. Subscribe for 40% off unlimited access through my link.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a HeadGum Podcast. Listen up. The 2024 election isn't just another political event. It is a turning point for our country's future. There's a plan called Project 2025 aiming to drastically reshape our government and potentially limit personal freedoms we hold dear. Policies affecting your privacy, freedom of expression, and personal rights could be at risk, and that is why it is vital to vote

like your rights depend on it, because they do. The Freedom From Religion Foundation is a free thought association dedicated to protecting the separation of church and state and ensuring that our government respects the personal freedoms of all citizens. So visit ffrf.org slash vote to learn more about Project 2025.

Register to vote and discover how you can take a stand. Don't let others decide your future. Your vote is your power. So use it to protect your rights paid for by the Freedom from Religion Foundation. So Elon Musk has been having a bad couple weeks. He just held his hotly anticipated Wee Robot event. Yes, that is actually what he called it. And somehow the whole thing was even faker than the Will Smith movie

he ripped off. Not only were the designs of Elon's cyber cab, Robovan, and robot directly lifted from a mediocre 20 year old sci-fi movie, the cyber cab didn't even get a demo on public streets. Instead, it drove around the fake streets of the Warner Brothers movie Backlot. And when Elon announced the release date, even he didn't sound so sure about it. Well, I tend to be a little optimistic with timeframes. But in 2026, so yeah. Before 2027, let me put it that way. Why does Elon sound like a teenager lying about when he'll get a school project done?

Oh, I'll get it done on Thursday, definitely before the weekend. And did you hear Elon's own fans booing him? When even your sycophants think you're full of shit, you really have a problem. But you know, the stupidest and fakest part of this entire demo was Elon's little robot buddies. So you can have your own personal R2D2C3PO. This would cost something like, I don't know, $20,000, $30,000. Probably less than a car.

It'll be able to do anything you want. So it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, just be your friend. I'm sorry, Elon, but you are just the most divorced man to ever live. We get it, dude. Your kids hate you and you have no friends. Why do you have to make that our problem? Well whatever, it doesn't matter because literally everything about this announcement was pure nonsense. What Elon actually demoed on the day was just in a completely different reality from what

he was claiming. The things walking around were not autonomous AI robots, they were just f***ing puppets. Are you fully autonomous right now or are you being controlled by a human? You have a specific race style? I am not fully autonomous yet. I am operating under the assistance of a human right now. Wow, that AI is incredible. It sounds exactly like a 22 year old theme park employee. That's right, this supposedly revolutionary technology is just some kid wearing a remote control suit in a nearby warehouse. This kind of puppeted animatronics has been around for a decade at this point.

It's Disneyland s***. It's literally turtle talk with Crush. Look at all you human dudes inside the human tank. I mean, it is just laughable at this point that anyone takes a single thing Elon says seriously. The dude trots out some Chuck E. Cheese ass animatronics on a literal studio backlot, says, I'm gonna build an AI robot in a magic robot taxi one day. And we're all supposed to be like, yes, that's happening. I have no questions. Get the f*** out of here. This event was so obviously bad, the promises so glaringly fake that you'd have to be

either stupid or a mark to believe it. Which is why, for maybe the first time ever, even the idiots on Wall Street have started to wise up to Elon's bullshit. Tesla shares dropped 9% after this announcement, which, yeah, is a start for the company whose only new product in the last five years is an ugly hunk of metal that makes everyone give you the finger as you drive by.

But you know, the low rent theme park wasn't the only stop on Elon's tour of cringe. He also appeared at a Trump rally and made the creepy little jump scene round the world. Is the only reason we can now send American astronauts into space. Come here. Take over, Elon. Yes, take over.

You know, masculinity is a prison, but it is still so funny to see dudes like Musk try to perform it. As you can see, I'm not just MAGA, I'm Dark MAGA. See, this is what happens when you want to be a comedian, but you don't have the guts to actually bomb at an open mic. Now, the theme of the rally was Elon and Trump's favorite cause, free speech. His name is Elon Musk. He saved free speech.

Free speech is the bedrock of democracy. You must have free speech in order to have democracy. Yeah, that's how Elon likes to portray himself, as a valiant warrior for free speech. But the truth is, Elon's actions over the past two years have actually destroyed free speech for millions of people, and replaced it with something much more sinister. Real quick before we get into that, I want to thank our sponsor, Ground News, and I want to remind you that you can support the show on Patreon. Also check out my brand new stand-up special on Dropout, and if you want to thank our sponsor, Ground News, and I want to remind you that you can support the show on Patreon. Also check out my brand new stand-up special on Dropout, and if you want to come see me

live in a city near you, I am on tour with a brand new hour of stand-up comedy. I'm about to head to Portland, Seattle, Austin, and Denver, followed by all of these fine cities. So head to AdamConover.net for tickets and tour dates. I'd love to see you out there. So before we actually start talking about free speech, we need to establish one thing. Free speech is a bedrock American value, and also we cannot agree on what we mean by it. Different Americans literally have different definitions of what free

speech means depending on who they are and what situation they're in. Like, if you're gonna adhere strictly to the language of the First Amendment, then free speech means Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech or of the press. But to a lot of Americans, it genuinely means more than that. It means having the ability to speak freely in the public sphere without fear of censorship, whether that's by the government, a corporation, or anyone else. And to conservatives, that has turned into a crusade against moderation on social media platforms. These big social media companies, why is it always conservatives who seem to get censored?

The single biggest threat to free speech in this country, in my judgment, is the power of big tech. Google, Facebook, Twitter, they have to quit discriminating against conservatives. As I go through for TikTok, the consistent fear is that conservative voices are silenced. That's the consistent fear he has while scrolling TikTok? Oof. He must have a different for you page. My biggest fear is that I'm going to have to learn Gen Z slang. I admit it, I'm a simple zero-risk-ivity. But Elon agrees with this conservative fear about social media moderation. According to him, that is literally why he bought Twitter.

Twitter has become kind of the de facto town square. It's just really important that people have both the reality and the perception that they're able to speak freely. Now a while back, I made an entire video about why Elon's purchase of Twitter was incredibly stupid from a business perspective. But you know, if you take him at his word about wanting to protect free speech, well, maybe it makes a little more sense. A lot of conservatives have cheered Elon for buying the site because they literally see

it as a selfless act. But you know, instead of just taking him at his word, you have to look at what Elon actually did once he bought the site. And the truth is, once he owned the platform, he cracked down on free speech. He suspended reporters who reported on him, and accounts he disagreed with politically, and he even banned the word cis because it made him feel icky. At one point, after realizing Joe Biden's posts were getting more hits than his were, Elon even forced his engineers to change the algorithm so that his personal tweets would get special priority. So Elon's definition of free speech is when everyone else is forced to listen to his speech. That's a pretty bizarre interpretation. That's like if the Second Amendment guaranteed Elon the right to shoot you shoot you in your head

To shoot you in your head I think I delivered that joke pretty well But the next thing Elon did was even weirder see the real reason the old Twitter moderated content wasn't because they hated Conservatives or even because they wanted to protect their users from hate speech They did it for the same reason I bleep the word fuck in all my videos, to keep the fucking advertisers happy. Social media companies don't actually give a shit if you read Nazi propaganda or see porn or indulge in some light fascist ideology on their platform.

They just don't wanna piss off the Charmin Bears. So that's why when Elon axed X's moderation team and the use of racist slurs on the platform more than doubled, the advertisers pulled out. I mean, of course they did! The Charmin Bears don't want to seem any more racist than they already do! Look at how they're segregated by the color of their fur. Why aren't they intermarrying? Maybe that's why they have such f**ked up assholes they need to wipe their butts with pure silk. They're inbred! But Elon wasn't about to let those dirty ass bears bully him. No sir. When the advertisers pulled out, Musk went to war with the companies to try and force them to buy ad space on X.

He even sued an advertising industry trade group so hard, they literally had to shut down. And not because Elon was right, it was just because he's so goddamn rich they couldn't afford to fight him. See, in Elon's world, free speech isn't just us being forced to listen to him, no, it means independent companies being forced to pay him to speak on his platform upon pain of death. And you know, I think that by any definition of free speech, that is literally the opposite. But because Elon now owns one of the largest and most important communication platforms in the world, we have to live with it. And Elon's ass-backward view of freedom

of speech got even more twisted once he dove into the world of politics. You know, if you want to see an overview of Elon's political activity, a great place to start is with our sponsor, Ground News. They have a topic page on him, so you can see all the latest headlines in one place. And they break down the news sources by left, right, and center so you can make sure you're getting an unbiased view. And when you do that, you start to see that Elon has made it his life's mission to get Donald Trump re-elected.

Almost every news source has reported that Elon donated 70 million dollars to the Trump campaign, but if you only read left or right-leaning sites you might miss some stories, and that's why ground news has a blind spot feature. For instance, only 5% of right-leaning news outlets wrote about how Elon actually coordinated with the Trump campaign to stop damaging material about Trump from appearing on X. It's like a fact checker for the fact checkers, which is why I find it so useful. And they're 100% subscriber funded,

so they always put your needs first. So if you wanna verify what you read and think more critically about the information you consume, go to groundnews.com slash factually, or scan this QR code. My viewers get 40% off unlimited access. That's groundnews.com slash factually. So I just want to dwell on that news story a second longer.

Elon Musk has directly colluded with the Trump campaign to silence negative reporting about his favorite candidate. When a journalist posted a leaked dossier of the Trump campaign's opposition research on JD Vance, the Trump campaign called their buddy Elon and asked him to take it down. And he did. Musk nuked not just the link, but the journalist's entire account. And you know what? That doesn't sound like f***ing free speech to me. Yeah, Twitter is a town square, a medieval town square, complete with the king who, if you say the wrong thing, will throw you in the dungeon so you can get torn apart by rats. So at this point, we have to ask why exactly Elon is stumping so hard for Trump.

I mean, I know he's got the brain worms, but it doesn't seem to be paying off financially, right? He is losing money on Twitter, and he's pissing off the liberals who used to buy his cars. I mean, seriously, every rich Hollywood showrunner I know is so embarrassed of the Tesla they bought five years ago, they'd rather be driving the Wienermobile or a Rivian. They're all clearly going to buy Rivians. The point is, Elon is clearly not doing this because he loves free speech. He's literally silencing people. So why is he doing it? Well, it's because Musk has a huge financial interest in who the president is. His entire business model is sucking on the teat of the American government.

Tesla has received billions of dollars in government subsidies, and Elon's rocket company, SpaceX, you know, the one that just did this cool-ass rocket booster catch? Well, they only did that as part of their contract with NASA. The dude is literally a government contractor. Musk's entire financial future depends on the United States government, so of course he wants to get his buddy elected. Trump is literally famous for funneling taxpayer money to people who kiss his ass. That is why Musk is pumping Trump.

It's the money, honey! See, right-wing grifters like Musk use the term free speech to obfuscate what they're actually fighting for. Paid speech. Their dream isn't a world where everyone can speak freely. It's one in which those with money can force the rest of us to listen to their speech so they can make more money. Look, again, free speech means different things to different people. Does it mean the government can't tell you what to say? That you can't get fired for posting a dumb hot take online?

Or that you get to talk about eating ass in your online stand-up special? Those are all valid definitions. But there's one way to look at free speech that I don't think we talk about often enough. See, the truth about speech is that it's never free. It costs money. And that means people with more money get to speak more. If you can't pay to get your message out,

no one will hear you. But if you have billions of dollars in government cash, well, you can drown out everyone else. So I think an important litmus test for whether a system, platform, or person is truly fighting for free speech is whether or not they're helping those with less money and resources have their voices heard. And that is why Twitter used to be such a good thing, because it made speech a little bit freer for those of us on the bottom.

Twitter helped grow social movements like the Arab Spring Uprising and Me Too. It was a place where the little guy could shame a corporation into doing the right thing. Twitter campaigns have gotten General Mills to end mandatory arbitration and bullied Chipotle into raising the minimum wage for all of its flaws, and it had a lot of them. Twitter was a place where those of us with less resources were able to claw back a tiny amount of power. But you know what? The people at the top didn't like that.

And that is why Musk and his friends wanted to destroy it. Because they don't want free speech, they want power. They want a world where the rich can buy the ability to dominate the national conversation, spread their political propaganda, and promote their bullsh-t lies about how they're going to build a magic robot. And if we let them get away with that, if we don't raise the voices that we have left and call bullsh** on them, then pretty soon the rest of us won't get a voice at all. That was a HeadGum Podcast. Hey, hey, I'm Lamorne Morris.

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