Billionaire and maybe Twitter buyer Elon Musk loves memes. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don’t (and usually he doesn’t create them). Thursday’s viral meme certainly fell into the latter two categories.
The argument presented here is simple: from 2008 to 2021, the political left moved even further to the left, while the right remained in exactly the same place. East I didn’t change! It was the left that left me! The attitude is a pretty common trope among center-right types, but it’s just not true. Though perhaps comforting, there is much empirical evidence to refute the core claim.
Obviously, political whims change over time, and parties can change their minds on individual issues. But broadly speaking, the right has been drifting to the extremes for decades. Can you imagine the modern mainstream Republican reaction to President Richard Nixon’s decision to create a new federal agency Protect the environment? Or how about President Ronald Reagan’s decision to offer amnesty to almost three million undocumented immigrants? How about President George W. Bush’s speech in which he said the words “Islam is peace,” even if the actions of his administration said otherwise?
Look how quickly the Republican Party turned against 2008 presidential candidate Senator John McCain Y 2012 presidential candidate (and now a senator) Mitt Romney, who have been criticized as RINO (“Republicans in name only”). The face of the party is now represented by people like Representative Lauren Boebert, madison cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Arguably the highest-profile non-Congressman Republican right now (besides Trump) is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who spent the last year passing a dizzying series of bills designed to specifically cater to the far right.
The face of the party is now represented by Rep. Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, and Marjorie Taylor Greene.
As for the Democrats? Well, they have definitely moved to the left on some key issues. For example, the party’s stance on LGBTQ rights It certainly has changed in recent years, even if that hasn’t resulted in a bunch of LGBTQ-inclusive policies being implemented at the federal level. (Meanwhile, Republicans like DeSantis have recently gone on the attack, with legislation like the so-called “Don’t Say Gay” bill targeting teachers and LGBTQ youth.)
Democrats have also, by and large, moved to the left in sentence reform Y police responsibilityeven if, again, that hasn’t resulted in a lot of politics to reflect this position. For all the thought pieces discussing whether cities should “defund the police,” city officials in the red and blue states are once again pouring money into law enforcement. Elected Democrats still tend to be fairly moderate on most issues, especially when compared to “leftist” positions abroad.
To take another example, while other countries have government-funded health care, the US remains tied to its private market insurance industry. What I have written in the pastthe positions typically held by Democrats who win tagged by the press as “extremist” or “leftist”, as high-capacity firearm magazine bans, universal background checks in arms purchases, support for LGBTQ rights Y tax the ultra rich – are actually not that extreme. These policies tend to be quite popular with the general public, something that cannot exactly be said about the Republicans and their crusade to ban books, restrict the right to abortion Y attack LGBTQ people.
Perhaps, like others like Will Oremus of the Washington Post As I’ve said, it could be that this is how Musk (and others) see the world around them: not in the form of actual politics, but through the lens of culture wars.
And, generally speaking, it makes sense to have cured a disinformation-laden media diet spread by Fox News and company. or surrounding yourself with pundits screaming about how trans people are supposedly ruining everything good in the world could distort your perspective. If you spent the summer of 2020 inundated by Fox News footage of the Black Lives Matter protests, you might genuinely think the left is out of control. This perception, however, simply does not match reality.
It is not uncommon for people to delude themselves into believing that their preferred political side is the reasonable one and that it is the other side that is out of control, as Musk has done. That said, if Musk really believes in the meme, which was created last year by Colin Wrightwhich writes a Substack mainly on gender and earlier this week attacked the trevor projectan LGBTQ youth suicide prevention organizationas part of the ongoing right-wing smear campaign targeting LGBTQ adults Y kids, that’s more worrying. After all, Musk is likely to control Twitter soon, a tool that, for all its flaws, still wields power.
If, as Musk has said, you want to have a “politically neutral” platform, which he defines as “annoying the far right and the far left alike” (that’s not what “politically neutral” actually means), and you think that Twitter has a bias that favors the left, as another meme recently shared baseless He suggested, we deserve to know what “neutral” really means to him. In recent days, he has used Twitter to engage with right-wing pundits like ben shapiro, david rubin, Saagar Enkheti, steven crowder and even once Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich. Do you recognize them as conservative voices? Shapiro, for his part, has asked Musk to form a “truth and reconciliation commission that reveals past manipulation” and have Musk “fire A LOT of people.”
For the “annoying far right and far left alike” speech, Musk surely seems to be telegraphing a pretty conservative take on Twitter, complete with conspiracy theories about anti-conservative bias and complaints about “the virus of the mind awakens” Y “pronouns.” There are plenty of questions about what Twitter will look like under Musk’s leadership, but if the memes of him are to be believed, it may not be very “neutral” at all.
Reference-www.nbcnews.com