Government

Missouri AG Will Lock Up Media Matters For Hurting Elon Musk's Wee Feefees

As soon as he gets through suing Joe Biden for weaponizing the federal government to restrict free speech.

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986715Nobody ever went broke betting on the cravenness of our nation’s elected law enforcement officials. But Elon Musk’s shrieking tantrum this week elicited acts of particularly rank hypocrisy from the Attorneys General of both Texas and Missouri, as they rushed to defend Twitter in its hour of need.

(Nope, still not calling it X. Sue me.)

Advertisers were already edging toward the exits before Musk endorsed the Great Replacement Theory last week, agreeing that Jews are part of a plot to flood the country with hordes of brown immigrants to vote out the “real” Americans. But just hours after his tweet, the liberal non-profit Media Matters for America (MMFA) published a story showing screenshots of ads for companies such as Apple, Xfinity, and IBM next to explicitly pro-Hitler content. This was apparently the last straw for those companies, as well as several others, who had been assured by Twitter’s putative CEO Linda Yaccarino that this could not happen. A stampede of major companies raced for the exit, including Yaccarino’s former employers at NBCUniversal.

Musk immediately promised to file a thermonuclear lawsuit, although the result was more of a wet fart, so embarrassing that none of his regular white shoe lawyers would soil themselves with it.

But no matter! Elon’s got cool new friends now that he’s at the bigot table with Catturd and The Babylon Bee.

“Fraud is both a civil and criminal violation. There are 2 dozen+ conservative state Attorneys General,” tweeted Stephen Miller, Trump’s former minister of white nationalism and immigrant bashing.

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To be clear, there was no fraud. As Musk acknowledged, the MMFA screenshots were real. The fact that they were obtained by following a bunch of Nazi accounts and then hitting refresh a bunch of times is of no legal moment. But that didn’t stop the attorneys general of Texas and Missouri from launching themselves at Musk like cartoon suitors wooing a beautiful princess.

Missouri AG Andrew Bailey rushed to assure Musk that “My team is looking into this matter.”

And Texas AG Ken Paxton announced his own investigation, “to ensure that the public has not been deceived by the schemes of radical left-wing organizations who would like nothing more than to limit freedom by reducing participation in the public square.”

Yes, that would be the same Ken Paxton who launched an investigation of Twitter for supposedly concealing the number of bots on the platform when Musk was attempting to wriggle out of his offer to buy the company.

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But Bailey’s position is perhaps even more ridiculous, since his office is the named plaintiff suing the Biden administration in the Missouri v. Biden jawboning case. The theory there is that Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube became agents of the federal government when they responded to pressure from the Biden administration to remove COVID misinformation.

“Having threatened and cajoled social-media platforms for years to censor viewpoints and speakers disfavored by the Left, senior government officials in the Executive Branch have moved into a phase of open collusion with social-media companies to suppress disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content on social-media platforms under the Orwellian guise of halting so-called ‘disinformation,’ ‘misinformation,’ and ‘malinformation,'” the complaint alleges. And while that idiotic theory has been rejected by every other court to consider it, these guys filed their case in the Western District of Louisiana and got themselves in front of that lunatic Judge Terry Doughty, who actually bought it. His order barring the federal government from flagging misinformation, including with regard to public health and election security, is stayed pending review by the Supreme Court.

But before we go gorge ourselves on carbohydrates, let us pause to contemplate the cajones it takes for Bailey to claim that Twitter becomes a government actor and violates the First Amendment by removing anti-vaccine lies flagged by the government, and then to turn around and use his office to harass a non-profit for mean, true speech at the behest of Twitter’s owner.

It’s almost enough to make you lose your appetite for a five course meal celebrating the glory of the American experiment.

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she produces the Law and Chaos substack and podcast.

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