An Open Letter to Elon Musk
My Plea to the World’s Richest Man to Save America for Americans
Dear Mr. Musk,
At the moment, America is going dark and it’s happening fast. The exercise of free speech and assembly is under siege by the government. This has been true for years, as you probably know. It’s become truer in recent days. The Constitution’s First Amendment is endangered. Censorship seems imminent. Extreme pressure not merely to silence or filter one’s thoughts but to harm and punish those with “wrong” thoughts comes from the press, industry and every collective, cartel and clique and it’s permeating every gathering space in America. This hostility takes varying forms. But everywhere you go, every day, whether a grocery store or a video conference and in messages, calls and various types of correspondence, what you think and say is too tempting to suppress. It’s as if Thought Purge and fear of expression is mandatory.
You know it. Twitter bans, punishes and targets freethinkers. Facebook banned a phrase adopted by Americans who support Donald Trump’s electoral results challenge. Apple, Google and Amazon clustered together to terminate Parler for violating rules which are neither clear nor concise, let alone consistent or consistently communicated and enforced. Posts are removed. Users are banned. Innocent people are canceled, destroyed, wiped out — names, reputations and livelihoods are decimated within hours with neither due nor proper process — for presumed transgression against the orthodoxy of sameness of thought. This wave of inhibitionism is exacerbated by chronic and ominous censorship threats and the insidious suppression of thought, speech and the press. It’s initiated by today’s dominant media: Comcast, the cable utility owner of a movie studio and three broadcast news stations; AT&T, owner of studios and broadcast media and a company which owns both CBS and one of the few major companies that publishes books, which instantaneously terminated a contract over thoughts, ideas and speech expressed by the author whose writing the publisher had agreed to publish. Currently, these companies pressure and purge as the dominant government calls for Parler to be investigated by the FBI.
There’s been some backlash. This has fostered starting up small, fragmented enterprises. These, too, can be shut down by predominant technology companies that accept, tout and promulgate the orthodoxy.
You, however, do not. Exceeding expectations (with, it must be acknowledged, subsidies at taxpayer expense), you’ve made a billion dollar success of a private motor car company. You’re making progress on private space travel. You’ve recently been reported to have become the richest man in the world. Fundamentally, you’ve demonstrated freethinking — valuing independence of thought, judgment and action — and proven that you’re one who’s able and willing to defy the government. When you thought you were wronged, you denounced America’s largest state and moved your business elsewhere. You can create new media. You’ve shown that you can make money and compete with Cook, Bezos and other capitalists who go left and take ideas on faith. You can think different and earn people’s trust. You can triumph.
Please let me suggest one way you can do this. Consider assembling rational thinkers, intellectuals and creators who revere free thought, speech and the press and recognize individual rights. You can convene this band of patriotic freethinkers to discover, contemplate and study market potential for growth, progress and profit. You can give Americans a source for reporting truth, mining goodness and living the American way. You can start an objective media company.
I know this because I know that you’ve mastered the exercise of free speech. You once expressed that your young teen son, Saxon, said “he feels like 2021 will be a good year.” You added that you think the good is possible, too, and you urged the reader to “... make it so.”
In the name of reason, help me and my fellow Americans to be at liberty to affirm Saxon Musk’s optimism, a sense which is distinctly and uniquely American. Exercise the right to free press. Start new media on the premise to emancipate from today’s stifling suppression, breathe, think and speak freely and reject collectivism in honor of the individualism and freedom of speech that makes America the greatest nation on earth. Please make good on what’s presently an ominous new year.
Please help to save America for Americans.