Culture Friday - Elon Musk’s free speech crusade

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Friday, April 8th, 2022. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Let’s bring in John Stonestreet. He’s the president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast, and he joins us now. Good morning, John.

JOHN STONESTREET, GUEST: Good morning!

BROWN: John, we just wrapped up season 3 of our Effective Compassion podcast—a compelling look at ways Christians are active in ministering to men and women behind bars.

I can't help but think these mission-minded men and women on the front lines are going to have their hands full, especially after what happened In Washington State this week.

Democratic Governor Jay Inslee signed into law a bill that John, you call the "Can't Ask About Males in the Women's Prisons" bill. What it boils down to is a male inmate, identifying as a woman, can be transferred to a women's prison and information about that man, like his transgender status cannot be released.

Do you see this as primarily a safety issue for inmates or as primarily a cultural issue?

STONESTREET: Well, the answer is yes. It's both, right? I mean, we're culturally downstream far enough to a degree in which we are saying things that are—and I don't mean this in any sort of derogatory sense; I mean, this in the legitimate sense of the word—things that would have been considered absurd, a generation ago, we now have headlines and have serious conversations about just bizarre things. You know, we call gender affirmation that which mutilates a body away from its sexual identity. We're doing things in this area that we would never do in any other area, any other sort of body dysphoria, where someone thinks one thing and their body reflects something else, such as eating disorders, we always then try to align the mind with the body. It's only in this case, and there's no other cases where we try to align the body with the mind.

And this is another consequence of that - once you start using words in brand new ways, once you start defining things upside down, then you have something that just is absolutely bizarre.

We have cases where males have sexually abused women in prison after identifying as women. We now have knowledge that women are getting pregnant behind bars. And then to turn around and go give a male says that they're a female and they’re, you know, sentenced for some sort of crime, even if it's some sort of act of sexual aggression, you can't ask about that. One, what planet does this make sense?

And now yeah, you're creating a safety issue for inmates because it's a cultural issue. In other words, cultural issues very often proceed on the definitions and redefinitions and reuse, and flipping upside down of language. But language doesn't stay in books. We know that the building block of reality itself is language, it's God's language. We know that the language of God's image bearers is incredibly powerful. I mean, we all have the ability, you know, to look at each other in the eye and either make somebody's day or ruin somebody's day. We have that sort of power in our language.

So it shouldn't surprise us that the abuse of language will turn out to be a real safety issue because ideas oftentimes proceed through the redefinition of words.

EICHER: Well, let’s talk about language, and specifically the dissemination of language. This week we learned that Twitter’s most wealthy critic—Elon Musk—became the single biggest shareholder in Twitter.

Do you assume that Elon Musk’s dropping something like 2-1/2 billion dollars to acquire this massive stake in Twitter is going to result in making Twitter a little more libertarian and a little less intolerant of free-speech?

STONESTREET: I think, gosh, there's a lot of outcomes. I think it's going to make it all a lot more entertaining. In other words, I think you know, that's the thing we can all be sure of like, we're all watching going, where's this gonna end? It may end in it becoming a little more libertarian. Certainly Elon Musk, you know, that’s one of his goals. You know, this could be the beginning of the end for Twitter, with such a big shareholder. So that's a possible outcome.

But it's going to be real interesting to see these collisions.

You've got Twitter employees, saying, “I can't work for Elon Musk” and to which it's like, hey, free market. Let Elon Musk buy the stock. You know, the free market allowed Twitter to abuse free speech for a long time, and target conservatives, and the free-market allows you to leave the job whenever you want.

So I will say I think this is a much more clever solution than bringing the state to bear. It's tempting to see something that's patently unfair and abusive, like the way that Twitter treats conservatives and then to say, well, the government needs to step in. You know, I still believe in what Reagan said that it's a scary time when the government says, "I'm here to help." They're not the ones you want to solve the free speech problem today.

EICHER: Interesting you’d bring that up, John. There’s a rift among conservatives on the role of government. There’s the use of market muscle, typified by what Elon Musk has done.

And then there’s the “we need to regulate this” approach. Basically, the moment Twitter stopped acting like a phone provider and started acting like a broadcaster, that regulators ought to step in.

I know we may be veering out of your cultural lane, but it sounds like you have some thoughts on that.

STONESTREET: Yeah, I'm still on the, you know, ‘let's not bring the state in to regulate it’ side at this point, mainly, because I think that Twitter's reputation for being that important is really overstated. If you look at the actual numbers, very few people are on Twitter, and a very few amount of those that are on Twitter send the vast majority of the tweets. Now, that said, there are certain discourses that do take place uniquely on Twitter, almost all of them unhelpful, but they're the culturally loud ones. And so, you know, it's played this outsized role in the Arab Spring, it's played this outsized role in passing, you know, information on from developing nations, particularly those that are in the middle of crisis. So there is that. And don't underestimate that. I mean, whenever there's a headline, I go on Twitter right away, because Twitter typically is ahead of the New York Times, The Washington Post, and anything else that can give us headlines just because of the nature of getting now of course, it's quite possible what you're getting is misinformation. You know, I understand like, there's a difference between conservatives and the role of government anyway, you know, what should the government be involved in? And what shouldn't? There's, uh, conservatives who think the government is, you know, a necessary evil, and there's those who think that the government is a potential good and an essential, but has to, you know, stay within its to use Kuyper, Abraham Kuyper’s language, in it's sphere. And the problem isn't that the government exists, the problem is that government has transcended its sphere. I would probably be in that category. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's probably at the heart of it, there's probably a deep ideological difference, and Twitter is, you know, probably the loudest are not just Twitter, but Facebook is the loudest example. And then what do you, how do you decide that? Because, you know, how do you decide if what applies to Twitter applies to Facebook, applies to TikTok, applies to Snapchat, like, you know, there's so many different platforms with so many different angles and played very different roles among different population segments. So, I don't know. I think there's a lot to figure out, which is one of the reasons I think that the most interesting outcome of Elon Musk is probably the sunset of Twitter. I don't know if it'll be next year or five years from now, but I'd see a future in which Twitter was this thing like MySpace.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. Thanks, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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