Elon Musk Takes On The Safe Space Empire

Elon Musk blew up the world this week. Okay, the liberal/ progressive world. Why so mad? 

First, remember just a few years back when the news media were saturated with stories about the “campus rape crisis”? You couldn’t open a news site without stories of how one in four women was being sexually assaulted beneath the ivy-coveted walls of academia? It was ghastly. 

Remember the pictures of the distraught woman carrying a mattress on her back to highlight the epidemic? The now-debunked Rolling Stone UVA clunker? And how the only protection was “safe spaces” where co-eds could avoid these beasts— and the traumatic messages buffeting their world view?

Good times, good times. For the Woke revolution, that is. Using statistics that bore no relation to the reality of drunken post-secondary hook-ups , they enlisted  media to intimidate college administrators into extending control of thought and deed over both student body and teaching staff. They called it safe spaces.

The U.S. Department of Education under Barack Obama warned schools to reduce the standard of evidence to find an accused rapist guilty or lose their federal funding. Kangaroo courts were started to boot men from the schools. The Trudeau junta did likewise. It worked. The intimidation part. Safe spaces were now an accepted form of modern discourse. 

This lowered threshold for hurt sent complaints up like a Musk Space-X rocket. Questioning the validity of the “crisis” invited being culture cancelled.  As we wrote back in April 2019  : 

Modern education has becomeTikTok, an accumulator of all things that amuse or distract young people. The ability to block or (be still my restless heart) censor messages that disturb the quiet lily pond of the young mind completes the bliss. And the bonding of like-minded woke folk stokes each other’s prejudices.

It is why late-night TV viewing is also imperative in the formation of the non-critical mind. Stephen Colbert’s daily dose of sarcasm in place of critical thinking guides hapless students in the ways of consensus… while bonding them with kids like you who just want to belong in an unquestioning  environment.

There’s no indication that the sexual dynamic of student life have changed much. But that’s yesterday’s news. The media shape-shifters have moved their safe spaces on to the suddenly red-hot issue of the transgendered right to compete in swim meets against women. Where the same combination of media derangement/ government overreach aims to create a safe space for the 0.01 percent of the population identifying as transgendered. Everyone else gets to shut up.

As a technique for subversion this mission creep would make Saul Alinsky blush. One by one, the pillars of Western society have succumbed to the pressure tactics from safe-space zanies. Corporations, media, entertainment and education have surrendered to the hurt feelings of radicals on critical race theory,  gender fluidity, white privilege, cultural appropriation and 1984-style socialism in their organizations. 

The latest example being Disney Corp, where an inside group of LGBTQI provocateurs forced their CEO into a disastrous conflict with the state of Florida over teaching sex to kids from JK to Grade 3. As a result, Disney has had their privileged tax status in the state revoked. But that’s a rare setback for HR radicals, as we wrote in this column on Michelle Obama’s lasting impact. 

More typical of the safe-space incursion was the media-led campaign to eliminate the name of Egerton Ryerson from the downtown Toronto university for having some role in residential schooling in the 19th century. In his day Ryerson was considered “the paragon of the forward-looking, progressive, inclusive, worldly intellectual. He was a beacon of educational reform, a fighter against injustice of all sorts, and a kind and generous man”. 

No more. The school’s “enlightened” board of directors announced he’s a non-person. Ryerson will now be named Toronto Metropolitan University to placate those sensitive to hundred-year-old re-evaluations of history. (No word on purging anything named after famed feminists/ eugenicists.) 

Where does Musk fit into this? The final horizon, and perhaps the greatest prize in the safe-space advance, was social media. From its initial vision as the Town Square, sites such as Twitter and Facebook have devolved into the Silicon Valley Square, home to censorship and disinformation campaigns against anyone who invaded the white liberal-guilt safe space. Read: Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, Alex Berenson.

While there are a multitude of examples of this hubris, none is more illustrative than the suppression of the Hunter Biden scandal during the last weeks of the 2020 election. The censors at all the major outlets— Twitter, Facebook, Instagram— suspended the accounts of the New York Post and other outlets for reporting that the future POTUS was selling influence to him in China, Ukraine and other hot spots. 

They were joined by all the major broadcast and print outlets (except FOX News) who denounced the stories as Russian disinformation. A large percentage of voters cast their votes having been denied a story that may have changed their choice. So Joe Biden won. Institutionalized bias in social media was now weaponized by the Left— much to its smug satisfaction. 

That’s why this week’s sale of Twitter to Musk sent panic through the halls of the Rachel Maddow Finishing School. The Tesla guy had noticed the funny business: “Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate.” Musk has promised to re-institute the mission statement of Twitter. Free and open exchange of comment. Removal of bots. Authentication of human sources. (An end to 98 percent of employees donating to the Democratic Party.)

Those employees are panicked about secret internal emails being revealed and their share options being cut. Politicians like Adam Schiff see hate on the march. Others see uncharted speech as only a benefit to “white males”. @AnandWrites: "This future in which there would actually be more abundant and equitable speech terrifies the crap out of people like Elon Musk." 

“Make no mistake: Musk’s ownership of the company will likely make the platform into even more of a hellscape,” penned HuffPost heavy breather Ja'han Jones. MSNBC’s Ari Melber, who’s apparently been in a coma the past five years, shrieked, “You could secretly ban one party’s candidate…secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out about it until AFTER the election.” Self-awareness alert in Aisle three. 

Predictably the same poseurs who vowed to go to Canada after Trump won in 2016 are now vowing to leave Twitter. As if. When there is so much hurt to weaponize against your enemies it would seem foolish to leave the party now. 

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the editor of Not The Public Broadcaster (http://www.notthepublicbroadcaster.com). The best-selling author was nominated for the BBN Business Book award of 2020 for Personal Account with Tony Comper. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. His new book with his son Evan Inexact Science: The Six Most Compelling Draft Years In NHL History is now available on http://brucedowbigginbooks.ca/book-personalaccount.aspx