the rehabilitation of Matt Walsh

Apparently, Elon Musk himself wasn't behind the banning or shadowbanning of Matt Walsh's attempt to screen his documentary "What Is a Woman?" on Twitter for free as a way to celebrate the film's one-year anniversary.

On Instapundit, I left the following comment:

I like a lot of what Musk says, but I understand (1) he's not a conservative Republican, (2) he's not exactly the most patriotic American given he also has Canadian and South African passports (i.e., divided loyalties), and (3) he remains deeply committed to China (Shanghai and Xinjiang Tesla facilities), which is not a bastion of free speech, last I checked.

I don't think Musk is unserious about free speech, but he's walking—and often straying off—a fine line. That said, it might be too early to judge Musk for the repression of What Is a Woman? I just saw a YouTube video by Black Conservative Perspective titled "Elon Musk OVERRULES Woke Twitter Executives Attempting To BLOCK What Is A Woman Documentary!" Full disclosure: I haven't watched the video yet, so I don't know its substance. But the title itself suggests that the suppression of Matt Walsh may not be coming from Musk.

Twitter is a bit like the Catholic Church in that it's a huge, thousand-tentacled thing composed of many writhing pieces going in multiple directions, not always in sync with itself. Musk (or his new, dodgy CEO) is still putting out fires at Twitter, and even with only 25% of the original staff, he's probably dealing with the Twitter version of an entrenched Deep State—elements still working at Twitter who hate the idea of free speech. Luckily, Musk has flamethrowers; he needs to crank up their projection force and burn out the rest of the barnacles. Sorry if that's a mixed metaphor. Mmm. Cooked barnacles.

So my position now is that Musk almost certainly wasn't involved in Walsh's suppression, but Musk is still hard to take completely seriously on matters of free speech as long as he remains in bed with repressive, genocidal China.

As for the Black Conservative Perspective video I mentioned in my comment: I have watched it now, and it clearly shows that Musk wasn't happy when he found out about Walsh's suppression. So Musk is obviously dealing with entrenched elements in Twitter that still want to ban, block, cancel, and otherwise suppress differing viewpoints.

I bought Walsh's book, What Is a Woman?, and am reading it now. It's fairly short, but I'm reading only a few pages per day. My tentative conclusion, having not read the whole thing, is that Walsh is a better talker than writer. He's not a terrible writer by any means, but annoying little errors in his prose crop up now and again. His book makes some trenchant points about the Zeitgeist, and it really is both amusing and embarrassing to witness these gender theorists' attempts to explain their position in a coherent way. Walsh essentially lets these people talk; he gives them a full platform, and then he stands back and lets them hang themselves with the rope that they themselves weave. Walsh interjects with questions on occasion, and some of his interviewees react by leaving in a huff, shouting, or going silent. It's enough to show that the people Walsh interviews haven't done the work of actually thinking through their positions. Of course, people like me shouldn't be smug: have I, after all, thought through all of my positions so thoroughly as to be immune to criticism? I doubt it.