By
Howard Bloom
On Wednesday April 12th, NPR announced that it will quit Twitter. It will take down all 52 of its Twitter accounts. Why?
Because Twitter has taken the label it uses for state-manipulated propaganda channels like Russia’s Russia Today and China’s CCTV—“state affiliated media”– and has applied it to NPR. Implying that NPR is a puppet of the state. Implying that NPR is just another propaganda channel.
But there’s an untold story behind NPR’s withdrawal from Twitter. It’s the strange story of Elon Musk and Joe Biden.
Elon Musk started out as a political centrist. In fact, in 2018 he said, “I am really a socialist.” Musk voted for Barak Obama, Hilary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Then two things happened.
In August of 2021 Joe Biden staged a major announcement of his aim to make half of America’s autos electric by 2030. Participating in that announcement were General Motors, Ford, and the European company that owns Chrysler, Stellantis.
But the president left out the one man in the world who has done more than anyone else to turn electric cars from an idea into an industry—Elon Musk. Elon Musk, the man who built Tesla. Elon Musk, the man who sells ten times as many electric cars as Ford and GM combined.
Why did President Biden snub the greatest visionary industrialist and producer of progress the world is likely to see in our lifetime? Why did Biden diss an immigrant from South Africa who believes that America” is the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth,… the greatest force for good of any country that’s ever been”?
Because Joe Biden is a union man. He believes “strong unions built the American middle class.”
But Elon Musk is not a union man. He pays his workers at Tesla and SpaceX above the industry average wage. But he is reinventing the industrial process from the ground up. If he were forced to conform to union rules, he would not have the freedom to create America’s industrial future.
But Biden’s electric car announcement was only the first insult heaped upon Elon Musk by Joe Biden. When NASA retired the space shuttle in 2011, we lost our ability to take Americans to space on American rockets. Instead we were forced to buy launches of Americans on Russian rockets. At a cost of up to $75 million per seat. This was a major national humiliation.
NASA and Boeing had been trying to pull off a human launch for over a decade and couldn’t.
But after eleven years, one man came along and saved us. One man launched the first modern American passenger capsule carried on an American rocket, a capsule with four astronauts. A capsule that has now docked with the international space station, has unloaded astronauts and has been loaded with completed experiments, then has splashed down back on earth nine times. That one man was Elon Musk.
You’d think that this feat would have won Elon a phone call from the president, a White House awards ceremony, and a ceremonial sash or a plaque. But, no. Joe Biden did not call. In fact, he acted as if Elon’s achievement did not exist.
The result? Elon had been a consistent voter for Democrats. But that changed. In 2022, he told his 134 million followers on Twitter that he was switching to the Republican party.
Worse, he switched to the MAGA belief system. The MAGA belief system portrays America’s mainstream media as a carrier of lies and as a tool of a globalist communist elite conspiring to enslave the citizens of the united states. The result?
Twitter has long used labels for state-run propaganda outlets like Vladimir Putin’s Russia Today and Xi Jinping’s CCTV. On April 5th, Elon gave “state affiliated” labels to NPR and the BBC.
The BBC handled this by prodding its tech journalist, James Clayton in San Francisco, where Twitter is headquartered, to email Elon asking for an interview. That was Tuesday April 11th. Elon said, “Sure, how about tonight?”
In that BBC interview, Elon proved to be a man you could negotiate with. When the BBC interviewer showed Musk that the label was inaccurate, Elon agreed to change it. And the change took place within two hours.
Apparently NPR did not attempt a negotiation of this kind. NPR president John F. Lansing concluded that the label would damage NPR’s credibility. So NPR withdrew from its 52 twitter accounts.
In other words, to protect its credibility as a journalistically independent news source, NPR shot itself in the foot.
References:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/biden-set-target-50-evs-by-2030-industry-backs-goal-2021-08-05/https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-pitch-his-174-bln-electric-vehicle-plan-michigan-2021-05-18/
https://joebiden.com/empowerworkers/#
https://www.comparably.com/companies/spacex/salaries
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/10-years-ago-sts-135-the-space-shuttle-s-grand-finale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_Crew-1
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/elon-musk-democrats-party-division-hate
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65251160
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65248196
https://www.npr.org/2023/04/12/1169269161/npr-leaves-twitter-government-funded-media-label
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-65248502
https://www.axios.com/2022/12/01/elon-musk-twitter-republican-conservative-politics
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Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. One of his seven books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Bloom had three phone conversations with Elon Musk in 2005. And Musk cheered for a Bloom article in the Scientific American calling for a permanent transportation infrastructure in space. So did Jeff Bezos. Bloom does news commentary at 1:06 am Eastern Time every Wednesday night on 545 radio stations on Coast to Coast AM. For more, seehttp://howardbloom.institute.