Did John Adams Warn about Twitter Debasing Americans? Would he applaud Elon Musk's Takeover?
Preserving liberty requires both moral and intellectual integrity.
What would John Adams, one of the nation’s founders, say about Twitter’s censorship? Did he warn about this type of threat to liberty? Would he applaud Elon Musk’s takeover?
Adams would recognize that Twitter’s censorship had become a threat to public liberty because it was depriving Americans of opportunities to hear multiple divergent views. This censorship debased Americans’ understanding of topics important in the public square and in their lives.
John Adams may have communicated by writing with a quill pen and parchment paper instead of voice-dictating on a smartphone, but he understood human nature. After all, he was doxxed when a British Admiral intercepted his pro-patriot but private letters to his wife and published them in newspapers in 1775.
Adams believed that any institution or system could be corrupted–whether the system was a monarchy entangled with nobles or a democracy with power diffused through three branches and levels of government.
“But kings and nobles have much oftener combined together, to crush, to humble and to fleece the people,” he wrote in 1772.
To Adams, a commitment to integrity was the only real bulwark, no matter the institution.
“The preservation of liberty depends upon the intellectual and moral character of the people. As long as knowledge and virtue are diffused generally among the body of a nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved. This can be brought to pass only by debasing their understandings or by corrupting their hearts.”
What did Adams mean by debasing people’s understanding? He was worried that a corrupt system would prevent people from having sufficient information to understand the truth about important matters. Debasing people’s understanding would prevent the diffusion of knowledge and truth among the majority of the people and corrupt their intellectual character. This corruption would erode liberty and promote tyranny.
One of the lesser-known causes for the American Revolution was corruption. King George III corrupted Massachusetts’s governor and judges when he began paying their salaries instead of the people paying their salaries through their legislatures. As a result, the governor and judges gave their loyalty to the king, not to the people.
“Is not the natural and necessary tendency of these innovations, to introduce dark intrigues, insincerity, simulation, bribery and perjury … ?” he worried about this totalitarian power.
As a Big Tech social media company, Twitter wielded great power and wide reach. Perhaps its elite status is why former Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal once declared that Twitter was “not to be bound by the First Amendment.” Although the Constitution binds the government from infringing on freedom of speech, society and culture must also uphold freedom of speech, especially during emergencies, to keep Americans free.
In addition to banishing President Donald Trump from their platform, Twitter censored thousands whose viewpoints did not fit certain narratives, whether the censored posts related to the 2020 presidential election or challenges to the COVID-19 vaccine, including concerns raised by respected scientists, physicians and injured patients.
Twitter controlled which knowledge was diffused and which knowledge was suppressed.
The most glaring example is when Twitter censored the discovery of a laptop of Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, who was the Democratic presidential nominee at the time.
“The laptop, which was left in a Delaware repair shop in 2019 by the first son before being turned over to the FBI by the repair shop owner, was first reported by the New York Post in October 2020 but swiftly censored by Twitter and dismissed by most mainstream media outlets,” Fox News published.
The laptop included text messages, emails, photos and financial documents that “showed how he used his political influence in his foreign business dealings, specifically in his work as a board member of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company.”
Not only did Twitter prohibit the New York Post from posting their article on Twitter about the laptop in October 2020, but Twitter also blocked anyone from linking to the article.
A recent Senate hearing revealed a fraction of the damaging content.
“We have a text message from Hunter Biden to his daughter stating, ‘Don’t worry, unlike pop (meaning Joe Biden), I won’t make you give me half your salary,” Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) read at an April 26, 2022 hearing.
“So it seems like Biden was serving as Vice President and running U.S. foreign policy at the same time as his son Hunter Biden was raking in money from his shady foreign business deals and this was money that was being diverted to benefit Vice President Biden.”
Twitter’s censorship debased people’s understanding and deprived them of crucial information when casting their votes between Biden or Donald Trump.
Adams understood that if enough people’s understanding of truth was debased, through no fault of their own, then the system was corrupt. He knew that integrity combined with courage could save the day.
“But this is an unalterable truth, that the people can never be enslaved but by their own tameness, pusillanimity, sloth or corruption,” Adams wrote.
Right now, Elon Musk is showing the opposite of tameness, pusillanimity, sloth and corruption through boldness, courage, hard work and integrity.
While he would be skeptical about Musk’s billionaire star status and concerned about transhumanism, Adams would applaud Musk’s courage to defy Silicon Valley’s ruling class and promote free speech instead.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said after reaching a deal to take over the company.
The star inventor of Tesla, Musk, who is also the owner of SpaceX and Starlink satellites, plans to enhance Twitter’s platform with “new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spambots, and authenticating all humans.”
Adams would agree with the star inventor of his era, Ben Franklin, who made this declaration under the pseudonym of Silence Dogood when the government censored his brother’s newspaper:
“Without freedom of thought, there can be no such thing as wisdom and no such thing as public liberty without freedom of speech… Whoever would overthrow the liberty of a nation must begin by subduing freedom of speech.”
Twitter was subduing free speech and thus, debasing Americans. Musk has an opportunity to turn Twitter’s bluebird into a phoenix rising from censorship’s ashes into a new era of free speech and tolerance. Musk is not alone.
A star entrepreneur, President Trump has created a competitive parallel universe through Truth Social, a platform openly dedicated to free speech in the social media galaxy.
Between Trump and Musk, freedom of speech is no longer being subdued by a monopoly of Big Tech tyrants. Competition is cracking the code of censorship.
Jane Hampton Cook is the author of 10 books, including Stories of Faith and Courage from the Revolutionary War. JaneCook.com