Topic: Media Research Center
Media Research Center writer Joseph Vazquez brought his George Soros obsession into his employer's Musk-fluffing, lashing out in a Feb. 6 post at a Soros-funded group that called out Elon Musk for interacting with right-wingers on Twitter:
A George Soros-funded group targeted Twitter owner Elon Musk for daring to interact with “right-wing accounts” following acquisition of the platform.
The leftist Institute for Strategic Dialogue spewed nonsensical agitprop in a Jan. 31 blog. ISD railed against Musk’s exchanges with “right-wing Twitter users” and claimed that his interactions with these accounts increased a so-called “staggering 1,690 percent after October 27, from 1.1 percent of his total interactions to nearly 20 percent.”
The “right-wing” accounts that ISD blacklisted included satire site The Babylon Bee, Psychologist Jordan Peterson, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, and social media influencer Ian Miles Cheong. ISD even attempted to label noted left-wing Glenn Greenwald as a “right-wing account.”
ISD whined that Musk was supposedly “signaling to his followers and other Twitter users that these ideas are acceptable on the platform, likely inviting more hate on Twitter, and creating space for actors to spread disinformation and harmful ideologies.”
Not only did Vazquez fail to justify tagging ISD as "leftist" beyond receiving Soros-related money, he didn't explain why those right-wingers shouldn't be accurately identified as such, let alone why they are not right-wing. Greenwald has been shifting rightward for some time now -- why else would he go on Fox News so much?
Vazquez went on to tout Musk siding with the standard "they're just posting videos" defense of Libs of TikTok:
The Soros-funded group even labeled Libs of TikTok, which simply finds left-wing extremists’ videos and reshares them to its various pages, a “prolific spreader of hate.”
The organization attempted to justify its arbitrary claim by slamming Musk for liking one of Libs of TikTok’s tweets. “Posting publicly available videos isn’t harmful, hateful or dangerous,” the tweet read. “You know what is harmful though? Confusing kids about their identity, stealing childhood innocence, exposing kids to adult sexual entertainment, giving kids porn in school, and sterilizing and mutilating kids.”
Apparently, per ISD’s logic, Libs of TikTok’s rebuke of the sexual exploitation of children is an example of “hate.”
In real life, however, Libs of TikTok purveyor Chaya Raichik has amply demonstrated herself to be a vicious homophobe, and her videos have inspired violent threats that she has never disavowed, which tells us that she has a bigger agenda than "just posting videos."
Vazquez went on to whine that "The organization also smeared Ian Miles Cheong and Townhall writer Scott Morefield as 'two conservative journalists' that are supposedly 'known to spread disinformation and amplify hateful right-wing talking points,'" but again, he offered no evidence to disprove that description. He then went into the usual MRC whataboutism:
ISD’s feigned outrage against so-called “hate” and “disinformation” on Twitter is laughably disingenuous. The organization said nothing about the anti-Semitic Ayatollah Khamenei or Chinese Communist Party-affiliated accounts which have been allowed to spread their respective bile for years under Twitter’s old regime. A 2010 tweet by Khamenei, for example, raged that “Israel Is A Hideous Entity In the Middle East Which Will Undoubtedly Be Annihilated.” Would ISD be suffering the same conniption if Musk was interacting with those accounts instead? The CCP in particular is currently conducting religious- and ethnic-based genocide against the Uyghur Muslims, is running an authoritarian surveillance state and was starving its own people under “zero-Covid” policies. But how dare Musk associate with “right-wing” accounts, eh ISD?
Yet all of these Twitter accounts are apparently still active, and Musk has done nothing to remove them. Shouldn't Vazquez be criticizing Musk instead? Also, his feigned outrage over right-wingers being accurately identified as such is even more laughably disingenuous.
Vazquez concluded by grousing that "The group continued ranting against Musk interacting with those so-called “prominent superspreaders of election disinformation” like Tim Pool and Dinesh D’Souza." Again, he offered no evidence to counter that accurate assessment.
