If you happen to have a leftist friend who’s on Twitter, it might be a good idea to call them and make sure they’re OK.
Because chances are good that they’re having a really, really bad day.
No sooner had billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk gone public with his offer to purchase 100% of Twitter for roughly $43 billion than leftists all over the site began losing their minds over the mere possibility that they may soon have to share the space with people who say things they don’t like.
Case in point: the guy claiming to be an “award-winning journalist” who has predicted that should Musk be allowed to purchase Twitter, it “could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet.”
No, really.
If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War 3 and the destruction of our planet.
— David Leavitt 🔜 PAX EAST (@David_Leavitt) April 14, 2022
To be fair, it should be noted that this is a crazy person who’s proven himself prone to severe overreactions.
Leavitt, whose Twitter bio says he’s written for CBS and Yahoo, among others, once said he called the police on a Target employee after the woman refused to sell him an electric toothbrush for a penny – but only after harassing the poor woman on camera and posting her name, picture, and information all over social media.
Over a toothbrush.
So, thankfully for the rest of us, perhaps his ability to rank potential cataclysmic disasters on a scale of one to "the destruction of our planet" isn't entirely trustworthy.
Unfortunately, though, it does appear that Leavitt isn't alone in his wildly hyperbolic assessment of a supposed "free speech" platform actually allowing, you know, free speech. According to "journalist" Jeff Jarvis, by potentially purchasing Twitter and scrubbing it of censorship, Musk is ushering in the digital Third Reich.
Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.
— Jeff Jarvis (@jeffjarvis) April 14, 2022
But you know what they say - once you've compared something to Nazi Germany, you're all out of arguments.