Max Boot Takes On The Far Right Over Musk's Twitter Offer
Former GOP policy advisor casts billionaire's bid as imminent threat to democracy
Thursday may well have marked a turning point which has been years in the making for Max Boot.
Once part of the constellation of learned Republicans advising the presidential campaigns of GOP nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney, Boot certainly has drifted away from his former party as a prominent critic of Donald Trump and Trumpism, from his perch as a columnist for The Washington Post.
However, Boot likely has never had a rhetorical cross hairs on his back the way he came to Thursday by forcefully opposing billionaire industrialist Elon Musk's stunning offer to buy outright the social media provider Twitter, for $43 billion in a hostile takeover bid.
Boot — who once penned a column “This conservative would take Obama back in a nanosecond,” after professionally opposing the former president in both the 2008 and 2012 campaigns — took fire from across the political far-right after casting Musk’s bid as a threat to US democracy.
Specifically, Boot worries that a Musk takeover would spell a disastrous weakening of Twitter’s policing for misinformation and disinformation on the service.
He published a piece in the Post titled, “Elon Musk is the last person who should take over Twitter.”
However, ironically, much of the battle Boot fought Thursday occurred in real-time in tweets, back and forth.
“If content moderation is communism or fascism, that would mean that the US was under fascist rule when I was growing up in the 1980s. Back then most people got news from a newspaper or 3 TV networks. Politics was saner and less polarized in those days,” Boot tweeted.
Among those attacking Boot’s position was Fox News host Laura Ingraham.
“Max Boot thinks that democracy means controlling free speech,” she posted, to which Boot responded, “Nope. I believe for democracy to function people need to have access to accurate information—not just the crackpot conspiracy theories peddled by Fox ‘News.’”
Former Democratic congresswoman and one-time presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard — who has drifted rightward and become a darling of Fox News since her failed bid for the White House in 2019 — was another one who took on Boot.
“Max Boot perfectly illustrates the thinking of those in power: in order to save our democracy, we must destroy it; in order to protect freedom of speech, we must end it,” Gabbard tweeted, to which Boot replied, “It’s very telling which people are outraged by the argument that misinformation should not be allowed to spread unchecked online.”
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