It's another day of maturity and gravitas at Musk Twitter, as Elon Musk defends "providing beds for Twitter employees" by turning this back on San Francisco and its other problems. Also, ICYMI, this "Twitter Files" thing...
In the last 72 hours, Elon Musk has been engaged with multiple figures in conservative media, including breathless firebrand and hatemonger Charlie Kirk and breathless "truth teller" of right-leaning grievances Matt Taibbi, following his leaking of the so-called "Twitter Files" — a set of documents that claim to be some kind of smoking gun about Twitter's internal debates, back in 2020, about how to handle the New York Post's spurious-seeming story about emails from Hunter Biden's laptop and... do I need to go on?
Taibbi treated all this as a huge scoop that vindicates all critics of "woke" liberal gatekeepers in digital media, writing it all in multiple Twitter threads (of course) beginning with this one on Friday. Meanwhile, MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan noted in a tweet how this was clearly an orchestrated leak between Musk and Taibbi in the service of Musk's growing sympathy for right-wing views of media. "Imagine volunteering to do online PR work for the world’s richest man on a Friday night, in service of nakedly and cynically right-wing narratives, and then pretending you’re speaking truth to power," Hasan wrote.
Suffice it to say, the likes of Tucker Carlson and everyone else in the bigoted and endlessly aggrieved conservative media pantheon has run with the Twitter Files as their own miniature version of the Pentagon Files for at least the last few days. Carlson went so far as to call Twitter's internal decision making about a politically charged and poorly verified news story "a systemic violation of the First Amendment, the largest example of that in modern history."
Then came the revelation that one of Twitter's top internal lawyers, James Baker, both during the Hunter Biden laptop brouhaha and up until this week, had once been general counsel for the FBI, and cue the "deep state" alarm over at Fox News.
Musk fired Baker on Monday, tweeting in response to the conservative pitchfork-wavers that he "only discovered this on Sunday" about Baker's FBI connections, perhaps via this New York Post story.
Tuesday brought news that San Francisco's Department of Building Inspection was going to do a site visit at Twitter HQ to investigate the use of conference rooms as makeshift hotel rooms for workers. This was not prompted by the city itself but by an anonymous complaint to DBI, likely from an aggrieved ex-Twitter employee. Nonetheless, Musk is defensively lashing back at the city.
"So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl. Where are your priorities[?]" Musk tweeted.
So city of SF attacks companies providing beds for tired employees instead of making sure kids are safe from fentanyl. Where are your priorities @LondonBreed!?https://t.co/M7QJWP7u0N
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 6, 2022
After Musk earlier tweeted, back when he was still jokingly tweeting about buying Twitter and trying to back out of the deal, that he might turn Twitter HQ into a homeless shelter, we know that he has no particular love for SF. And this little scuffle will likely make him go full Tucker Carlson on the city soon.
The Mayor's Office, meanwhile, issued a comment in response to Musk via Bloomberg, noting that this investigation wasn't being driven by some city "deep state" — it was an anonymous complaint.
“Our Department of Building Inspection is required to investigate complaints when they are filed and determine if there are any violations that have occurred," said Jeff Cretan, a spokesperson for Mayor London Breed, in a comment to Bloomberg. "It’s a basic government responsibility." Cretain added that Mayor Breed is "focused on running the city, which includes delivering basic city services, like ensuring departments are responding to official complaints, and confronting our very real challenges, like addressing the crisis caused by deadly fentanyl on our streets."
It's not clear if the Twitter "hotel rooms" are mainly for those "hardcore" employees who have hung following the recent purges at the company, so they can sleep their few hours a night in between proving their coding mettle to Musk to earn their keep. As Bloomberg reports via a source, the could also be for visiting Tesla and Boring Co. employees whom Musk has brought in from out of town to oversee said Twitter employees and/or do the work themselves.
In other news, on Tuesday, Musk was tweet-replying with Charlie Kirk — one of the right-wing loons whom state Sen. Scott Wiener blames for fomenting homophobic and conspiracy-driven rage against him leading to things like yesterday's bomb threat — shrugging off a revelation that Dr. Anthony Fauci's daughter had been employed by Twitter saying, "Small world."
Small world …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 7, 2022
It should be noted that Kirk, in a Newsweek opinion piece back in April, praised Musk as one of the "brave contrarian voices of elite dissent [that] are emerging to challenge the rot that has dominated America's progressive institutions for a generation."
For those just tuning in, right-wing pundits still treat Dr. Fauci as a deep-state enemy and liar because the pandemic wasn't a thing, and even after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and hundreds of war crimes to date, we're still more concerned about Twitter supposed "censorship" of a Hunter Biden story than about Vladimir Putin's hacker army and the manipulation of our elections. And Musk now sees this two-year-old story as good PR for him and his unfettered free-speech version of Twitter? Got it.
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