The Long and Short of the Stock Market Fallout from the Pending
Purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk and Tangentially Related More, Trump's Truth/er Social and Trutherism
I speculate that the precipitous drastic down flux in the
company value and stock value of each Twitter and Tesla on April 26, 2022 is the result of
stock-market investor fear that Elon Musk, the pending buyer of Twitter, whose offer to purchase it the board of directors of announced it had accepted on April 25, 2022, and CEO
and founder of Tesla Motors Company, may mismanage and crash and burn Twitter
the way the once most stellar, former social media platform, MySpace, the
predecessor to Twitter, Facebook, and the rest of the current social media
platforms, crashed and burned in popularity and users after it was bought by
right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch's right-wing company News Corp. The
audience of all of the right-wing media combined does not translate to enough
to support and sustain, on an ad-hoc user basis, for-free major-league-scale
social media platforms (but in theory, though in practice not likely for lack
of willing payers, it could be made viable by paywall subscription support by
that audience). Like the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, unconstrained by
politically partisan gerrymandering manipulation and the oligarchically
susceptible Electoral College presidential-election selection system, told us
with the popular vote, by the millions and millions of the American people in
the majority, of the Democratic and multiple third political parties opting in
opposition to and over the Republican candidate in their sizable majoritarian
popular vote, there is not the appetite and interest in bigotry and bigoted
speech media on the part of the majority of the people of the USA.
The new social media platform, misnomered Truth Social,
deceptively and absurdly so, of right-winger former minoritarian US President
Donald Trump, who was overwhelmingly voted out of office by a majority of both
the popular vote and Electoral College vote in the 2020 US presidential
election, another example of the comparatively marginal right-wing social media
appeal online, is really Trump Social or aka Truther Social, and barely exists
and is teetering on the brink of nonexistence in comparison to the other major
social media platforms. Reportedly, he and some of his rich right-wing backers
started Truth/er Social to upsurge his social media platform followership
popularity that he was not getting on the moribund new right-wing social media
platform Parlor that he migrated to after he was evicted from the online social
media platforms Twitter and Facebook because of his speech misconduct on their
platforms according to the standards of their user terms of service. Yet, there is a
rumor that Truth/er Social ignited from its coma almost right after the news came out that the Twitter board
of directors accepted Musk’s offer to buy Twitter, but that may have been the
result of bot and/or campaigned-for intensive Trumpian-user-activist activity
on it, much like Republicans have activists go online to social media platforms
and call into talk radio or TV shows with talking points to plug for pet GOP candidates, issues or legislation or pretending to be Democrats supporting
those, etc. (Read the definitional commentary on trutherism, with historical examples, that follows the end of this narrative. Basically, it is the tactic of collaborative, organized, mass, tenacious and viral mantra mendacity (mantra lying) for political or economic gain, or both.)
Although Musk is entertaining as a person and admired in the US
and across the globe for his green energy and vehicle technology companies, he
is generally viewed as socioeconomically right-wing lite and at risk of
steering Twitter definitively politically toward that audience, with a paywall
for Twitter users, under his ownership or command of Twitter, that would
discriminate against and filter out as users budget-middle-income, low-income,
poor and homeless people, as well as youth, who now use and are free to use
virtually all social media platforms, including Twitter, without a paywall, and
produce the same hereinabove right-wing result pointed out for MySpace of the
past going for Twitter in the near-term future.
A subscriber, subscription social media platform with a paywall
to have one’s say is not free speech, a free-speech platform, nor is a
public-forum social media platform that censors speech -- that is not properly
censored criminal or dangerous speech such as that of making threats of bodily
or property harm or of death, of advocating or inciting violence, public panic and
pandemonium, rioting or genocide, of harassment stalking and such persistent,
obnoxious trolling of an individual that evades the user blockout button of the
target, of sedition or advocating or inciting insurrection, of advocating the
disenfranchisement of the constitutional and otherwise legal rights of other
citizens, of soliciting or advocating the commission of an unconstitutional or
statutorily criminal act (including offfering, selling and buying stolen goods, and trafficking in humans and contraband), of extortion, of fraud, of false advertising, of an
unsubstantiated or false claim or accusation mis/represented as fact, including
slander or defamation against an individual or group/s that is not opinion or
evident implicit opinion (judgment), jest or fiction, disseminating child
pornography, disseminating excretory-related pornography (which is always
explicit obscenity), disseminating depictions of bestiality, disseminating
depictions of snuff events or staged, as in not in the wild, animal fights,
etc. -- at the behest or lobbying of personal, ideological, religious,
cultural, political or social partisan interests or sensitivities by
government, individuals, groups or organizations. Free speech is democratically
free speech in which each communicator has and all communicators have the same
freedom of speech rights, equality of speech rights, according to the same
standards, that are not subject to censorship by the government or any
government entity, an individual or group, mob or partisan interest of any kind
or the populace, electorate or citizenry.
Also, I am doubtful that users or subscribers to such a new
Twitter would want to join and interact on, as well as "enjoy," a
social media platform, a social interaction forum, without sports, music,
party, social-and special-event, TV, movie, book, science, medical, food and dining, beverage, fashion,
travel, vehicle, gadget, jobs, etc., promotional, sales and invitational
advertisements and announcements...by mom-and-pop businesses, mainstream
businesses, organizations and individuals.
Winston asks Joe "Where is the stock market going?"
and Joe answers "It's going up and down."
(Yes, because of..., regardless of and always.)
Trutherism
Donald Trump's Truth Social aka Truther Social
Trutherism
Trutherism is a political tactic and was formally born and institutionalized in the Republican Party, plus, in the 2008 US presidential election. It is the tactic of collaborative, organized, mass, tenacious and viral mantra mendacity (mantra lying, or a mantra lying campaign, often proliferating tacitly by imitative contagion) for political or economic gain, or both, or for the purpose of manipulating and forging either mass or majority public belief and political control, in which belief becomes the artificial, fake truth, or mind-control delusion, that can block out and depose recognition of and belief in actual truth itself for dupes. (Truthers use smear tactics, or smear-tactic campaigns, of all kinds as well.)
In a casual, transitory regard, the designation truther, and thus trutherism, was a term of derision applied, in the aftermath of the year 2001 jihadist hijacked airliner attacks on the International Trade Center twin towers in New York city and the US military's headquarters Pentagon facility in Washington, DC, to a movement of writers and fringe media lecturers arguing and discoursing in technical terms that the attacks, including the one airliner crashed by the onboard rebellious passengers in Somerset County in the state of Pennsylvania before it could reach the hijackers' intended destination and target of attack, were US government special ops in which the twin towers were razed, destroyed, by secretly planted explosives strategically hidden in the twin tower buildings by secret government operatives acting in advanced preparation for and anticipatory coordination with the airliner strikes on the twin towers, claims that were not as emphatically, if at all, propounded by them about the Pentagon facility that suffered severe damage but was not destroyed and about the other intended but unstruck target of the hijacked airliner downed in Pennsylvania by the rebellious passengers before it could reach the hijackers' target. The accusatory authors and lecturers attracted an extensive audience to and believers in the, their, alleged truth behind the hijacked airliner attacks, their books sold copiously and their lectures stimulated book sales and likely themselves earned substantial money too for the evangelists of the alleged truth conspiracy theory. The term truther was also applied to the mantra believer-parroters of this theory. References -- click on and read: https://www.kqed.org/arts/13902056/how-9-11-truthers-and-conspiracy-theorists-got-a-foothold-even-in-the-bay-area, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/september-2001-truther-conspiracy-theory-1.3756431, https://www.aim.org/aim-column/lies-of-the-911-truth-movement/, https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/trutherism/2011/09/where_did_911_conspiracies_come_from.html, https://decider.com/2015/09/11/911-conspiracy-theory-documentaries.
As a government and political practice, tenacious choral and mantra lying, trutherism, originated improvisationally in the first term of the George W. Bush Presidency (of which G.W. Bush, a Republican, was a two-term president from January 20, 2001 to January 20, 2009) following the Septermber 11, 2001 (9/11) hijacked jihadist airliner attacks on the World Trade Center in NYC and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, as a means to manufacture and evangelize excuses for his administration to launch a military invasion and war of regime change on Iraq, with the second-largest oil production and known natural oil reserves, at the time, in the world, by attempting to connect Iraq to the al-Qaeda terrorist organization that was the political-military base of the 19 kamikazi-hijackers (15 from Saudi Arabia, 2 from the United Arab Emirates, 1 from Lebanon and 1 from Egypt) of the 9/11 airliners they commandeered to crash-attack into the WTC and Pentagon, and the airliner that failed its attack, an organization and hijackers with which and whom Iraq was found to have no relationship, other than one of mutual enmity between the government of Iraq and the al-Qaeda organization. Thereafter, the G.W. Bush administration, as the default justification for its US military invasion and occupation of Iraq, with change of its regime, doggedly alleged authoritatively and with voices and the rhetoric of certainty that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that posed a threat to nation-state friends of the USA and to the USA itself, as though Iraq possessed the population size and a navy, airforce and amphibious army, with the most elite military training and advanced weaponry and combat machinery of humanity, that could and would dare to cross the oceans to invade and [try to] conquer the USA, although all of the series of inspectors and investigators of Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and access to weapons' grade uranium abroad, found that Iraq neither possessed nor had access to any of either -- the WMD inspectors and investigators were retired Colonel Scott Ritter of the USMC, Hans Blix of the UN, Professor Joseph Wilson, yellow-cake uranium investigator appointed by the G.W. Bush administration, David A. Kay, veteran diplomat, nuclear weapons expert and chief US arms inspector for the CIA, and Charles Duelfer, special advisor to the director of the CIA. Nevertheless, top political officials of the G.W. Bush administration continued unanimously to make the same default claim, with large numbers of Americans, mainly Republicans, latching onto and parroting it steadfastly and permanently, and with the US war of occupation, subjugation and demolition shooting, blasting and bombing of Iraqi sovereignty defenders and major cities of Iraq continuing for almost 2 decades, killing masses of Iraqi civilians and driving millions into flight abroad as war-refugee emigrants. For some, their yet supportive but modified mantra for the US military invasion and regime change of Iraq was to the effect that "Even if Iraq didn't have WMDs and had nothing to do with 9/11, al-Qaeda or Afghanistan (the host nation-state, under Taliban rule, of al-Qaeda and the 19 9/11 jihadist airliner hijackers), Sadaam Houssain (the president then of Iraq) was a bad guy and we got rid of him." and for most others, their secondary mantra was "We have to fight them [over] there so we won't have to fight them here." References -- click on and read: https://www.npr.org/2005/11/15/4996218/iraq-wmd-timeline-how-the-mystery-unraveled, https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7634313, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB80/, and concurring information audit from the other ideological side @ https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2003/06/wmd-j21.html.
A Truther, aka birther, of the truther-birther movement, initially was a disinformation activist against then-presidential candidate US Senator Barack Obama, D-IL, during the campaign season of the US presidential election of 2008 and after Barack Obama had been elected US president on November 4, 2008. The truther-birther white-racist populist canard was that presidential candidate Barack Obama in that election was born outside of the USA and so was constitutionally disqualified from running for or being elected US president, a canard in which publicity hound, rich-man Donald Trump was publicly the leading vocal activist, and their canard that he was a Muslim, implicitly a dangerous, anti-American jihadist Muslim. Both of these claims of theirs were well known to be false and proven to be false. Barack Obama was the [black-white] biracial child of a white American mother who was a professor and a Kenyan father who was an economist but also an authoritarian and condescending husband toward Barack's mother and an alcoholic who died in an automobile accident. Barack Obama was raised primarily by his professionally, internationally traveling, on academic assignments, mother, and, after she died of cancer as a relatively young woman, by her parents, who were middle-class white Americans who lived in a white community in Kansas. He was not only a Christian but a practicing Christian, as an adult in an African-American congregation Christian church in Chicago, IL. An official of an agency of birth records in the state of Hawaii, the state in which he was born, confirmed publicly to interested news media the place, year and day of his birth, and later, with his permission, publicly released a copy of his birth certificate to the interested news media -- his birth in the USA state of Hawaii was also confirmed by a newspaper record of it announcing it shortly after his birth. Prior to the latter, a video and photos with a political disinformation news story were disseminated online and elsewhere of a claimed Kenyan elder woman relative of his father, and thereby of Barack Obama, who said that he was born in Kenya. Incidentally, at a GOP presidential election campaign rally of his opponent US Senator John McCain, R-AZ, a shrieking Karen yelled out emphatically “He’s a Muslim!,” to which John McCain replied that he was not but that he was a Christian, and an honorable or decent man. At either another or the same campaign rally for candidate McCain, the GOP crowd roared the chant “Nigger! Nigger! -- Kill him! Kill him!,” in reference to McCain’s Democratic Party opponent candidate Barack Obama, to which McCain replied, in vocally competing with the crowd to speak to it, “No, No! -- Stop! Stop!,” and schooled the GOP crowd on decency. There was one more particularly egregious truther incident during that campaign season, by a Karen GOP activist, a resident of Texas, but an incident that occurred in a different state, who reported that she, a very chunky and ugly young white woman, was attacked on the street at an ATM site, knocked down, robbed and fondled and had her clothing, or some part of her body, scrawled on in writing with a politically and racially partisan and inflammatory slogan by a black man, which the white police who investigated the alleged incident found to be false and which she confessed was a story she had fabricated, apparently to hurt the Obama candidacy and help the GOP McCain candidacy. References -- click on and read: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trump-perpetuated-birther-movement-years/story?id=42138176, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/behind-the-birther-movement/, https://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2012/01/what-is-the-birther-movement/, https://www.politico.com/story/2011/04/birtherism-where-it-all-began-053563, https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-37391652, https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/10/politics/obama-birtherism-big-lie-disinformation/index.html.
Trutherism did not end with the election of Barack Obama as US President. After Obama was elected US President, GOP Tea Party activists against his proposed Affordable Care Act legislation (universal, affordable medical/health insurance care, subsidized by government, aka Obama Care), apparent dupes, against their own self-interest, and goons en masse for the select-enrollees, with minor or no adverse health conditions, medical and health insurance industry and its oligarchical broadcast and print commentary and public-influence, lobbyist news media, campaigned in live rallies, town-hall meetings with politically elected officeholder leaders and representatives, and in online social media platforms and with the traditional media that Obama Care would involve government death panels that would decide who would live and who would die in getting [critical] publicly supported and mandated universal health care, via public and private insurance plans, that could not deny or penalize, in insurance premium rates and co-pays, enrollees because of adverse health conditions, age, gender or race, etc. References -- click on and read: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/14/health/policy/14panel.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_panel, https://www.politifact.com/article/2009/dec/18/politifact-lie-year-death-panels/, https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509164679/from-the-start-obama-struggled-with-fallout-from-a-kind-of-fake-news, https://thehill.com/video/campaign/155415-tea-party-group-says-obamacare-wont-let-you-choose-your-doctors-in-new-ad/, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/addiction-in-society/201309/why-does-the-tea-party-hate-obamacare.
Trutherism is alive and well with Donald Trump in his and much of the Republican Party constituency's recent truther mendacious mantra campaign of "Stop the steal (of the 2020 US presidential election from the losing candidate former President Donald Trump)," currently the mendacious mantra campaign of "The stolen election (from Donald Trump)." for his hoped-for comeback presidential candidacy in the 2024 US presidential election.
CEO of Truth Social Devin Nunes, formerly a Republican US congressional representative from southern California before he was hired recently by Trump as CEO of TruthSocial got himself into a public clash with entrepreneurial celebrity Elon Musk relating to his truthfulness concerning Musk's pending purchase of the popular online social media company and platform Twitter that contradicts and casts discredit on the name of the company and social platform TruthSocial that Nunes leads as well as discredits, further, his character and any pretense of his to his standing for truth, as documented in the news stories of the following click-on hyperlinks: https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-calls-bs-on-truth-social-ceo-devin-nunes-trump-claim, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10790273/Musk-slams-Truth-Social-CEO-Devin-Nunes-saying-encouraged-Trump-buy-Twitter.html?fr=operanews and https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-trump-twitter-purchase-directive-false_n_6275966de4b046ad0d7c3975. But this incident does show Truth Social CEO Nunes to be a truther and that Truth Social is really Truther Social. It appears that Nunes made the wrong or false assertion on Fox News TV that Trump encouraged Elon Musk' to buy Twitter to promote the mythical public image of Trump as a business and political tour de force and master dealmaker, as well as an opportunity to demean the Twitter social media platform that had evited Trumper from Twitter for life for his vocal support for the January 6, 2021 insurrection and its rioters under its outgoing management as well as to burnish and promote his Truth Social, while expecting Musk to tacitly play along with to help promote Trump's power persona.
If the tactic of trutherism had succeeded in any of the aforementioned examples of it, the truthers' response would have been "Hahaha, it worked, tricked you, we won, hahaha!" When they fail, the truthers' reaction is "Oh well, what the hell(?); we'll do it better the next time around."
