News broke today that billionaire Elon Musk has offered to buy Twitter. All of it.

If you’ve spent even a little time on Twitter in the last week or so (and maybe even if you haven’t), you likely already heard about Musk’s nearly $3 billion purchase of Twitter stock, which currently makes him the largest shareholder with a 9.2 percent stake in the company.

Musk had been telegraphing his move in the days and weeks leading up to it with a series of public musings questioning Twitter’s political and ideological impartiality and its handling of speech and censorship issues. He interspersed all of that with a series of general jabs at woke culture and online liberal orthodoxies. For those at home who’ve long shared Musk’s concerns not only with Twitter but also with the dominance of hegemonic liberal culture on tech platform governance more broadly (but have lacked the several billion dollars needed to do anything about it), his tweets were thrilling and his actual purchase was nothing short of messianic.

Shortly after the news broke, it appeared as if both the Tesla founder and Twitter’s leadership had come to an agreement that Musk would join the company’s board, with Twitter’s newly appointed CEO Parag Agrawal (who once famously stated that Twitter’s role was “not to be bound by the First Amendment”) heaping some very strategically-driven praise on his newfound frenemy.

But less than a week later, the plan fell apart and Agrawal announced that their new activist shareholder would not in fact be pushing for his changes from within the tightly regulated, child-proof confines of Twitter’s board of directors.

It’s clear now why that happened. As many speculated, Musk’s invitation to the board was more of a containment strategy by Twitter than a good faith attempt at collaboration. Joining the board would have restricted Musk from taking any more than a 14.9 percent ownership stake in the company and would have also obligated him to further fiduciary responsibilities that might have limited his criticism and reform attempts. Musk clearly has larger ambitions. It remains to be seen whether the company take-over actually happens and what Musk has planned if it does happen.

In the meantime, I have one suggestion.

I should state upfront that what I’m about to propose is far from a comprehensive solution to the problem of Big Tech censorship. As I’ve written about before, these companies are in some ways victims of their own success, what with having monopolized the flow of speech and information for pretty much everyone on the planet. As such, private self-governance is not likely to solve this problem, as much as Big Tech clings tightly to the belief that it can. But for now, a little billionaire activism pointed in the right direction might not be the worst thing.

It’s well-known that a major source of ideological bias and censorship at companies like Twitter is their very passionate and vocal rank-and-file employees who are disproportionately plucked from a highly-educated, progressive demographic pool — one where the line between social justice activism and professional obligation has all but disappeared. Given the unprecedented power and influence concentrated at these companies today, going to work for one of them has become less about contributing to the growth of a successful company or producing new innovations and more about joining something of a ministry of culture — an elite institution where the best and brightest can impose and enforce their benighted class’s enlightened and progressive values over the country’s media, culture, and politics. In its most potent form, these activities are concentrated and institutionalized at tech companies in the form of “safety” and “misinformation” departments tasked with censoring and imposing speech controls using extremely arbitrary standards that seem to change day to day based on the fleeting partisan, ideological, and electoral context of the moment.

So with that in mind, perhaps one thing Elon Musk might do if his credit card isn’t declined and his impulse purchase actually does go through is hire a group of people whose job is to literally do the exact opposite of all of that.

In other words, if there are employees at Twitter whose job (either formally or informally) is to look for any reason to ban users and censor information, there should also be employees whose job is to look for any excuse to defend the free speech of users and combat the censorship of news and information. It would be an intentional invitation of a counter-insurgency, made up of people who are every bit as zealously dedicated to defending speech rights and press freedoms as many current employees are to their social justice causes and misinformation anxieties. And by design, this department would exist in an overt tension with those who seek to protect the "safety" of users and combat "misinformation."

A pro-speech, anti-censorship department at Twitter (and other Big Tech platforms for that matter) would address two primary issues.

The first issue is that advocating for the freedom of speech and the combating of censorship, in our present political environment, requires people dedicated to doing that and nothing else. It simply isn’t something that any individual, or group of individuals, can “balance” among other competing duties.

Part of the reason for this is that, just as your Human Resources director was literally trained to spread the gospel of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, anyone whose job is to “protect user safety” or “combat misinformation” is likely to have come straight out of a social justice madrasa. But perhaps the bigger reason is that censorship today largely relies on social pressure, shaming, and mob intimidation. It works because nearly everyone, to some degree, is sensitive to these tactics. Most people have their lives to live, families to raise, and simply aren’t willing to experience a social death no matter how lofty the principles at stake. Protecting speech and advocating against censorship in today’s pressure cooker of a political environment requires people who are completely indifferent to the mob — people whose sole job is to not care in service of those higher ideals (think someone like Edward Snowden). In other words, in addition to having an understanding of and commitment to civil liberties, free speech, and press freedoms, these counter-insurgents would need to demonstrate a track record of not caring — an appetite for cancellation. Hard to find, perhaps, but they are out there.

The second issue addressed by this initiative is that, as I just mentioned, censorship and the curtailing of speech happens as a result of pressure and intimidation, and specifically the kind that that is internally exerted directly onto the CEOs and top executives of Big Tech companies. At the moment, activist employees are essentially an unopposed lobbying force within these companies, making these confrontations a one-on-one showdown that put CEOs and top executives in a very vulnerable position. Even Twitter’s recently departed CEO, Jack Dorsey, who was generally seen as one of the more civic-minded, pro-speech executive leaders within the world of Big Tech, repeatedly found himself having to bow to pressure, as he did with the censoring of the Hunter Biden laptop story during the 2020 election (a move which he later admitted was a mistake).

The solution to this is obvious: The social justice warriors need some healthy competition, so that the heat of the mob can at least somewhat be redirected away from top leadership and instead be funneled into a “team of rivals” dynamic within these companies. Only then can these fights cease being a referendum on the personal virtues of one tech company CEO.

So that’s my humble suggestion. If Musk does end up owning Twitter outright, then I imagine it might be tempting to focus first on who needs to be fired. But as I’ve said, the ideological capture of the educated professional class is so pervasive at this point that trying to staff an elite tech company that’s free of wokeness mania and disinfo panic would be likely trying to bail out the ocean. So Elon, if you’re reading, my advice would be to first think about the very specific kind of people who need to be hired.

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Hey everyone, we wanted to let folks know that INQUIRE has launched our new live call-in show — INQUIRE Live — on the new social podcasting app Callin. We’re joining a raft of other exciting, independent, heterodox writers and thinkers like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and others to support a new, alternative platform for discussing topics and ideas that are increasingly becoming threatened and suppressed on today’s dominant media platforms.

Callin allows listeners to take part in the show by letting them ask questions and have conversation with show hosts. After the show, episodes are saved and recorded so that they can be listened to like a regular podcast. We’ve been soft-launching for a couple of weeks and have three shows recorded so far. The app is available on iPhone and Android, and can also be used on the web. Once you download the app, you can subscribe directly to our show and get notified when we go live and when a new recorded episode is available to listen to.

As always, we deeply appreciate the support of our subscribers, which makes it possible for us to continue experimenting with new formats and platforms that allow us to have free and unfiltered discussions on today’s most important debates.

As of March 1st, Virginia’s public schools will no longer require students to wear face masks. The demise of the mask mandates was settled by the November election; the state’s new Republican Governor, Glenn Youngkin, quickly signed into law an executive order ending masking. When that order came under dispute, he worked to pass a bipartisan law winning a parent opt-out for students.

While the Virginia branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has decided to sue the state, arguing that the move “shows a reckless disregard for students with disabilities across Virginia,” the legal maneuver is unlikely to succeed.

The most vociferous opposition to ending the mandates has come from Northern Virginia, the region of the state that is most Democratic. That’s not a surprise at at this point. Early in the pandemic, COVID-19 mitigation policies became polarized to such an extent that you could predict the status of school closures not by the severity of the disease at the moment but by partisan leaning of the district and the strength of teachers unions.

Since the culture of masking emerged in the United States, opponents of mandates have argued that they aren’t proven to significantly reduce the spread of COVID-19; proponents have argued that these mandates are essential to protect people from the spread of the virus and that masks are only a small imposition on personal freedom to begin with.

When it comes to masks in schools in particular, both sides have little research to draw from because the vast majority of research on COVID-19 has been focused on adults; this makes some amount of intuitive sense because the disease is on average much more severe for adults than it is on children.

The British government, however, conducted its own review of studies of the use of masking in schools and found the evidence inconclusive about health effects. Interestingly, the British also conducted a broad survey of students to query them about how they felt about using masks:

A survey conducted by the Department for Education in March 2021 found that pupils had a somewhat positive attitude towards wearing face coverings. Pupils generally agreed that face coverings made others (87%) and themselves (70%) feel safe. However, 80% of pupils reported that wearing a face covering made it difficult to communicate, and more than half felt wearing one made learning more difficult (55%).

The results offer fodder for both sides. Masking does offer psychological comfort to many students during the ongoing pandemic; but many students also believe that masking makes it more difficult to communicate.

The latter point has been only lightly studied. Last year, I covered research showing that masks have been shown through experiments to lower trust. But we barely know how masking is impacting society as a whole and we know next to nothing about how masking is impacting the social development of children, who are still learning how to vocalize words and engage in communication with their peers and adults. There’s a lot we don’t know, and it often seems like we’ve barely made any effort to find out.

Last year, I had the opportunity to work with a talented filmmaker named Eli Steele on a documentary about the closure of a historic pharmaceutical plant in a town in West Virginia.

Eli is deaf. One thing I learned working with him is that even with hearing assistance technology, it’s very important to use good diction when communicating with people who are deaf or hard of hearing. That includes making sure they can read your lips.

As contentious debates about masks heated up in Virginia, I started to wonder how the culture of masking has impacted deaf and hard of hearing Virginians. That led me to the Northern Virginia Resource Center for Deaf & Hard of Hearing Persons (NVRC).

The NVRC has worked with deaf and hard of hearing people for around 34 years, serving as a hub for the community. It operates a number of services, including educational programs and hearing screenings. They stay busy — it’s estimated there are over 100,000 people in Northern Virginia who are hard of hearing. When I reached out to them, they graciously offered to sit down with me and explain how the last two years have transformed the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people.

“There’s something I want to play for you,” Bonnie O’Leary, NVRC’s Director of Community Outreach Programs and a hard of hearing person herself, told me before she played an audio recording for me from her stereo system.

“I want you to listen to a simulation of high-frequency hearing loss,” she said. “Which is what impacts the majority of people within the hard of hearing community, like 26 million Americans who’ve got this problem. And what you’re going to hear, this man as he’s speaking first it will start out with normal hearing you’ll hear like a normal hearing person, then it will go to mild, then moderate, then severe, and then profound high-frequency hearing loss. And as the hearing goes down I want you to imagine what it’s like for someone with that type of a hearing loss to try to understand somebody who’s got a mask on, it maybe like drives the point home in a way.”

I heard a voice reading a sentence. At first, it was clear as daylight what he was saying. But as the line repeated at every stage of hearing loss, it became much more difficult to hear. By the time it got to the last stage, I couldn’t make out any of his words at all.

As someone with normal hearing, listening to the simulation offered a small taste of the world that people who are deaf or hard of hearing live through every day. And the COVID-19 pandemic and the culture of masking that sprung up around it introduced even more challenges to that world.

Eileen McCartin, NVRC’s Executive Director, explained those challenges to me.

“Acoustically, even if you didn’t really think you were hard of hearing before this, now you are,” she told me while gesturing to a surgical mask on the table, “because…of the acoustic properties of this are interfering with the sound going through. So you have that little muffle. And…you also lose the ability to lip read, and the facial expressions, and things like that. So people going into stores and places like that, they get heightened anxiety, if you will. So I have two cochlear implants, so for me usually I use lip-reading as a backup. So I have acoustic ability to receive the sound pretty good but with the masks it’s harder.”

Both McCartin and O’Leary use apps on their smartphones to help them communicate. They showed me Live Transcribe (available on Android phones) and Otter (which you can use on both Android and Apple phones), which offer a way to transcribe what the phone can hear.

O’Leary told me she had surgery in the recent past and had to communicate to an anesthesiologist who had both a face shield and a mask on.

“Imagine being a deaf person having to go to the hospital, or a very hard of hearing person, and they’re all coming at you in masks,” she told me.

In this case, the anesthesiologist was kind enough to take her mask down to allow O’Leary to lip read her (she also downloaded Otter to be able to communicate with her in the operating room).

Public schools have long offered accommodations for deaf or hard of hearing children. These include providing sign language interpreters and/or providing assisted hearing systems that include a teacher pinning a microphone to themselves. But in a culture of masking, these accommodations can only go so far. If most students and staff are masked up — and in Northern Virginia, it’s likely that most of them will be even after the removal of mandates — challenges will remain for deaf or hard of hearing children. The lip-reading they rely on will continue to be obstructed, and masks will continue to muffle the sounds that will be even harder to understand.

To be clear, the NVRC aren’t anti-maskers. In fact, McCartin and O’Leary spoke both told me that they understand the health concerns and tradeoffs that currently exist. They want people to be healthy.

But it’s obvious that there has been too little research done on the social costs of the culture of masking, both on the general public and on groups like the deaf and hard of hearing community. It’s possible, for instance, that moving to transparent or clear masks could help everyone by enabling lip-reading and facial communication again. The NVRC staff showed me some of the clear masks they had on hand.

Of course this would be a challenging transition to make. How many clear masks have you seen during the entire pandemic? I hadn’t seen any until I visited NVRC. Now, many Americans are switching to more advanced N95 masks, which are typically not transparent (although Ford Motor Company announced they will be making clear ones).

Meanwhile, some educational settings are starting to be more mindful about these challenges. Rochester University, for instance, moved to require “surgical, N95, KN95, or KF94 masks (non-cloth masks) to be worn by all students, faculty, staff, and visitors—including those who are fully vaccinated—while indoors on any of the University’s campuses and properties,” but made an exemption for deaf or hard of hearing individuals who may need others to wear a clear face mask. If Ford is able to ramp up the production of its clear N95, there may be a way to satisfy both interests: providing protection for those who continue to want it while doing less to impair facial expressions and lip-reading.

But we can’t seriously tackle any of these challenges until we admit they exist. For months, some have argued that the case for or against masks in various settings is cut and dry, black and white. When we fail to see the gray is when we miss the important realities of many people out there whose voices have gone unheard.

Spotify podcaster and former Fear Factor host Joe Rogan is so hot right now. Every corner of the Internet seems to be debating the merits, or lack thereof, of The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE), the interview podcast that launched in 2009 with relative obscurity but has now become the most-listened to …

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Neil Young, the famed Canadian-American rock and folk musician, issued an ultimatum to the streaming service Spotify: you either get me or podcaster Joe Rogan.

“I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote in an open letter posted on his website. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Y…

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At least a dozen state legislatures are considering legislation that would require more transparency in school curricula and materials. In the left-leaning press this is largely being reported as a response to growing conservative concern around instruction relate…

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In the United States and across the world, people have spent the past century migrating to cities in order to seek better economic opportunities. Central America, for instance, has one of the highest urbanization rates, a consequence of people moving out of economically deprived rural …

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If you decide to hunker down with your family this holiday season and tune into Netflix’s Adam McKay feature Don’t Look Up, you’ll have a decent time. I did.

The movie’s cast — featuring Dr. Randall Mindy (Leona…

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When you see headlines about rising crime, it’s important to remember that not everyone experiences crime at the same rate, even when we tend to notice more when that crime is hitting unusual places and atypical targets. Take this recent piece from the Los Angeles Times:

Crews of bur…

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Ruy wrote a recent article on his Substack on this subject, and has written extensively about the demographic shifts shaping Amer…

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Over the course of the pandemic, much of the U.S. has gotten a taste of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of an unconditional government cash transfer. In 2020, stimulus checks and a more generous unemployment benefit combined with other government effort…

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In 1989, the feminist scholar Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay titled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” McIntosh, who is white, described white people as carrying an “invisible package of unearned assets” that they can “count on cashing in each day.”

No matter what your sta…

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It’s not every day a murder trial ends up being covered in play-by-play fashion by the national news networks. There were more than 21,500 homicides in the United States last year, and most people couldn’t name anyone involved — victim or offender.

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Andrew Yang is breaking up with the Democratic Party, a move he announced in a blog post published on his website last month. He changed his voter registration from Democrat to Independent, calling it a “strangely emotional experience.”

He noted that he had first joined the party in 1995 to s…

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If you roll back the clock to early August, the Virginia gubernatorial contest was a pretty subdued race. The RealClearPolitics (RCP) polling average at that time showed Republican Glenn Youngkin trailing Democrat Terry McAuliffe by almost six points.

Many observers assumed that V…

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The party that has traditionally embraced free markets and free people – that once proudly declared that the business of America is business – is increasingly finding itself on the other side of Corporate America when it comes to hot-button culture war debates.

Conservatives are watching in ho…

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For a while I’ve considered doing a regular series where I remind everyone of some very obvious, foundational principles that are easy to lose sight of due to the rapid pace of cultural change we’re currently experiencing. So this may be the first of that series.

Last week, a high school teacher in California was caught on video imitating a Native Americ…

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