Elon Musk Has Forgotten How He Got Here

Elon Musk’s impending takeover of Twitter, and his seeming desire to do away with most content moderation and make the site a free-speech free-for-all, has predictably made him a hero to conservatives (who have been convinced for years now that Twitter is flagging tweets, and suspending and shadow-banning accounts, for ideological reasons) and prompted angry and frustrated tweets from many liberals. And Musk himself, while he says that his goal is for Twitter to be politically neutral, has been leaning into the conservative embrace, tweeting that the far left hates everything, including themselves, and claiming that the Democratic Party has been “hijacked by extremists.”

This is, in one sense, totally unsurprising. Musk has always had a libertarian edgelord side to him, and he really likes trolling people on Twitter. His seeming indifference to questions of harassment and hate speech online make him a natural ally for the right on social media. And he’s become a favorite target of liberal politicians in recent years because he’s paid so relatively little in income tax despite being the world’s richest person and because he’s been a vocal opponent of unions. So it’s only natural that he would gravitate away from those who have been attacking him.

Still, while Musk’s coziness with conservatives may be unsurprising, it’s still genuinely odd when you…