I Just Got Kicked Off Of X. Whodunit?

    I’ve been kicked off of X.  Last weekend, I got a notice that I was suspended. This was followed by a notice saying I was unsuspended, which was then followed by another notice saying I was suspended, fully this time, and that the matter is closed.

    Who did it? The list of suspects could be longer than an Agatha Christie novel. Despite being owned by Elon Musk, X is still vulnerable to censorship. 

        In my view, there are three possibilities.

    Fans of the Washington Post. The Washington Post was decimated last week, with owner Jeff Bezos cutting half of the staff. The destruction was the glorious realization of a lifelong dream of mine, and I was euphoric as I celebrated the demise of this evil institution. Washington Post reporters, like most journalists, are censors. It’s possible they dogpiled me and flooded Elon with complaints. Sally Quinn herself may have dropped the payload.

    Secondly, Hollywood. Or rather, the people in Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry who are not thrilled about my Anti-Communist Film Festival. A piece just ran on Breitbart exploring how the AFI theater in DC strung me along for months, only to reject my request to rent the theater to show The Lives of Others on its 20th anniversary. The Lives of Others is about the East German Stasi, the secret police who played for keeps. It’s possible my X account was sunk by the theater kids in America’s elite institutions. They are the American Stasi.

    Third, Jim VendeHei. When the Washington Post got nuked, VandeHei, a media figure who gave the world both Politico and Axios, was howling bloody murder and offering advice to save the paper. I shared an item I wrote about Jim – in fact, I shared it quite a lot. To everyone. It has some salty language in it. That could have done me in, although a warning would have been nice.

    There’s also a fourth possibility – that I just could not contain my delirious joy at the sinking of the Washington Post and was spiking the ball in the face of too many people.

    It’s still hard to contain the delight. History will consider The Unknown Hoya, our high school underground newspaper, as more accurate than The Washington Post. We never laid people off – staff of three – and always made a profit. We also, even in 1982, believed in free speech. 

    In 2024, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, dropped a bombshell of an editorial.    The headline is a stunner: “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media.” Bezos explains why the Post is not going to endorse Kamala Harris, a decision that caused an uproar at the paper and several high-level editorial defections. Bezos was unsparing. The Post is biased, and people don’t trust it: 

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

He wasn’t done:

Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for the media, but also for the nation. Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions. The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.

    So who did it? Who kneecapped my X account? Was is Posties, Hollywood, Jim VandeHei, or my own delirium at the Washington Post finally being blown up like the Death Star?  Help me, Elon Musk, you’re my only hope.

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