Elon Musk Holds Twitter Poll on Pardoning Assange and Snowden
The public has spoken, and the results are staggering
The whole Musk-Twitter takeover has been wild — to say the least. From firing half the freaking staff to telling everyone else to work themselves to death, supposedly letting speech run wild, having Trump back on, trying to keep advertisers happy, and then the Twitter Files chaos, it’s been a sh*t show.
Elon clearly has that Donald-Trump-Kanye-West mentality where he needs to be in the headlines. If too many days have passed without a controversial Musk story, he’ll get on Twitter and make sure we’re talking about him. He’s the world’s richest man. And he is so desperately thirsty for attention.
If I had to find a silver lining to the whole thing, I’d point to his poll on pardoning Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
The response and results were mind-blowing.
Of course, a simple Twitter poll doesn’t change anything. Assange is still being psychologically abused in a maximum security prison, while Snowden can’t leave Russia for fear of having a black bag thrown over his head the moment he stepped off of a plane and being dragged to a CIA black site to be tortured and never heard from publically again.
Musk asking his one hundred twenty million followers about pardoning the two of them doesn’t directly help either of their situations.
But it put a bit of hope in my heart to see that millions voted and the general public is overwhelmingly correct on these very important cases.
The Assange case is shockingly a place where Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow agree. Both admit that he was a journalist and published documented crimes of the US government.
I’m not going to relitigate all the details of either case because many great journalists already have, and everyone is familiar with the Snowden and Assange stories. Although, many in the West have a misguided or incomplete understanding because mainstream media demonization has been extremely effective. The purpose of the constant negative coverage and obfuscation is to create that negative association in the minds of the public.
At the core, Snowden is a whistleblower who revealed crimes of the US government, and Assange is a journalist, who revealed crimes of the US government — notice a theme?
But for people who don’t pay attention, when they hear the names Snowden or Assange, it is easy for them to dismiss the cases because, one time on TV, they heard something negative about stealing data or Russia connections or helping Trump or something weird and fishy.
Currently, Snowden is in a more fortunate position because he still has a bit of freedom. He can’t leave Russia but can go to the supermarket, tweet, speak virtually at conferences, and live a semi-normal life. He’s done the Joe Rogan podcast and Hollywood even made a freaking movie on his story.
What is happening to Julian Assange is criminal and sadistic.
Even the former UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer says Assange is a political prisoner who is being psychologically tortured.
The Assange case is shockingly a place where Tucker Carlson and Rachel Maddow agree. Both admit that he was a journalist and published documented crimes of the US government.
What this is is now a novel legal argument to punch a huge hole in the first amendment… by labeling it criminal espionage to publish secret stuff. — Rachel Maddow
This case is about criminalizing free speech. — Tucker Carlson
All other media outlets also published pieces on the documents WikiLeaks revealed. And yet, it has only been Julian Assange who’s been persecuted for ten-odd years, a journalist being prosecuted for espionage and deprived of his rights, locked in a maximum security prison as we speak, and could soon be extradited to the US where he’d have a show trial and be stuffed in a fluorescent-lit cage until he died.
Meanwhile, nobody has been prosecuted for the numerous war crimes he exposed.
But again, the US State Department and war-hungry media muddy the waters on each case. Even the aforementioned UN Rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer, said he was hesitant to take on the Assange case because he had consumed the typical narratives surrounding Julian, and so his initial reaction was dismissive and negative.
Only after digging into the details himself did he realize how grotesque the mischaracterizations were and how appalling the miscarriage of justice has been.
These are two of the most important cases of the last century.
That is why I appreciate Elon Musk holding this poll.
I think it’s a bit of a cop-out to say he’s ‘not expressing an opinion.’ But let’s not forget, as journalist Alan Macleod said, ‘Elon Musk is not a renegade outsider — he’s a massive Pentagon contractor.’ He might virtue signal about free speech and fundamental rights, but at the end of the day, he’s still an oligarch who said the US can coup whoever it wants.
That being said, he did pose this important question to the public, and a shocking 80.5% said Assange and Snowden should be pardoned. Who knows how many bots and what the geographic breakdown of the voters was, but either way, it warmed my heart a bit.
The US and UK governments would be wise to examine where the people stand.
Because the overwhelming majority of the public, Rachel Maddow, and Tucker Carson are all against the American position. Latin American leaders came out and said Assange should be freed. And a consortium of international media organizations recently said the same.
And when it is such a blatant violation of international law, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, it allows other governments with authoritarian tendencies to shrug their shoulders and point at the Assange case when pressed on their own suppression of journalists.
The world can see what this case is really about.
America, for its own selfish image-based reasons, should drop the prosecution and move on.
If the Assange case goes forward, it is setting a very dangerous precedent.
So good on Elon for posing this question. It might not change much, but it did give me a bit of hope in humanity.