December 11, 2023 - 1:40pm
Elon Musk has reinstated the X account of notorious InfoWars host Alex Jones. Banned in 2018 for claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting was faked, Jones was subsequently ordered to pay $1.5 billion in damages to victims’ family members. On Saturday, Musk allowed him to return to the platform following a user poll.
This isn’t the first Musk-era unbanning: he has also brought back Donald Trump, and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, among others. The tech boss has made much of his support for free speech, telling advertisers now boycotting X to “go f*** yourselves”, and saying on Saturday that while he vehemently disagrees with Jones’s statements on Sandy Hook, “are we a platform that believes in freedom of speech or are we not?”
The day after reinstating the InfoWars host, Musk celebrated by joining a highly attended X Space which included Jones, Tate and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy. The message is clear: Musk is intentionally treating X as a counter to the increasingly heavily-policed moral consensus that has emerged since Anglosphere public discourse transitioned definitively to a digital-first model.
But what’s significant about this latest unbanning is less Musk’s view on freedom of expression than the subversive relation Jones’s mode of speech has to many of the prior assumptions on which “free speech” rests.
In order to make sense at all, the idea that free speech will make the world better presumes the speakers themselves are (broadly speaking) sufficiently rational, logical, and persuadable to be willing to work collaboratively on uncovering the truth. But Jones commands a vast audience less for delivering facts than communicating a vibe. He is decried as a “conspiracy theorist”, and it’s usually easy enough to debunk his statements at a factual level. But his pronouncements make a great deal more sense when one realises that they are intended less literally, in the rational register of reasoned debate, than in one closer to that employed by someone presenting as a preacher or prophet.
Jones is just one person, but in social media platform terms he is a very big beast. And if one views so-called “conspiracy theories” less as lies than as allegories, it becomes clear that Jones’s popularity and reinstatement signal the unstoppable return of allegory, to a public square still purportedly governed by rationalistic norms. That is, as yet another sign of the broader shift in Anglophone digital-era public discourse, away from a conception of truth that prioritises what is viewed as objective and verifiable, and towards one that prioritises what feels morally or emotionally resonant.
This is both enabled and accelerated by the digital transition. If words on a screen can be repeatedly, invisibly altered, do they point to anything stable or true? Or do they just reflect what “they” want you to believe? Perhaps it’s no coincidence that among the generation of Americans most accustomed to the fluidity of digital print, one in five thinks the Holocaust is a myth. Flat earth theories are making a comeback, while another campaign half-seriously claims that “Birds Aren’t Real”.
It isn’t simply a fringe phenomenon: it holds across the political spectrum. Take propositions such as gender self-identification, for example, which are treated on large portions of the Left as in some sense morally true, despite being objectively absurd.
Notwithstanding the lamentations of those who still value facts and logic, and the best efforts of (often themselves highly politically suspect) fact-checking bodies, this direction of travel is now well-established. Jones’s reinstatement on X will turn up the allegorical temperature.
In the immediate future, this all suggests that the 2024 US election will be even louder and more unhinged than the last two — and even more powered by prophecy, vibes, and the mercurial moods of the digital mob. In the longer term, it points to something still more unsettling: a global superpower that combines an increasingly obvious lack of public interest in logic, objectivity, or rational calculations with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
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SubscribeAcademia is largely to blame for this. As a long-term academic I have become disgusted with how higher education abandoned its core mission to uphold truth and objectivity and instead have pandered to those who use strong emotions and overblown narratives of injustice to amass power. Higher education and many other cultural institutions are peopled by those who refuse to be reasoned with, because they have brainwashed themselves into believing that the pursuit of truth is the ‘white man’s’ tool to keep others down.
In a world where truth is offensive, moral and emotional discourse takes over. I reluctantly include myself in this. Whenever I have tried to rationally question left-wing ideology I have been met with accusations of white male privilege and misogyny and bigotry. I no longer bother talking to those with vehemently opposing viewpoints to mine, because I’m beginning to think it’s absolutely pointless. We are losing the ability to disagree with each other and still be friends.
When people talk about “academia” in this kind of context, they’re really talking about arts and humanities aren’t they? Those of us who graduated in STEM subjects didn’t really see too much of that.
I’d just guess that arts and humanities graduates are over-represented among the chattering classes, opinion writers and columnists and therefore give a skewed and exaggerated view of the travails of the academy.
I’m not convinced everyone in STEM subjects is committed to objective, verifiable science. There are a lot of doctors out there who think gender is a spectrum. During Covid, a lot of doctors denied the role of natural immunity. There are a bunch of engineers telling us you can run an electric grid on wind and solar.
Yes it is true that science can become corrupted, especially when political or commercial interests come to bear. I’m a mathematician myself, but a lot of what you see these days in term of models applied to complex systems seem to be designed to arrive at a certain results, and when they don’t, sleight of hand is employed to make them fit the data better. It really is borderline “objective” science.
Nonetheless, the idea that there is some objective truth out there, waiting to be discovered, hasn’t gone away.
“I’m a mathematician myself”
No you’re not
Oh yes I am!
(It is the panto season, after all)
Your comments aren’t constructive, nor are they funny. You are just a space taker.
The anonymous simpleton has returned – yawn.
I’ve got it. You are Owen Jones (the level of comment gave it away).
Where’s my £5?
The ‘M’ in STEM is Maths, not Medicine: which with psychology and economics are pseudo-sciences, imposters as you rightly say.
After the Faculty of Education the Faculty of Medicine is commonly the second most deranged at most North American Universities. STEM is absolutely not immune.
You must not be aware of the inroads critical theory is making in STEM.
Yes, I’ve read about attempts to “decolonise” maths and the like, but they’re pretty risible. The trouble is, whenever something like that does happen, outrage peddlars jump on them and exaggerate their influence and importance, and people end up believing that critical theory is “making inroads” when, let’s be honest, it isn’t really.
“Really” meaning “among those who matter”? Because it IS “really” having an impact beyond all proportion. #statisticsismath
But you are of course?!?!
Why don’t you enlighten us, Jezza?
Not at all.
Not long before Covid my son had to listen to abuse from a non-white fellow student about white male physics knowing that any suggestion that he did not agree with this premise would likely land him in difficulty.
Also his department signed up to decolonise the curriculum. How you do this in a physics department is not exactly clear unless it involves denying non-white students use of the advances made as a results of white man’s physics
My fellow Chem major has blocked me for championing Larry Sommers view that differing interest accounts for most of the differences in STEM participation between genders. A position backed by extensive research.
I return to Unherd and found my posts just vanished when I closed the page, maybe a month ago, so just gave up on coming here at all. But they still send me auto-emails and this article on censorship was compelling as I have had such a history of censoring here, especially after re-joining this time,,haha They write of the canceling wile doing it themselves.
Anyway, I want to say hi to all you sheep, and point out Unherd fundamentally, totally, misunderstands the entire premise of ‘Free Speech’
”In order to make sense at all, the idea that free speech will make the world better presumes the speakers themselves are (broadly speaking) sufficiently rational, logical, and persuadable to be willing to work collaboratively on uncovering the truth.”
NO
It means no self appointed Gatekeeper of Free Speech will be allowed to determine who is:
”sufficiently rational, logical, and persuadable to be willing to work collaboratively on uncovering the truth”
Because the Gatekeepers, (old Twitter – Unherd Mods – University DEI postmodernist loons, etc) never can get it correct about whose truth is truth and who’s is agenda. You always end up with a Torquemada making the decisions. The idea of ‘Free Speech’ does not mean a speaker necessarily adds anything at all to make sense – it means the idea of a speech gatekeeper prevents uncovering actual truth.
When you play in somebody else’s sandbox, you have to live by their rules. Sometimes comments won’t appear right away because of moderation sometimes not all. It’s their board.
Yes, but (see below) …
Yes, I don’t know why comments disappear in UnHerd’s comment sections. They sometimes reappear days later when the “Herd” has moved on to different subjects, so no discussion is possible anymore. In an ideal world every comment should be published unless it calls for violence. Wish the moderators would tell us why comment disappear. At least at X you get “community notes” …
Wrong. Without a modicum of civility the Comments section will become a shouting match, which will tend to drive away some of the more interesting comments. It’s a community (of opinionated, often annoying, sometimes strange, people), not a private soapbox. At least, that’s what I think.
We all get deleted occasionally. Sometimes for no known reason. For all I know this one will go down with all hands. I’ve been trying to figure it out for a year, now. No luck.
What you say cannot be true. Look at ‘Champagne Socialist’, for instance – how does he/she/they contribute to genuine discussion in any way? They’re just a troll. The taking down of comments in UnHerd is obviously administered by bots who seem to focus on key words and combinations thereof in ‘deciding’ what is acceptable.
I find it is random. Completely vanilla comments get spiked – while salty ones stay up. I doubt there is a human being in the process.
“As a long-term academic”
Long-term fantasist.
There – fixed it for you!
Are you ok there? Do you have someone who looks after you?
Tip top, old boy!
Please – don’t feed the trolls!
Unfortunately, the moderators allow trolls.
You seriously don’t need those kind of friends. Find others though this might entail stepping from the campus into the real world.
The idea behind free speech is not that it will make the world better, but that nobody is entitled to define if speech is good or bad.
Hmm…so Mary supports free speech up to a point, but then implies that unserious deranged mad mouthpieces should not be heard, lest too many of their followers actually believe what they say.
So does that mean the Guardian should be banned for its take on “free speech”, which is actually just…propaganda , hate, racism and conspiracy theories…
I think people should at least be expected to match their own standards (aka do what you preach). So yes, Guardian should be banned for hate, racism and conspiracy theories..
Mary has disappointed of late. She doesn’t understand that having a commitment to ‘logic, objectivity, or rational calculations’ only makes sense when you share a narrative to being with. But for that, you need free and open debate.
I’ve often thought that Brits just don’t quite “get” free speech. Wonderful commentator Mary is an example.
The problem isn’t that people like Jones exist and are given space on social media, (the Left isn’t bereft of idiots either and they have larger platforms and are given more cover in the media), but that people listen to them. Two generations of ill-educated children have become adults, and it is their world now. I just watched a debate where Jonathan Haidt who wrote The Coddling of the American Mind explained all the reasons he thought kids were fragile today and it occurred to me that it didn’t matter because the damage had already been done, Millennials and GenZ were formed and there was no changing them back. There is no changing the course we are on.
Democracy in America is breaking down, nothing gets done on the national level except the funding of wars and games of chicken around government funding for existing bloated programs. The system is badly in need of reform, but there is no one who wants to do it, authoritarians and iconoclasts rule the day. Forty years of neo-liberal capitalism have turned us into a country where if there is no profit in something, there is no point in doing it. Our Left has always been feckless, ineffectual and only capable of endless circular firing squads, so there is no help coming from them.
Millennials and GenZ, mostly because Boomers gave up on reform, will live through a dark age of authoritarianism and civil unrest and I don’t think anything can be done to change it. Have a nice day.
Seems a bit much to blame mollycoddled Millennials for Americas political posturing when the vast majority of their politicians are from the older demographics such as Gen X and Boomers
I don’t think it is all their fault, neo-liberal economics is on the Boomers, but a lot of the Woke, DEI stuff on campuses and in corporations today is. I also don’t think there is much hope that they will change anything for the better in the future. Do you?
I don’t think it’s an age thing. Most youngsters I know have no time for any of that type of stuff, but that’s likely because they work on site and had what could be described as fairly working class upbringings. The views you describe are mostly middle class affairs, who unfortunately are over represented in the media and academia
Someone once said of Donald Trump that his detractors tale him “literally, but not seriously ” whereas for his supporters, it’s the other way around, and that was way back in 2016.
I think the problem with technocratic liberalism that we’ve all had to get used to in recent decades is that’s it’s just so, well, boring.
I think there is something in the human soul which strives against this, and which cries out for politicians who are charismatic prophets, and not mere managers, as if we can no longer bear politics which ressemble “The Economist” editorials or LinkedIn corporate press releases, without losing the will to live.
The problem with the ”technocratic liberalism” is that is is part of an agenda which is antithetical to Western Society. It is one of the shipworms eating away at the hull of the ship which carries us. Boring, haha, away in a very different sense, unregarded, till the leaks begin spouting so fast the vessel is doomed.
Yes. We want kings, not corporate managers.
Most of what Alex Jones says is truth. The problem with this article is the writer does not understand the full depth of depravity the Elites who run the world are preparing for us, are subjecting us to. It is 1937 all over again, but a more benign appearing ‘Hideous Strength’ is enveloping the world, yet just as dreadful. Let us hope we win the struggle again.
How about say, Yuval Harari, for truth. If a fully evil philosophy existed he embodies it. (the Philosophical/Tech spokesperson of the WEF)
If the writer actually has fallowed Alex Jones, maybe watched him, read his books, then the message is huge, and the suppression of it equally so. Alex basically says the world is controlled by a global Elite who wish a 1984, but worse, for the planet. Worse in that it encompasses AI, and thus eternal and a ‘Singularity’ that they hope to become part of. If Alex Jone’s message is the Titanic, this writer is worried about the colors used on the flyers advertising its voyage.
“Most of what Alex Jones says is truth”
How about the stuff about the murdered schoolkids at Sandy Hook? Was that telling the truth?
Or was he dancing on the graves of little children in order to enrich himself?
You should listen to what he said about it on Tucker Carlson. Supposedly he listened and believed so called “experts” ( whatever that means) at the time. He apologised later and admitted his mistake, Btw. he wasn’t removed because of his Sandy Hook comments , but much later when he used abusive language against a journalist.
Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson?
What kind of world do you live in?!?!?
The real world, where everybody has their own thoughts and opinions regardless of whether they’re allowed on Twitter or not. The messy, ugly world where some people use whatever words they can to deceive and manipulate one another or to get their own way. The uncertain world where what is true depends on who you ask, which expert you believe, or which media you listen to. People disagree with each other about most everything including facts. Two people can witness the same scene and give radically different descriptions of what happened. Two people can take the same information and draw different conclusions. That’s just how things are, and as far as I can tell it’s how things have always been. I encourage you to make peace with the nature of the world we live in and not insist on making it conform to your expectations.
One of the earlier Doctor Who characters said the following – it fits not only the subject here, but also some of our sillier fellow-travellers below the line:
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts; they alter the facts to fit their views
The problem with this article is that it begins with an error. Jones was not banned from Twitter for anything he said about Sandy Hook, but for “abusive behaviour”.
“Banned in 2018 for claiming that the Sandy Hook school shooting was faked”
The link supplied does not actually back up the assertion Mary makes.
Apparently what happened was Jones confronted a left wing journalist in the Capitol.
Told him, amongst other things, that he had “the eyes of a rat”
Maybe he had and Jones was speaking the truth
“In order to make sense at all, the idea that free speech will make the world better presumes the speakers themselves are (broadly speaking) sufficiently rational, logical, and persuadable to be willing to work collaboratively on uncovering the truth.”
Mary … change ‘speakers’ to ‘listeners’ and you’ve nailed it.
Free speech means hearing from cranks and eccentrics.
Mary, I don’t claim “the idea that free speech will make the world better.” No one that I know on the right does.
The proper claim is that restrictions on free speech make the world worse.
“In order to make sense at all, the idea that free speech will make the world better presumes the speakers themselves are (broadly speaking) sufficiently rational, logical, and persuadable to be willing to work collaboratively on uncovering the truth.”
No it doesn’t. I presumes that the listeners are sufficiently rational, logical and persuadable in order to work collaboratively and critically with all forms of speech and weed out the truth from amongst the junk.
A stupid remark produces a billion-$ judgement against Jones. But Holocaust-deniers are feted and promoted.
Much of the criticism of Jones -like Harrington’s- are largely ad-hominem. And because he is a despicable rightwing male, cannot be engaged respectfully by the righteous, but must be lumped together with flat-earthers, etc.
“A stupid remark produces a billion-$ judgement against Jones.”
Um, I think you mean a protracted persecution of the parents of murdered schoolchildren based on provable lies with the explicit aim of enriching himself.
Alex Jones is slime and I’m guessing by your defence of him you belong in that category too. But go ahead, keep showing us who you really are.
With the obvious provisos that governments have a great incentive to understate or overstate their nuclear arsenals and that the number of warheads is not necessarily equal to the number of actual usable weapons at any one time, the general consensus is that Russia and not America possesses the largest nuclear arsenal. Whether a possibly unstable egomaniac tyrant is more trustworthy than a mostly democratic society with “an obvious lack of public interest in logic, objectivity, or rational calculations” is a topic worthy of debate in its own right. In any case, since the invention of the bomb, it is fear, not reason that has kept the missiles in the silos, and I see no evidence that fear of destruction is any less motivating these days.
Furthermore, as a committed and long-term believer in rationalist philosophy, I am delighted to see so many in the world coming around to the idea that there is no such thing as ‘objective’ truth or indeed, any such thing as ‘objective’. Every thing we read was written by somebody else who is just as human and capable of being wrong as we are. Nobody is pure. Everybody has an agenda. We’re making all this up as we go along and any resemblance to any ‘objective’ reality present or past is coincidental. We don’t allow free speech because we can collectively arrive at some better truth. That’s just the myth empiricist thinkers peddle because they’re unable to deal with the unlimited uncertainty of our existence. On the contrary, we allow freedom of speech because none of us, individually or collectively, is ever able to definitively establish what the ‘truth’ even is and therefore none of us are qualified to decide what should and shouldn’t be seen, read, or heard by anyone else.
Science isn’t about determining what is true, but an exercise in rejecting that which is false, and it isn’t any more perfect than any other human invention. Any scientific principle can be rejected if further experimentation and evidence demonstrates it’s falsehood. At best, it’s a progressive approach to ‘truth’ which allows us to get relatively closer to truth as a mathematical function approaches an asymptote, but by definition, we cannot arrive at truth through the scientific or any other empirical method.
If you are trying to bring down a system that holds that subjective emotions are truth, you cannot do it with objective logic. Instead pile on the bat-shit-crazy subjective emotion as truth until the weight of the obvious illogic brings down the edifice. Elon is a prophet and genius in this regard.
Conspiracy theories aka spoiler alerts.
“Logic, objectivity, or rational calculations” lost their cachet thanks to Scientism. If you don’t know what that means, it is worth your time to look it up.
I think it’s possible to overstate the significance of these things. Musk is just engaging in the time-honoured sport of winding up the world’s smug busybodies which, after all, is just about the most fun you can have with your clothes on.
Why do people find Alex jones such a threat, especially mainstream media? This straight away shows that power find him some sort of threat? Then it makes the presumption that academic intelligence is the way forward, but those in academia are mostly corrupted at top level institutions. Government have been highlighted to be highly corrupt and war after war has shown they no longer trustworthy. Also when reporters say it easy enough to debunk his statements, well if this is true, why don’t you do it! And don’t just pick the easy ones. Why doesn’t anyone ever debate him on the facts, if so easy to debunk and audience would see straight through Alex jones if it were all lies. Usual statements about not giving him a platform is just ridiculous at this stage, it’s because he seemingly has better facts which continue to come true. He called major events before they even happened. He showed us event 201 in 2019 stating covid would be launched and the globalists would reset the system. It all happened – fact!
If all Jones tweets (or whatever they are called now) has the tag ‘convicted liar’ perhaps just one of those things we have to roll with.
Wish they would put a warning tag on politicians and doctors, especially during Covid for all the rubbish we were told. What about a red tag attached to Dr. Fauci. Problem with him is that he so far escaped conviction. Hope Rand Paul will get him eventually.
Fascinating thought piece. But couldn’t what you identify as allegory also hold within itself the possibility of the sacred once again coming into its own by shaking up the current materialistic science-based assumptions that largely outlaw religion and, particularly, Christianity? If so it’s not all doom and gloom, suggested by your closing paragraph.
Is believing in ‘free speech’ the same thing as believing that all speech matters the same?
The latter seems like hard relativism to me, the former a more or less modern human right. Either way, it seems that Musk seems to be conflating the two.
Wondering what UnHerd commenters think.
“That is, as yet another sign of the broader shift in Anglophone digital-era public discourse, away from a conception of truth that prioritises what is viewed as objective and verifiable, and towards one that prioritises what feels morally or emotionally resonant.”
“Prioritises” is viewer’s choice, isn’t it? In plain speech, the expression “I guess it depends” makes the point better. Alex Jones paints with a broad brush, but he is more on the money than the dishonest oligarchic legacy media owned by left-wing plutocrats lead you to believe.
This image of conspiracy theories and bombastic political rhetoric as allegories is brilliant. The endless floating of ridiculous ideas is a privilege the Left has long reserved to itself.
Isn’t Russia the country with the world’s largest nuclear arsenal? Not that this specific error in any way alters the ideas in Mary’s piece.
People are endlessly creative. If asians, jews and whites are pushed out becausenof DEI.tey will become founders. The ones that su ceed willqeaponise their wealth. We.can already see the donor.class.heading down this route (eg Bill Ackman).
No surprise here. Donald Trump, Alex Jones and Andrew Tate are the intellectual leaders of the conservative movement. The fact that they are all morons who wouldn’t know the truth if it slapped them in their stupid faces is a feature, not a bug.
You are led by racists and misogynists and you seem to want more and more of it.
Well, whadyaknow! My old sparring partner DamnShame Socialist is back – at the usual time (presumably after knocking off work) and with the usual yobbish jeering and sneering.
You have to wonder how much this person of indeterminate gender is inspired by that lofty Lefty opinion churner James O’brien. Perhaps He/She/It would care to tell us.
Over to you DamnShame…
My faithful little puppy! Still following me around, hoping for some attention!
It could be James O’Briens wife ….
No. Apparently James O’Brien has an 11-year old daughter. That would seem to fit better.
I genuinely have no idea what you support. Every post is a smear.
I don’t support Alex Jones or Andrew Tate like you do.