Author: Mises Institute Editors

On May 12, 2023, Elon Musk announced that Linda Yaccarino, the now former chairman of global advertising and partnerships at NBCUniversal, would become the new CEO of Twitter. Musk’s appointment of Yaccarino followed an advertiser exodus that caused Twitter’s ad revenue to plummet by more than 60 percent from October 2022 through January 25, 2022, from around $127 million to just over $48 million. According to Pathmatics, by Sensor Tower, more than half of Twitter’s thousand advertisers pulled their ads from Twitter after Musk’s takeover of the social media company.

The flight of advertisers was due to concerns about Twitter’s content moderation and Musk’s so-called free-speech advocacy. In short, Musk’s supposed free-speech absolutism and his subsequent renunciation of the Democratic Party as “the party of division and hate” put Musk and Twitter squarely in the crosshairs of the establishment and its woke cartel. Yaccarino’s appointment represents Musk’s attempt to appease this seemingly all-powerful contingent. But the Yaccarino hire has no doubt damaged Musk’s reputation as a free speech advocate and dashed many hopes for Twitter as an open forum.

Soon after Musk’s announcement, a firestorm erupted on Twitter. Numerous posters claimed that Yaccarino was the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), a globalist organization that has strongly advocated social media censorship to exclude “misinformation,” “disinformation,” and “conspiracy theories.” Through its partnerships with the United Nations and over a thousand leading banks and corporations, the WEF has promoted its Great Reset project to advance “stakeholder capitalism” and “global governance.”.

Of course, Yaccarino is not the executive chairman of the WEF itself—that would be Klaus Schwab, who is the founder and chair—although her LinkedIn profile seems to suggest as much and is the source of the Twitter and alternative media confusion. But as noted by Reuters, Yaccarino is the chairman of the WEF’s Taskforce on the Future of Work and sits on the WEF’s Media, Entertainment and Culture Industry Governors Steering Committee. She declares that she is a “Global Leader” on her LinkedIn profile; however, it is unclear whether she is an alumnus of the WEF’s Young Global Leaders Forum, a training program that Schwab has claimed exerts enormous influence on leading political figures around the world.

Nevertheless, Yaccarino’s affiliation with the WEF should be a cause for concern for those Twitter users who advocate free speech on the platform, as should her statements during an interview with Musk that Twitter advertisers should have a say about Twitter content moderation. In response to Yaccarino’s questioning, Musk stated that Twitter has implemented “adjacency controls” that let marketers block ads from appearing next to “anything that is remotely negative.” That is, posts that include “anything remotely negative” are already subject to visibility filters that limit their reach to reduce their adjacency to ads. That means that Twitter limits the reach of posts that criticize governments, leading politicians, the Federal Reserve, or the globalist organizations with which Yaccarino is associated, for example.

Yaccarino is an establishment-approved figure and is very well respected in woke advertising circles, which is largely why Musk hired her. During her tenure at NBCUniversal, she also served as the chairman of the board of the Ad Council from 2021 to 2022, and she remains on the board of directors to this day. The Ad Council was a driving force in promoting masking, social distancing, and vaccinations throughout the covid crisis. Under Yaccarino’s direction, the Ad Council teamed up with the JED Foundation to produce its “Alone Together” public service announcement (PSA) campaign, which suggested that viewers stay home “alone” to save lives “together.” The PSA was picked up by numerous media outlets and other organizations.

Yaccarino’s WEF and Ad Council affiliations, and her advocacy of advertiser regulation of speech, have led some Twitter users and media outlets to declare that she is a globalist, a vaccine pusher, and another high-profile promoter of censorship. Indeed, it does appear that Musk has caved to the woke cartel and its state, corporate, and international governance enforcers.

The human tendency to kill what one fears asserted itself on April 4, 2023, as a Manhattan district attorney called Donald Trump into his office to issue a vague threat.

What crime Trump was being charged with is known only to Alvin Bragg, but the rest of the world is left playing a guessing game.

Trump supporters are rallying everyone with a heartbeat to support their candidate. It’s survival time. Even a few Trump haters are finding a way to support Trump. Not that they want him back in the White House, perish the thought, but the Bragg travesty is more than even they can stand.

If Trump doesn’t win in 2024, the crumbling edifice that was once this country will come to rival the sack of Rome. Policies will amount to anything and everything that will wipe out the economy. Joe Biden or some other surrogate will continue his attacks on the country he was hired to defend.

Even if Trump is nominated and is heavily favored against a woke World Economic Forum (WEF) democrat, there’s the so far unsolved problem of how to get an honest vote count. Did the recently elected Brandon Johnson for Chicago’s mayor actually receive more votes than Paul Vallas as an expression of Chicagoans preference for high crime rates? Much of the suffering in the last three years has been on the back of a broken democracy.

Suppose Trump wins and serves as the forty-seventh president. Trump will be persecuted to his grave and so will any follow-up frontpiece that doesn’t embrace the woke WEF agenda.

For those who find deliverance in wokeness and bugs for breakfast, have at it. There are many who want no part of it.

The incendiary Marjorie Taylor Greene has suggested a national divorce wherein red states would separate from the blue states, although Steve Bannon absolutely rejects it. Journalist Jason Whitlock wants some kind of separation, whether through a national divorce or secession.

The Challenges of Separation

With separation comes issues. Let’s look at a few of them.

Would the Federal Reserve, the government’s money printing agency, go red or blue, and how will it be decided? Would the red states eliminate the central bank and rely on a market-chosen money such as gold or silver—or bitcoin? How many Trump patriots understand what the Fed does and its role in our economic decline? Are most of them Ron Paul supporters in his drive to end the Fed? When they sing the National Anthem, are they including the Fed and the Internal Revenue Service, the two major bloodsuckers of the middle class? How free do they feel when they hit the part about the land of the free, knowing their government can push them around any way it wants if “national security” or some other excuse is invoked?

How many Americans understand the essential nature of the government that lords over them? Will red states create a kinder, gentler government with fewer regulations and taxes? How will red states defend themselves against foreign aggressors (including against blue states)? Will both continue on the offense as the government has since the CIA emerged from Harry Truman’s pen in 1947?

Would red states be able to keep out blue-state citizens, such as the agitators who infiltrated the January 6 protest? Could the red states do it without violations of personal liberty?

Would foreign rivals such as China, Russia, or North Korea assist the blue states in obliterating the red states?

Would the red states eliminate the blue states with a false flag?

Members of both red and blue states have embraced the idea of a coercive form of government that the United States Constitution was meant to mitigate. However, it didn’t work. In 1867, Lysander Spooner detailed many of the Constitution’s shortcomings in his essay The Constitution of No Authority concluding that “whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain—that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist” (emphasis mine).

He wrote this over 150 years ago, before the Fed, before the income tax, before the world wars the government was eager to join and the smaller wars of choice that continue to this day, and now with the looming prospect of nuclear Armageddon.

A Stateless Government

The idea that coercive governments represent a contradiction in theory has been developed in such works as Robert P. Murphy’s article, “But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?,” videos of Hans-Hermann Hoppe presenting his thesis, “State or Private Law Society?,” and Murray Rothbard’s Power and Market: Government and the Economy. There are many more. My own book, Do Not Consent, argues that the government we need is the government that’s right in front of our face.

Finding something other than the gang of bandits running our lives will forever be only a dream if we don’t have a radical cultural change. The late Gary North said it best when he wrote in 2015:

We need to know what we have lost. We need to know why we have lost it. Only then will it become clear that there must be a restoration of liberty. This means a restoration of personal responsibility on a scale that is almost unimaginable today. It is going to come, but only after the great default has at last bankrupted the federal government. (emphasis mine)

When the government goes belly-up, it will be as close to a state of nature as we will ever experience. It will be a time to start fresh without the mistakes of the past—by freeing the free market from state coercion.