On the menu today: Republicans in Texas and Ohio consider following in Florida’s footsteps on keeping controversial sexual topics out of children’s classrooms and what Elon Musk might do now that he’s Twitter’s largest shareholder.
Conservative States Consider Copying Florida
In Ohio, Republicans have introduced legislation similar to Florida’s recently enacted law prohibiting teachers from discussing sexual orientation and gender identity with children in kindergarten through third grade. In Texas, Republican lieutenant governor Dan Patrick has suggested that it would behoove his state to consider a similar law in the next legislative session. By one accounting, there are about a dozen states that have considered legislation like this. Florida’s is the only one that has made it into law.
This controversy could well fizzle out, but right now it feels like the debate is growing into the next major skirmish in the endless culture war. Advocates on the left seem to think they’ve finally landed on an issue that can distract the public from the ongoing abysmal failures of the Biden administration and the Democratic Congress, from rising inflation and high gas prices. The only problem for them is that this issue doesn’t seem to be a winning one at all.
The biggest poll to date on Florida’s law found that not only do almost two-thirds of Americans support the law once they’ve read the text, but that that support holds strong across nearly all major demographic groups. A majority of Democrats supports the law. A majority of Biden voters supports it. Sixty percent of suburban voters support it. More than 60 percent of respondents who said they “know someone LGBTQ” support it.
It’s not difficult to understand why these numbers shake out the way they do when you look at the legislation with clear eyes. It’s not an attack on LGBTQ people or their existence. It doesn’t “erase” anyone. It doesn’t harm anyone. It merely asks teachers to reserve for parents the right to introduce their very young children to sexual topics at the pace they feel is best in the privacy of their own homes. The law affirms, in other words, that parents, not teachers, are the primary educators and guides of their children.
It is not now and never should be the job of teachers to ensure that every American child under the age of eight knows what it means to be queer. Children under the age of eight do not need “gender affirmation” in the classroom. They need to learn how to read and how to multiply numbers and how to locate their state on a map. That anyone thinks otherwise is indicative of a deep, startling divide on what it means to educate children.
Will Elon Musk Transform Twitter?
It was reported earlier this week that multibillionaire Elon Musk has bought a 9.2 percent stake in Twitter, becoming its largest shareholder — holding an even larger stake in the company than investment giants such as BlackRock, J.P. Morgan, and others. Musk was subsequently appointed to Twitter’s board of directors.
Technology changes at such a rapid clip that it’s impossible to predict how long Twitter will remain a dominant force in our national political and cultural debates, but Musk’s buy-in appears to be significant. It’s always worth reminding ourselves, of course, that only about a quarter of Americans use Twitter at all, and only about a quarter of those Americans are responsible for nearly all of the tweets in the U.S.
Nevertheless, it’s impossible to claim, at least right now, that Twitter doesn’t matter at all. And that’s certainly one reason why conservatives have trained their ire in recent years on the leadership of the social-media company, which has demonstrated substantial bias against conservative viewpoints. As opposed to some on the right, I am not of a mind that this bias requires, or would even be solved by, federal-government action. I think we have plenty of evidence that government committees tend to cause more problems than they solve.
Because I’m wary of big-picture “solutions” to tech and social-media bias, I’m gratified to see Musk taking a leadership role, which might well nudge the company in a positive direction on free speech. According to one report, since acquiring his stake in the company in mid March, Musk has been involved in internal company conversations about Twitter’s algorithm, its policing of speech, and even the possibility of a new platform.
As NR’s Editors note in a piece this morning, there’s plenty of reason to believe that Musk will encourage major change within Twitter and, if he fails, pioneer his own external “solution:”
The pace and scope of the Internet, along with the intensity of the conversations it permits, often encourages its aristarchs to believe that all of its shortcomings must be resolved immediately lest the adverse consequences become too dire. But, ironically enough, their preferred solutions — which invariably involve government superintendence — would be more likely to slow, rather than to expedite, any remedies. The risk would be that a Twitter subjected by law to close federal oversight would have been transmuted from a temporary winner within a free market into a permanent part of the political landscape. In 1952, when the Truman administration tried to nationalize U.S. Steel, it was the largest corporation in the world. Today, it is the 38th-largest steel producer. There is nothing special about Twitter that inoculates it against this fate.
In a statement issued Tuesday morning, Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, described Musk as the company’s most “passionate believer and intense critic,” and confirmed that he would be joining the board. A few days earlier, Musk had used the service to ask, “Free speech is essential to a functioning democracy. Do you believe Twitter rigorously adheres to this principle?” before noting that “the consequences of this poll will be important.” In other tweets, Musk has wondered aloud if a “new service” is needed to replace Twitter. No doubt, if Musk fails to transform the social-media platform from within, we’ll find out soon enough.
In late March, after Musk had become a shareholder but before that news had been made public, he said that Twitter had failed “to adhere to free speech principles” and publicly shared that he was giving “serious thought” to creating his own social-media platform. If he ever did so, there’s no way to know whether it would be successful. President Trump’s venture into alternative social media has been so successful that he himself has posted on it . . . once. Even so, as a bit of a Twitter critic myself — though from a different perspective than the typical conservative complainant — I can’t help but admit to being glad Musk has become involved and seems to have some radical ideas for how to refashion the platform. If he had ideas for how to stop it from intentionally being addictive to users, I’d be all ears.
ADDENDUM: Tomorrow is Opening Day for America’s greatest sport. Most years, I’m more excited than I am this time around. In fact, a few years ago, I wrote one of my favorite NR pieces in honor of MLB’s Opening Day. But as I’ve also written, I’m frustrated with MLB. I’m irritated by the totally unnecessary delay to the regular season. I’m sick of the nonsensical blackouts on MLB TV that work out in favor of everyone other than fans. I’m sick of Rob Manfred politicizing the sport. I’m sick of endless rule changes that take baseball further and further away from the sport I grew up watching in the name of “speeding up” what is meant to be timeless. I’ll probably always watch baseball, but I find that, at least these days, I don’t feel the same way about it anymore.