“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” – George Orwell, 1984

Last January, Elon Musk shared an image showing book titles 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World, with the words, “you are here” in the center. Around this time, the Twitter Files were being released and mostly ignored and even denied by mainstream media outlets and most politicians. 

Since then, Elon Musk had “kept shooting at his feet,” meaning he has increased his involvement in politics. He is doing great things to help many people and accelerate a sustainable energy economy on the political front. 

Elon Musk has accepted important invitations and had vital talks with French President Emmanuel Macron, China’s foreign minister Qin Gang, and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

Why are his political meetings good for humanity? Because Elon Musk stands for the things that will preserve our civilization and that will make humans as happy as possible.

The opposite is a sad decaying civilization that Orwell warned us of in the book, 1984.

BOOKS LIKE 1984 HELP US SEE HOW EASY IT IS TO FALL VICTIM TO CENSORSHIP

When George Orwell published 1984, in the year 1949 it was around the same time as Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated, the House Un-American Activities Committee accused Alger Hiss of spying for the USSR and the Soviet government sealed off land routes to Berlin. 

1984 immerses you in a world where a totalitarian government monitors people even in their private lives. Writing is illegal. Winston Smith rebels and keeps a diary and desires to beat the system. Everything about his life is miserable and that includes his job, his meals, and the grim area of London he lives in. Winston abhors all the cameras and microphones the government uses to monitor people. He despises that his TV must never be turned off as it spits out hasbara continuously. 

The signs “Big Brother is watching you” in the book are synonymous in our culture with the dangers of a government that want to police our thoughts, which is what we experienced on a global level just recently. 

Thankfully, the Twitter Files exist so we can be aware of just how far our own government was willing to push.

ALMOST ALL OF US WERE ADVERSELY AFFECTED BY RECENT WIDESPREAD GOVERNMENT CENSORSHIP

The Twitter Files show just how far our own United States government organizations were willing to go to control the public narrative on US elections and with SARS-CoV-2.  Three examples are,

• By censoring info that was true but inconvenient to U.S. govt. policy 
• By discrediting doctors and other experts who disagreed 
• By suppressing ordinary users, including some sharing the CDC’s *own data*

You can read about these in a Twitter thread shared by David Zweig, author of Invisibles.

Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an M.D., economist, and professor of health policy at Stanford warned about the dangerous impact of lockdowns, especially on children, the working class, and the poor. In 2020, he and Dr. Martin Kulldorff, then a professor of medicine at Harvard, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, professor of epidemiology at Oxford wrote an open letter arguing for “focused protection” for the most medically vulnerable and a return to normal life for the rest of society.  ​​

Twitter 1.0 put Bhattacharya’s account on the Trends Blacklist, which meant that, no matter how many likes or views one of his tweets racked up, it could never “trend”; its visibility to users on the platform would be sharply curtailed. (You can read more about that in the article, “Twitter’s Secret Blacklists” by the Free Press.) 

Lee Fang released Twitter Files Part 8 and wrote about how “Twitter Aided the Pentagon in Its Covert Online Propaganda Campaign in an article in the Intercept.”

Fang said, “This appears to align with a major report published in August by online security researchers affiliated with the Stanford Internet Observatory, which reported on thousands of accounts that they suspected to be part of a state-backed information operation, many of which used photorealistic human faces generated by artificial intelligence, a practice also known as deep fakes.”

The Twitter Files revealed how the government paid millions of dollars to censor information from the public. Michael Shellenberger said, 

“As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — the Bu alumni — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.” 

Shellenberger published a screenshot of an email, which I will attach to this article near the end.

xAI STANDS FOR TRUTH AND HOPE:  THE MISSION IS TO UNDERSTAND THE TRUE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE

We should do all we can to promote and root for the success of Elon Musk’s new AI company, xAI. I believe xAI will serve humanity and help preserve our civilization. 

xAI is much needed as we have learned from both recent events revealed by the Twitter Files and from cautionary works of literature like Orwell’s 1984. The statement at the beginning of this article is chilling. It was written in 1949, and it could apply today.

CONCLUSION

Elon Musk’s heartfelt motivation to help humanity was summed up in a response to a tweet from January 1, 2022. 

“Elon Musk deserves our full support. Elon’s companies exist, because he cares enough to make our lives better and safeguard consciousness.”

 I was supercharging my Tesla in Austin when I tweeted this, and wondering if I spelled consciousness correctly when Elon immediately replied, 

“I have trouble understanding any other motivations tbh.”

I would like to end this sad, tragic article on one positive note. Though much has been lost, there is great hope in the creation and building of xAI. I think humanity has a much greater chance of preserving truth and it is never too late to turn the tide around. I have hope that we will soon see people become optimistic about the future, excited about space travel, and happy to live a joyful life. 

AUTHOR’S NOTE: This is a revised article from the original I wrote for my blog What’s Up Twitter on January 5, 2023. Elon Musk is hell bent on changing the status quo. How these 3 books relate to the Twitter Files.

The information is still pertinent so I have chosen to share this new article with you for a wider reach considering how important this topic is.

Article by Gail Alfar, please credit accordingly. Mentioned in the article: @elonmusk @xai @shellenberger @lhfang @DrJBhattacharya @MartinKulldorff. Dr. Sunetra Gupta

Images credit: Elon Musk, Reddit, and except from 1984. Used with permission.

Addendum: Michael Shellenberger published this revealing email screenshot as part of the Twitter Files, saying, “As of 2020, there were so many former FBI employees — the Bu alumni — working at Twitter that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.”