Has free speech absolutism ever gotten more absolute?
By 
Elon filed his THERMONUCLEAR suit in a carefully cherrypicked venue:
X, the social media service formerly known as Twitter, sued Media Matters in federal court on Monday after the advocacy organization published research showing that ads on X appeared next to antisemitic content.
A post last week from Elon Musk that endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, which he wrote a day before the Media Matters research was published, kicked off an advertiser exodus, with major brands like IBM, Apple, Warner Bros. Discovery and Sony pausing their spending on the platform.
X has rejected Media Matters’ findings, saying they were not representative of a regular user’s experience on the platform. On Friday, Mr. Musk promised a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters and its backers.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, claims that Media Matters tried to damage X’s relationships with advertisers. “Media Matters has manipulated the algorithms governing the user experience on X to bypass safeguards and create images of X’s largest advertisers’ paid posts adjacent to racist, incendiary content, leaving the false impression that these pairings are anything but what they actually are: manufactured, inorganic and extraordinarily rare,” lawyers for X wrote in the complaint.
Angelo Carusone, the president of Media Matters, said in a statement, “This is a frivolous lawsuit meant to bully X’s critics into silence.” He added that his organization “stands behind its reporting and looks forward to winning in court.”
And it’s not just alt-right billionaires seeking to use the state to suppress (concededly accurate!) criticism, but actual Republican public officials who are also crooks:
For years, right-wingers have postured as free-speech warriors, insisting that government shouldn't serve as the arbiter of truth. But here's Paxton saying he wants to use the power of govt to punish a media organization for publishing something he thinks was deceptive.— James Surowiecki (@JamesSurowiecki) November 21, 2023
Still, perhaps we should focus on the bigger threats to free speech in this country, like a sophomore at Wesleyan who told a reporter that tuna and Miracle Whip spread over an English Muffin probably shouldn’t called an “authentic New Haven clam pizza.”