Rand Paul: ‘History will actually record’ Musk’s free speech courage to ‘reveal inconvenient truths’
Heather Hamilton
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Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) praised Elon Musk for standing for free speech rights and being willing to speak out regardless of possible backlash.
“I think history will actually record that,” Paul told Jesse Watters Primetime. “You know, back in the 1950s, and ’60s, and ‘70s, that ACLU, the Left, NAACP were great defenders of free speech and the First Amendment. And then, somewhere along the way, something happened, and people began to think that there was only certain types of speech that were acceptable. And then along came Elon Musk.”
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The Kentucky Republican noted that Musk recently defended his tweeting regardless of any possible negative impact it might bring Tesla. Paul referenced Musk’s interview with CNBC during Tesla’s annual shareholder meeting earlier this week.
“I’ll say what I want to say, and if we lose money, so be it,” Musk told CNBC.
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“Thank God for someone who can still speak their mind and won’t take guff off some journalist who tells him he can’t speak his mind,” Paul said of Musk’s interview with CNBC.
Paul also pointed to the release of the “Twitter Files” that showed social media collusion with the federal government to censor information and news stories.
“The country, the Bill of Rights, frankly, all of us are going to be very thankful that a guy with a lot of money bought an entity, a social media, you know, entity, Twitter, and allowed us to see what was going on with the government colluding to limit speech,” Paul said.
“What we can’t allow to happen is the government to collude with private business and use them basically as their extension or their arm of censor,” Paul continued. “I have a bill that would actually stop this. I have a bill that would say no one in the government can collude with anybody in the media to limit constitutionally protected speech.”
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Paul noted his new legislation will define constitutionally protected speech that will look to Supreme Court precedent to avoid scenarios in which “the government didn’t want to reveal unpleasant truths or inconvenient truths.”
“We won’t have a waiver,” Paul said of phony national security threat claims that could hinder free speech. “We will simply define it as constitutionally protected speech.”