As heavy weight contests go, they do not come much bigger than ‘Apple versus Musk’. Apple is the biggest company in the world; Elon Musk is the richest man in the world.
Last week, with Fortune 500 companies cutting their advertising on Twitter or withdrawing it altogether, Musk hit back. He aimed his attack at the tallest poppy. Musk tweeted that Apple had threatened to ‘withhold Twitter from its App Store but won’t tell us why.’

The why is obvious. Apple is a full-on Democratic Party cheer leader; according to the Centre for Responsive Politics, at the midterm elections, 97.5% of its employees’ political donations went to the Democrats.

The same Democrat political bias goes for most of California’s high-tech companies; the equivalent political donations figures for Netflix, Google, and Amazon are 99.6%, 96% and 89% respectively. Even at Tesla only 6.1% of their employees gave political donations to the Republicans.

There are reasons for Musk’s attack on Apple that go beyond financial interest. Musk is a man with a mission… or rather missions. He wants to help solve climate change and secure the human species by making it interplanetary. He is an old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon ‘Whig’ liberal who believes in human progress.

For Musk a pre-condition of this advance is free speech. Like the famous ‘Whig’ philosopher, historian and Germanophile, Thomas Carlyle, he is opposed to religious dogma (including modern day woke-ism) and believes that individuals rather than society move humanity forward. For Musk a pre-condition of this advance is free speech. Hence his Twitter rant, ‘Apple has mostly stopped advertising on Twitter. Do they hate free speech in America?’

By contrast ‘new liberalism’ believes in the collective. For them society, not the individual is the core of human progress. It is an essentially left-wing philosophy. Over the last few decades new liberalism has merged with Wokeism (or political correctness), which dogmatically believes in the deconstruction of society. The high priest of Deconstructionism is the now deceased French philosopher Jacques Derrida, who taught philosophy at Berkeley, Yale and Cornell Universities in the 1970s.

Its followers have created a new language whose tenets have become increasing known on this side of the Atlantic. Terms such as Male Patriarchy, De-colonization, Critical race theory, White Privilege, Acknowledging Privilege, Me-too, Black Lives Matter, Safe Spaces, Pronoun Badges, Empty Chairing, and Virtue Signalling are now widespread in western academia, particularly in social sciences.

The most topical of these new dogmas is Gender Self-identification. Sex is now deconstructed. People are no longer male or female, heterosexual or homosexual. People are identified by a myriad of identifications. Hence LGBTIQCAPGNGFNBA+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual/aromantic, pansexual/polyamorous.

Above all the ‘new liberals’ do not believe in free speech. These moral absolutists grant themselves the right to cancel those who speak against their deconstructionist dogmas. Having infected academia, new liberalism is now invading politics and just as alarmingly, business.

The weak point in corporate life has always been its human resource (HR) departments. Often filled with intellectually weaker humanities graduates, this department has traditionally been the ‘tail-end Charlie’ of corporate life. No longer. In the age of woke they have garnered powers that would make the Spanish Inquisition blush. Those who oppose the woke agenda face disgrace and ‘cancellation’. The most extreme punishment comes in the form of exile from social media. Effectively this is social murder. A sort of western style Taliban public execution. This explains why corporations across America, like Apple, are withdrawing advertising from Musk’s ‘free speech’ Twitter.

The Democrat Party, having abandoned the ‘deplorable’ working classes of middle America to the Republican, has become the political home of woke. President Biden and his cronies, who had been strong advocates of Twitter when it was in the vanguard of woke cancellation – such as high-profile opponents like Canadian intellectual Jordan Peterson - are now seeking to close Musk’s ‘free speech’ Twitter.

In the past week cronies such as Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen have hinted that the US government could investigate the national security risks of Elong Musk’s takeover. In this spurious justification they are being joined by the increasing woke EU, whose minister for digital policy, Thiery Breton, has issued threats against Musk’s free speech Twitter.

There is of course more than a little irony that Western politicians and media are trying to close free speech at the same time as they are launching attacks on Iran’s morality police in the aftermath of their recent feminist uprising. But then, hypocrisy and ‘new liberalism’ are perfect bedfellows.