Elon Musk is censoring a leaked document about J.D. Vance

The self-proclaimed king of free speech immediately suspended the reporter who published the Vance dossier and blocked us all from posting the link.

Here’s some rich (man) irony for your Thursday: Billionaire edgelord Elon Musk, who claims he bought Twitter in 2022 in order to expose the platform’s unacceptable “free speech suppression” related to the Hunter Biden laptop story, suspended journalist Ken Klippenstein’s X account today because he published a leaked document the Trump campaign had compiled about J.D. Vance’s vulnerabilities as a VP pick. Musk also banned us all from posting the link to Klippenstein’s story, effectively censoring the Vance dossier across the whole platform in the very same way he claims Twitter had wrongly censored the Hunter Biden story.

The leaked 271-page document, which Iran obtained by hacking the Trump campaign in July, was deemed not newsworthy enough for mainstream outlets like the New York Times to publish, despite the Times having breathlessly covered Russian hackers’ breach of the DNC’s computers in 2016 and the infamous Hillary’s Clinton emails that emerged from it. Having read the whole Vance document today, I can confirm that it is equally as boring as the leaked Clinton emails, making Musk’s censorship of it appear bizarrely desperate. I’d also argue that suspending Klippenstein and blocking the link to the Vance documents has almost certainly driven exponentially more attention and traffic to said link than it otherwise would have received—a perfect example of the Streisand effect!

For those who are mildly curious about the Vance dossier but don’t feel like downloading and reading hundreds of pages about a man who can’t even order donuts like a normal person, allow me to summarize: It’s a compilation of everything negative about Vance that the Trump campaign could find while vetting him as a running mate. There’s at least a hundred pages about Vance saying horrible things about Trump another large section about his potential vulnerabilities with moderate voters. Here’s a couple screenshots:

Yes, we already knew most of this stuff, but it’s still pretty funny to imagine Trump being briefed on all of this, bouncing 271 pages of Vance dealbreakers around in his think-meats and concluding, “I’ve heard enough. We’ve found our guy!” It’s also funny that Musk personally ensured that pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis were sprayed all over Twitter and personally reinstated accounts that had been banned for posting child porn, but threw his entire free speech schtick out the window over a document that basically compiled a bunch of existing headlines about Vance.

Here is the banned link once again in case you find yourself wanting to Control-F your way through the doc.

In other news…

• NYC Mayor Eric Adams, the weirdest and most chaotic man in the world, has been indicted on federal corruption charges after allegedly taking bribes and illegal campaign contributions from Turkey. I am still waiting for Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito to face any consequence at all for their objectively worse corruption, but pleased that our great public advocate Jumaane Williams is in line to replace Adams if he resigns. (Huge upgrade)

• Lana Del Ray is marrying a Louisiana alligator tour guide, which will never not be funny to me

• Melania Trump told Fox News today that Donald wanted her to have more kids but she was like nah, I’m good with us procreating only the one time and then living in separate states while you pay me to attend your campaign events

• In the wake of ProPublica’s heartbreaking reporting about the two Georgia women who died because of the state’s abortion ban, a new report out of Texas finds that the rate of maternal mortality cases rose by 56% from 2019 to 2022 for basically the same reason.