Elon Musk lawsuit against Media Matters is frivolous but the GOP is helping him

Elon Musk has proclaimed himself a “free speech absolutist,” by which he apparently means he is absolutely against free speech. In his latest effort to squelch anything that makes him look bad, Musk filed a lawsuit against Media Matters, a watchdog group, for noting that Musk’s social media platform X has been placing ads next to posts from neo-Nazi and antisemitic groups.

Unsurprisingly, Media Matters’ report led to an exodus of advertisers from X. But Musk hardly needed any help on that front. His own endorsement of antisemitic and white supremacist tropes has caused X to lose millions in ad revenue from such major accounts as Apple, IBM and Comcast.

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The lawsuit is widely regarded as meritless by legal scholars. It is a “bogus” attempt to chill criticism in a way that “flatly contradicts basic First Amendment principles,” Ted Boutrous, a First Amendment lawyer experienced in the tech industry, told CNN.

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But Musk has deep pockets and is using the lawsuit to force Media Matters to spend a lot of money defending itself against Musk’s wounded ego. That’s a standard tactic of rich people who want to get their way, even in the face of the facts. Donald Trump made threatening lawsuits against critics one of his favorite pastimes. He hoped that the legal fees would drive his critics into bankruptcy even if they won the suit.

What is more worrisome about Musk’s lawsuit is that he has found allies among Republican government officials who are willing to use their legal power to fuel Musk’s personal crusade.

Freshly off his impeachment acquittal (although his felony indictment is still pending), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced that he was going to investigate Media Matters, which he called a “radical anti-free speech organization,” for violations of state laws protecting consumers from fraud. Paxton, who has made a career out of attacking LGBTQ+ rights, knows about fraud. He’s under indictment for security fraud himself.

Not to be outdone, the attorney general of Missouri, Andrew Bailey, said that he too was “looking into the matter.”

Musk also made a point of shopping his lawsuit around to the most conservative court that he could find. He landed upon the Northern District Court in Texas, which has virtually nothing to do with the case at hand. X is headquartered in San Francisco and Media Matters is based in the District of Columbia.

But the Northern District Court of Texas has an unusual configuration, where a single judge hears the civil cases filed in Amarillo. The judge is Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee, who is one of the most right-wing jurists on the bench. Kacsmaryk came to the bench from an anti-LGBTQ+ Christian group. As judge, he overturned the Biden administration’s LGBTQ+ protections in health care and overturned the FDA’s 25-year-old approval of an abortion drug.

The willingness of government officials to involve themselves in a frivolous lawsuit and possibly even uphold it is a new and troubling twist. For all the Republican complaints about Democrats’ weaponizing government against Trump, the right has shown that what it wants to do is eliminate any respect for the law and use it to punish its enemies. Trump is out on the campaign trail promising to do exactly that.

“If I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say, ‘Go down and indict them,'” Trump promised in an interview earlier this month.

The Musk lawsuit is a foretaste of the way the right wants to use the legal system to punish its enemies. Musk may be relying on the old technique of making his critics spend a lot of money, but he’s getting unsolicited help from politicians willing to use the system to his benefit.

It’s crude and rudimentary now, but just wait. They’re only just beginning.