Former Trump White House trade adviser Peter Navarro has claimed that Elon Musk is “very vulnerable to the blackmail of the Chinese Communist Party.”
While some feel that tech mogul Musk’s recent move to buy Twitter outright is a sign that the restoration of free speech could return to the platform, to others, Musk is a threat to the Left’s control of the Internet.
Speaking at a TED event in Vancouver, Canada, on Thursday, Musk said that the reason he’s attempting to buy Twitter is not to make money but to reduce the “civilizational risk” censorship poses to democracy and freedom and to remove restrictions to free speech.
“I don’t trust Elon Musk,” Navarro told The Epoch Times.
“I don’t trust him because he made a deal with the communist Chinese devil to produce his Tesla cars there.
“And he’s very vulnerable to the blackmail of the CCP.
“So having him take over Twitter … It’s not clear to me what his agenda is, I do know that he doesn’t care about American workers.
“He doesn’t care about concentration camps in Xinjiang province,” Navarro added.
“He doesn’t care about the free people of Taiwan or the imprisoned people of Hong Kong.
“I was not overjoyed when Musk made that move.”
In January, two Democrat congressional panel chairmen on oversight and trade, Reps. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) and Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), criticized Musk in a joint letter for his expansion in Xinjiang, an area that has drawn attention due to its infamous slave labor camps.
“Your misguided expansion into the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region sets a poor example and further empowers the CCP,” the Democrats stated.
On another note, Navarro blasted the CCP for its handling of the pandemic, especially in the Shanghai area, where people have been suffering from severe lockdowns.
“The Chinese Communist Party Party has chosen to handle the pandemic on home soil in typical CCP fashion, which is authoritarian and fascistic—by locking people down in extreme conditions, using bad science and bad politics, and I think it ultimately might threaten the regime if they continue that insanity,” Navarro said.
“It’s certainly not a model for the world.”
Navarro, who was suspended from Twitter in 2021, believes that developing sources of true information is the key to combatting “fake news,” and that if Donald Trump becomes president in the next election, he would disperse the power of Big Tech’s social media platforms.
“When Donald Trump becomes president in January 2025, I think one of the first things he’ll do is a move to break up the social media companies and turn them into public utilities,” Navarro said.
“They need to be dealt with. And I think they will be.”
