Mark Kelly used to lay low in the U.S. Senate before Kamala Harris named him as a potential running mate earlier this year.
Before then, caution was a Kelly trademark as he kept his profile earthbound. Even some of his own constituents complained they hardly knew the man.
That was then.
On Sunday, we saw the new Mark Kelly. We saw ignition and liftoff, and caution thrown to the wind.
The former Navy pilot and former NASA astronaut went on CNN’s State of the Union and picked a fight with another spaceman, Elon Musk.
Mark Kelly throws down with Elon Musk
Kelly is a surrogate for Harris. Musk is a surrogate for Donald Trump.
CNN’s Dana Bash played a clip of Musk speaking at Trump’s rally on Saturday in Butler, Pa., where the former president had survived a July 13 assassination attempt.
In the clip, Musk, the founder of SpaceX and co-founder of Tesla, told the Trump crowd, “This is no ordinary election. The other side wants to take away your freedom of speech. … They want to take away your right to vote effectively. …President Trump must win to preserve the Constitution. He must win to preserve democracy in America.”
Bash turned to Kelly and said, “Musk, as you know, has a huge social media platform and a lot of influence there. He received billions of dollars from the federal government in contracts. Does it worry you to hear what he said and see what he is doing?”
Kelly responded, “Well, it’s also hypocritical. He’s standing next to the guy that tried to overturn the … 2020 election on Jan. 6, saying that this is somehow going to be the last election, they’re going to take away your vote, and it just doesn’t pass the logic test.”
Kelly said it. Musk saw it.
Soon the latter responded with a tweet on his social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
“Bring. It. On.”
Kelly has a point. But so does Trump
Kelly is quite right that Musk bemoaned attacks on democracy while standing next to the 500-pound gorilla — the former president who engineered the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol that injured roughly 140 Capitol and D.C. police officers.
That was part of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, what one federal judge famously described as Trump’s “coup in search of a legal theory.”
Trump strongarmed Republican election officials across the country trying to get them to take actions that could help reverse his loss to Joe Biden. He was cut off at virtually every pass.
GOP may lose an election:And still win the culture war
Since then, Musk has become the Republican counterweight to the Democratic argument that Trump poses a unique threat to democracy.
His retort to Jan. 6 is that modern Democrats have become the enemies of free speech, which is to say the enemies of our free society.
Democrats tried to censor Facebook, others
The proof is now undeniable that the Biden-Harris White House squeezed Big Tech to suppress opposition voices online.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said the Biden administration put pressure on his company to censor information and opinions related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
High-profile Democrats such as John Kerry are chewing on ways to “curb” speech on the internet that contradicts acquired truth or narrative.
Hillary Clinton wants more government controls on social media.
In 2019, Kamala Harris called on what was then Twitter to ban Donald Trump. Challenged by liberal news anchors, Harris told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, “Free speech does not condone or protect threats to the safety of other human beings. That is what we are talking about, because this can go into some abstract law school debate.”
On MSNBC, Tim Walz said, “There’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech, and especially around our democracy.”
If Kelly can counter, his star will rise even more
The rub is that the only speech worth protecting is offensive speech, such as burning the flag. You don’t need laws to protect the mundane. We have long believed as Americans that the way to confront offensive speech is with more speech, not government edicts.
Democrats like to natter on about “disinformation” and “misinformation,” but theirs was the party that lied for years that Joe Biden was mentally fit to be president and that assembled 51 former intelligence officials to falsely assert that the Hunter Biden laptop appeared to be Russian subterfuge.
Do we need more government control of speech to crush disinformation such as that?
No.
If Mark Kelly is going to carry this fight into the ring with Elon Musk, he’ll want to prepare for the argument that the Democrats also pose a threat to democracy.
Kelly’s stature is rising. Through his own ambition, hard work and discipline, he has built a reputation that can amplify his voice.
Now, the next two steps.
Can he turn reach into gravitas and longevity?
If so, we may be looking at the next Barry Goldwater or John McCain.
Phil Boas is an editorial columnist for The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com.
