"Musk has a penchant for sharing memes and diving deep into the bellows of Twitter conversation, to what end, no one knows. But as with most things on the internet, it all eventually goes Nazi." — David Covucci, Musk shares Nazi soldier meme—after deleting praise of quote from Nazi, Daily Dot, November 7, 2022
Elon Musk says his politics are in the center but extremism experts say he's using Twitter to increasingly empower right-wing viewpoints, Katherine Tangalakis-Lippert and Hannah Getahun, Business Insider, Dec 11, 2022
A Jan 31 screenshot I took of what was trending, at least in my location, at that moment.
Here's a May 27 tweet by Elon Musk — consistent with conspiracy theories about Jews controlling the media.
Here's a May 27 tweet by Elon Musk. (I took the screenshot around mid-day on May 31, exactly four days later, so the views/engagement stats reflect that timeframe.) The sentence is not by Voltaire, but by neo-Nazi Kevin Alfred Strom, who said it on the radio in 1993.
Here is what Seth Abramson had to say about it. "Community Notes," by the way, is a feature on Twitter that allows users to say that the information is incorrect or portrayed incorrectly and to provide essential context so others can understand it properly.
Where to find Seth Abramson: for politics, sethabramson.substack.com and Notes, and for other stuff retrostack.substack.com
"Do you not see the intolerant graffiti on the walls now? You are in the middle of Westboro Baptist Church trying to talk to people about the debt ceiling. They don’t care. They want you dead.
I still check Twitter occasionally, out of habit. My thumb finds the Bird icon, I can’t help it.
The app is a swamp. The most prominent accounts, the ones that the owner enjoys, are engaged in open homophobia. The top replies to any news story include bizarre accusations of 'grooming' by guys who shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms. A basset hound could win the Westminster Dog Show and the first 18 replies would be accusations that Hunter Biden runs a child sex dungeon.
Is that enjoyable to journalists? What are you doing there?"
— Jason O. Gilbert, Why Are Journalists Still on Twitter?, JOG Blog, Substack, June 2, 2023
At a June 24, 2023 Pride parade near Portland, Oregon, "rival far-right groups and neo-Nazis who began fighting among themselves while protesting," CNN reported. "Online conspiracy theorists soon jumped into the fray. Rather than accept the fact that two far-right groups who have previously embraced violence were responsible for the clash, online trolls insisted it must be a so-called 'false flag' event – a set-up of some kind to make the neo-Nazis look bad." They randomly picked a 22-year-old Jewish man who had just graduated college and falsely asserted he was a Neo-Nazi working undercover for the federal government. Elon Musk engaged with the harassment. Brody's lawyer, Mark Bankston, is "the same attorney who successfully sued conspiracy theorist Alex Jones over his lies about the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre."
June 29, 2023 tweet from LGBTQReads:
A.R. Moxon:
"It's hard not to look at Elon Musk’s cartoon villain smirk-face and not see a cruel boy with a magnifying glass who just spotted an anthill.
It strikes me that the experience of being on Twitter is very much like the experience of living in the United States, or anywhere else where the whims of wealth hold the reins of power, where increasingly the answer wealth has for those of us experiencing misfortune or calamity—much of it brought on by conditions caused by the decisions of wealth—is: work for us until you can't, then give us all your money to stay alive until it’s all gone, then die as politely as you can. And to be sure, many of us are far more vulnerable to this than others, because our systems are inherently supremacist, but a supremacist system is an unsustainable system, and an unsustainable system will not sustain, so the reason that you feel vulnerable is ... you are."
— A.R. Moxon, "The State of Things," The Reframe newsletter on Substack, July 12, 2023
A.R. Moxon again:
"...since the new owner—a fella I’ll call Owner X, whose overall sensibilities seem to have arrested around 7th grade, who seems like the kind of guy who finds it amusing to pull wings off flies—seems intent on wrapping his $44 billion toy around a telephone pole, and so it seems foolish to blindly trust it to stick around in the long term or maybe even the near term..."
* * *
This leads to a lot of talk about why. Some believe he’s just a profoundly ignorant fool with a predilection for bullying, in over his head and demolishing something he barely understands. Others think that he’s a deliberately destructive vulture capitalist with a predilection for bullying, who wants to sabotage something of public value to create an environment more conducive to oligarchy.
* * *
...maybe it’s all a little too abstract a question to matter, since the result is the same."
— A.R. Moxon, "The Dipshit Paradox": Profoundly ignorant? Deliberately malicious and lying? Does it matter? The demand to engage in good faith with supremacists in a musky age, The Reframe newsletter on Substack, July 26, 2023
Not that it was ever meant to be good.
"there's a lot of bad tweets every day. In my thinking, the worst tweets are really the best tweets, because that's what the website is designed to do." — Rick Paulas, 2021 interview
"He dresses up his antisemitism in tech jargon and cutesy tweets, but it’s antisemitism nonetheless. Musk actively promotes the conspiracy that Jews are responsible for all the world’s ills, a tale as old as time. He’s dangerous, and not to mention staggeringly unoriginal. And terrifyingly for Jews, he’s also incredibly powerful. ...with his encouragement over the weekend of the Twitter hashtag “#BantheADL”...now he’s actively threatening to sue the ADL because of an erroneous and unquantifiable claim that somehow the organization’s calls for the Twitter CEO to regulate hate speech resulted in a 60% reduction in advertising revenue."
"Elon Musk is an antisemite," Marisa Kabas, The Handbasket (Substack), September 5, 2023
Kabas acknowledges that "One of their [the ADL's] core values is that any criticism of Israel is equal to antisemitism. ... they often equate right wing antisemitism with progressive criticism of Israel’s leadership and policy ... But we can hold two things true at once: The ADL is not representative of all American Jews, and Elon Musk is an antisemite who’s singling out the organization as a stand-in for all of us." She points out this article from the Guardian:
"Research published by the ISD and CASM Technology (CASM) earlier this year found a major and sustained spike in antisemitic posts on Twitter since the company’s takeover by Musk, with the volume of English-language antisemitic tweets more than doubling.
Analysts detected 325,739 English-language antisemitic tweets in the nine months from June 2022 to February 2023, with the weekly average number of antisemitic tweets increasing by 106% when comparing the period before and after Musk’s acquisition. The rate of creation of antisemitic accounts more than tripled in the period after Musk’s takeover."
— Twitter faces legal challenge after failing to remove reported hate tweets, Jason Burke, The Guardian, July 10, 2023
"I’m going to call it X when I'm talking about the evil bullshit; whatever the users built that is still good and fine is still Twitter to me." — A.R. Moxon, "How to Help Writers Leave X," September 7, 2023
Elon Musk Threatens To Sue Anti-Defamation League For X’s Lost Ad Revenue (HuffPost)
In October 2023, upon war between Israel and Palestine:
On November 15, an X (Twitter) user who identifies as Jewish said that anyone who believes "Hitler was right” should “say it to our faces." Someone else replied that certain "hordes of minorities" don't "like" Jews, and the user gives not "the tiniest shit" since "western" Jews "support[ed]" those groups "flooding their country" in the first place. Musk replied to the second person: "You have said the actual truth."
Apple, X's largest advertiser, said it would temporarily pause ads, as did Amazon, Lions Gate Entertainment, Disney and the European Commission. “It’s self-destructive for any advertiser to be associated with him,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, dean for leadership studies at the Yale School of Management, told CNN.
"Essentially, they [right-wing leaders including Musk] argue that left-wing Jews who have supported progressive causes have incited racial division and hatred. Antisemitic claims along these lines have been around for years — they’re just usually dressed up as opposition to 'cultural Marxism.'
* * *
Matt Gertz of Media Matters observed that 'Musk is, in the parlance of the white nationalists who applauded his remark, explicitly ‘naming the Jew’ as the source of the problem.'"
— Matt Shuham, Right-Wing Figures Go All In On Antisemitism, HuffPost, November 17, 2023
On Musk's endorsement of "the vile replacement myth," A.R. Moxon writes ("Channels of Rage," The Reframe (Substack), November 19, 2023):
"It’s the latest incident in Musk’s ongoing promotion of white supremacist and neo Nazi ideology, and probably the most unignorable one, or at least it isn’t being ignored by advertisers, who have pulled their ads. Musk may be confused by this, since they didn’t pull their ads after many other horrible things he’s said recently, but he may also be counting on them coming back, as they have after other times he’s said horrible things."
On November 19, Ron DeSantis — polling second in the upcoming presidential primary, behind Donald Trump — when asked for a reaction to Musk's comment (made four days previously), said "I did not see the comment" and added that he assumed Musk was the victim here: "And so I know that Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it in a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like." So does DeSantis mean Jews control the media, or what? He went on to say "I know Elon Musk. I have never seen him do anything." He added that it would be "surprising" if Musk had said anything antisemitic.
Musk tweeted on the afternoon of November 19: "This past week, there were hundreds of bogus media stories claiming that I am antisemitic. Nothing could be further from the truth. I wish only the best for humanity and a prosperous and exciting future for all." Someone who is truly not antisemitic would, in this situation, apologize for the hurt they've caused, acknowledge that they said specific words that were ill-chosen or misunderstood, listen to Jews and thank them for their feedback, and commit to improving their speech and behavior. Actually, someone who is truly not antisemitic would have followed these general steps at the first opportunity and thus would never get years-deep into antisemitism as Musk is.
Brian Krassenstein, co-host of a podcast with 159,000 followers on X, replied to Musk six minutes later: "as a Jewish man I have never once thought that you were even remotely close to an antisemite." Musk replied one minute later: "Thank you". This helps reveal the interests of Musk and his supporters. They want to polish Musk's image and come up with a reason not to listen to Jews. Their answer: They've found one Jew who's willing to tell Musk that it's unthinkable that anything he should ever say is "remotely close" to antisemitic.
Musk "wants it both ways. He wants the following he’s cultivated to know very clearly that he remains antisemitic, but he wants to simultaneously appear to toe a line meant to stem the exodus of advertisers from Twitter, and keep his other businesses from being affected. It should be very easy to see through this façade." Netanyahu can see the truth as well as anyone else, but unfortunately "the fascist Zionist right places their nation above the safety of Jews everywhere else. Some, like Netanyahu, even appear to embrace the perverse incentive that danger to Jews around the world bolsters Israel as the only place that can ensure our safety. It’s a deal with the devil. Or, in this case, a deal with Elon Musk."
— Fascist Meetup: Netanyahu Welcomes Elon. Plus the Netherlands, Argentina, and the global far-right. Joshua P. Hill. November 28, 2023.
"A day after Elon Musk restored the X accounts of notorious right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his website, Infowars, the platform is actively promoting Jones’ account to other users, giving the fringe figure a major platform to air his deceptive and dangerous views.
Conspiratorial posts from Jones’ account appeared Monday in the “For You” feed of some users who do not follow him on X; his account was promoted in some users’ “Who to Follow” recommendations; and his name was promoted in X’s top trending topics section.
Musk on Sunday also elevated Jones’ newly restored profile, which had 1.6 million followers as of Monday, by engaging with him in a live streamed interview on X. They were joined by Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynistic internet personality who earlier this year was indicted on human trafficking and rape charges in Romania although he denies the claims, far-right conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec, “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer and Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy."
— Elon Musk’s X is encouraging users to follow conspiracy theorist Alex Jones after reinstating his account, Clare Duffy, CNN, December 11, 2023
[Update:]
“I don’t really have much of a life, you know?” Loomer says. “So I’m happy to dedicate all my time to helping Trump, because if Trump doesn’t get back in, I don’t have anything.”
* * *
Loomer’s ability to remain visible to Trump is, perhaps, a testament to the former president’s media diet — which apparently includes content on the platforms where the self-described “most banned woman in the world” still freely posts. Her show, “Loomer Unleashed,” airs via Rumble. She’s also on Gab, Gettr, Telegram — and now X, formerly Twitter, where she was unbanned after Elon Musk took over. “It’s pretty amazing,” she says of her reinstatement. “It’s given me an opportunity to have a comeback.”
* * *
“Donald Trump is, like, hope for me,” she says. “I don’t really feel like I have anything in my life. I got canceled everywhere for what, speaking the truth? And they treat me like a criminal. Half the world thinks I’m a Nazi. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
— For Laura Loomer, a Trump comeback is everything: The anti-Islam, anti-immigration crusader has repelled even would-be allies in the MAGA movement — with one major exception. Kara Voght, Washington Post, May 2, 2024
On January 9, 2024, another journalist informed Stephen Monacelli that his X account was gone:
"My Twitter/X account with more than seventy-thousand followers had been suspended overnight, along with the accounts of several other prominent journalists and leftist posters. Thalen and other journalists were asking if I knew why. ...by the afternoon, the other suspended accounts and I had been reinstated. I never received a notification as to why my account had been suspended. Elon Musk himself claimed in a public post that the entire episode had been an accident, the result of a sweep for “spam/scam accounts — an assertion as convenient as it is implausible."
Matt Taibbi has seen his X posts suppressed, so he's complaining on YouTube.
Hmm.
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