We’re witnessing in real time what happens when a billionaire gets red-pilled. Elon Musk not only is demonstrating that he has no business taking over a corporation like Twitter, in which he has zero expertise or experience—taking the company into a steep financial nosedive—but also that he has been radicalized by conspiracist right-wing extremism, and so his vision of “free speech” is a recipe for freely spreading neofascist ideas and behavior and driving out democratic discourse in the process. It’s a plutocratic authoritarian’s wet dream—and a nightmare for democracy.
Musk, who began his tenure at Twitter by retweeting far-right conspiracy theories about the attack on Paul Pelosi, isn’t just restoring the accounts of a long list of far-right trolls, QAnon conspiracy cultists, misogynists, and hatemongers, who are now free to do their thing on the platform—including spread their threats of genocide and mass murder. He’s also taking the advice of faux journalist Andy Ngo and other right-wing trolls to suspend the accounts of prominent left-wing and antifascist activists (who appear to have no recourse for reinstatement), making ineluctably clear that when Musk talks about “free speech,” the principle only applies to right-wing extremists. As one of his victims observed, he’s turning Twitter into Gab with crypto ads and a much larger user base—for now.
Musk’s recent use of the alt-right icon ‘Pepe.’
While Musk did eventually delete the Pelosi-conspiracy-theory tweet, he has subsequently been doubling down on his embrace of the extremist right—conversing in friendly tones with notorious trolls like Ian Miles Cheong, the Hodge Twins, Dinesh D’Souza, and Mike Cernovich. And if there were any doubt that Musk has been “red-pilled,” as conspiracists like to call their process of radicalization, he erased them early this week by tweeting out a classic alt-right Pepe the Frog meme.
Among some of the bad actors who have come crawling back onto Twitter are an assortment of neofascists, creepy misogynists, and innately threatening accounts:
- Neofascist Brett Stevens, who was cited as an ideological inspiration by Norwegian mass murderer/terrorist Anders Breivik in the manifesto he published prior to the rampage in which he murdered 77 people. Stevens’ response to this: “I am honored to be so mentioned by someone who is clearly far braver than I, no comment on his methods, but he chose to act where many of us write, think and dream.” Now back on Twitter, he's already advocating for genocidal policies and forced removal of ethnic groups.
- Sargon of Akkad, aka the U.K.-based misogynist Carl Benjamin, who has argued that feminism was culpable for the rising tide of mass murders committed by men, because the movement had disenfranchised them, so the killers were “out of options.” He once retorted to a woman critic who described how she received rape threats, “I wouldn’t even rape you.” (He was banned from Twitter shortly thereafter.)
- Tony Hovater, a longtime organizer and top lieutenant in the neo-Nazi Traditionalist Workers Party. Hovater was a prominent figure in the alt-right of 2016-17, but has become siloed at the chat platform Telegram, where he currently holds forth.
- Accounts like “Day of the Rope,” with the anonymous username @TrumpWon2020Fr, have also popped up after it spent $8 on a verification badge. Its name, as the Anti-Defamation League explains, is a white supremacist concept taken from The Turner Diaries, the neo-Nazi “race war” blueprint, which describes the mass lynchings of purported “race traitors” such as journalists, politicians, and women in relationships with non-white men. However, Twitter appears to have promptly suspended the account.
More disturbingly, however, a number of prominent left-wing activist accounts have been suspended without explanation—but the reasons for the bans are more than apparent in Musk’s own exchanges with pseudo-journalist Andy Ngo, who essentially identified all of the accounts that were eventually suspended by name, as Robert Mackey and Micah Lee report at The Intercept:
- Los Angeles activist Chad Loder, a cyber-security expert who identifies as an antifascist researcher, one whose work has led to the arrest of at least one of the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionists. At the time their account was suspended, Loder had been reporting on a data breach in Europe affecting millions of users that Twitter had been covering up.
- Video journalist Vishal Pratap Singh, a member of the Daily Kos community who has reported on far-right protests in Southern California at his VPS Reports channel. Singh, who survived violent attacks by far-right anti-vaccine protesters in 2021, was described as “Antifa” and falsely accused by Ngo of “calling for deadly violence again”—as he has done previously.
- The Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, an antifascist group that made headlines recently by providing armed security for an LGBTQ+ event in North Texas, one that had been threatened by Proud Boys and self-described “Christian fascists.” The group’s alternative account, however, remains active.
- CrimethInc, an anarchist collective that publishes “news, analysis, books, journals, posters, videos, podcasts, and a wide range of other resources — all copyright free,” as its website says. Its Twitter account has never in 14 years on the site violated Twitter policies and has never been suspended. Ngo, however, urged Musk to suspend its account by lying: he falsely labeled Crimethinc an “Antifa collective,” saying the group had “claimed a number of attacks” (it has not). The account was suspended only hours later.
In fact, all four accounts had been singled out for criticism by Ngo, one of the right-wing propagandists primarily responsible for fomenting the “antifa” bogeyman narrative, a hollow farrago of far-right demonization. Musk and Ngo had a public exchange Friday in which the billionaire invited Ngo to report directly to him any “Antifa accounts” that needed suspending.
“Musk’s goal in acquiring Twitter had nothing to do with ‘free speech’ — it was a partisan move to silence opposition, paving the way for fascist violence,” CrimethInc said in a statement.
The collective also explained:
The same morning, at 9:21 am, we received an email from notify@twitter.com establishing that our account was not in violation of Twitter policy, reading “Twitter is required by German law to provide notice to users who are reported by people from Germany via the Network Enforcement Act reporting flow. We have received a complaint regarding your account, @crimethinc […] We have investigated the reported content and have found that it is not subject to removal under the Twitter Rules … or German law.” We did not receive any other such emails.
Crimethinc told The Intercept: “This suggests that the decision to ban our account shortly thereafter was dictated by Musk himself, without regard for the Twitter Rules or any other protocol other than his own apparent allegiance to the far right.”
Singh believes their suspension may have simply been a result of the targeted reporting campaign that typically follows any Ngo tweets attacking individuals, as followers flood the platform with complaints that trigger algorithms that suspend accounts. They wrote at their Kos account:
One of the profiles Musk was told about was mine. And so, within hours of fascists complaining to Elon Musk about me while Nazis simultaneously circulated a purge list with my name on it AND programmed bots to report every profile in the list—my Twitter profile was suspended. The original Nazi-allied Telegram account that posted the original list has essentially taken credit for taking my account down, as have the fascists who lobbied Elon Musk personally.
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Likewise, Loder wasn’t sure that Musk directly had a hand in their suspension: “What I believe happened is that I and other accounts have been mass reported for the last few weeks by a dedicated group of far-right extremists who want to erase archived evidence of their past misdeeds and to neutralize our ability to expose them in the future,” Loder told The Intercept. “What I suspect happened is that Twitter’s automatic systems flagged my account for some reason and no human being is reviewing these.”
Regardless, Loder observed, it’s clear that Twitter is “no longer a viable platform” for users conducting research into fascist groups or related security issues: “If I get my account back, it’s only a matter of time before I get mass reported again.”
Loder noted sardonically that Twitter “is going to turn into Gab with crypto scams.”
Relying on figures like Ngo—a fabulist whose journalistic ethics are so degraded as to be nonexistent, including a willingness to act as a stalking horse for white nationalists like the Proud Boys, as well as cozying up to white-nationalist “Groypers” like Michelle Malkin—is certainly a direct route to the conspiracist right’s alternative universe.
“Andy Ngo’s bizarre vision of ‘antifa’ seems to be the metric used to delete the accounts of journalists and publications, most of which engaged in verifiably good journalism and done so completely above board and TOS observant ways,” writer/editor Shane Burley observed on Twitter. “Paranoid delusions about antifa are driving it.”
In addition to the flood of neofascists and extremist trolls returning to the site, Musk also has opened the floodgates to QAnon conspiracy theorists, 70,000 of whom were summarily booted from the site in the wake of the Jan. 6 insurrection. As David Gilbert reports at Vice, Musk has hung out the welcome sign with his announced plans for amnesty for those banned accounts.
Among those who have already had their accounts restored are leading cult figures like “QAnon John,” the pseudonym of John Sabal, whose company, Patriot Voice, organizes large QAnon gatherings. Another restored account is that of Romana Didulo, the self-declared Queen of Canada who was heavily involved in COVID denialist protests there.
Cult followers are already eagerly returning. “Been on Twitter since Elon reinstated Trump,” said one user on a popular QAnon Telegram channel. “It is ripe for red pills, most influencers on Twitter put down this movement but don’t realize anons are breaking all the stories these days.”
The company’s final descent into the abyss of disinformation—thereby guaranteeing its inevitable fate to become an utter cesspool—was sealed by a change of policy that it only rolled out very quietly this week: “Effective November 23, 2022, Twitter is no longer enforcing the COVID-19 misleading information policy,” reads a hidden note added quietly to its website describing its pandemic policy.
“Musk has promised to restore many previously banned Twitter accounts as soon as this week,” reports CNN. “It is possible that among the restored accounts will be some of the 11,000 banned under Twitter’s former Covid misinformation rules.”
Musk has a longstanding animus directed at COVID restrictions. He frequently took to Twitter in 2020 to downplay the magnitude of the pandemic, and repeatedly urged ending stay-at-home policies. “I would call it, ‘forcibly imprisoning people in their homes’ against all their Constitutional rights, in my opinion, and breaking people’s freedoms in ways that are horrible and wrong and not why people came to America or built this country,” Musk said on an April 2020 call. “It’s an outrage.”
In a September 2020 New York Times podcast interview with technology journalist Kara Swisher, he said he would not get vaccinated: “I’m not at risk for Covid, nor are my kids.”
Swisher responded that many people could die if they failed to follow health guidelines. Musk replied: “Everybody dies.”
Musk’s idea of creating a “balanced” website is also clear. He mocked old Twitter apparel found in a closet bearing the hashtag #StayWoke, and commented: “It has been really bad. Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter.”
“Twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field,” he added. “No more thumb on the scale!”
Unless, of course, Andy Ngo or Ian Cheong targets you. Or you write something unflattering about him. Or anything he doesn’t like, or his friends don’t like. Free speech for me, and none for thee. Or as the pigs in Animal Farm put it, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
The Republican Party continues to flail and point fingers at one another. The traditional media pretends it did not completely blow it on predicting a “Red Wave” a few weeks ago. On today’s episode Markos is joined by Democratic political strategist Simon Rosenberg. Rosenberg was one of the few outsiders who, like Daily Kos, kept telling the world that these midterms were closer than was being reported. The two do a little gloating about being right in their optimism coming into the 2022 midterm elections and they give their analysis on why Democratic candidates were successful and how terrified the Republican Party is going into 2024.
