Elon Musk is a credulous dope who wants to make Twitter a safe space for other credulous dopes who are happy to live in an authoritarian media world in which "nothing is true and everything is possible."
Remember that one of the distinguishing feature of a credulous dope is that they usually believe themselves to be uniquely intelligent, unlike those credulous dopes over there who believe what "they" tell you.
One of the dumbest planks of the libertarian ideology Musk has imbibed is that a tweet sent by a rando with 57 followers is exactly the same thing as a tweet sent by the billionaire owner of Twitter with 112 million followers. It's all just "fReE sPeEcH!"
This is how they scare randos with 57 followers into thinking that if Twitter can ban Trump for inciting a coup or Kanye for circulating genocidal antisemitism then they can ban you, dear rando, for "wrongthink."
It would be a shame if some intrepid propagandist out there got #elongate trending.
I wouldn't normally waste time analyzing the chemically enhanced shitposts of an undereducated 3rd generation heir to an ill-begotten fortune, but these pieces of juvenilia offer useful insight into the key role fascist political violence now plays in GOP political culture.
In a more "normal," pre-2016 world, the response to these posts would be "OMG, but wait, wouldn't this person have responded totally differently if someone had broken into Mar-a-Lago looking for Trump and broken Melania's skull with a hammer? What a hypocrite!"
The thing about hypocrisy, though, is that it only matters in a world that presumes small-l "liberal" equality before the law. As in, identical offenses inflicted upon two different people (one rich, one poor, one powerful, one not) should be treated in exactly the same way.
Was just reminded that a week after the 2020 election, after it was clear Biden had won, then Secretary of State Pompeo said he expected there to be a "smooth transition to a second Trump term."
It's important that the GOP not be allowed to pin responsibility for their political culture of authoritarian rot on Trump and Trump alone.
Pompeo gave a little chuckle when he said it, maybe with the hopes that he could later claim he was kidding, but that doesn't matter one bit. When you're the Secretary of State your words matter, and he said the authoritarian thing he said.
When Pizzagate guy here helped to pull off Pizzagate with a following, then, of less than 100k, it was a warning about how propaganda can work on this site. 6 years later, here we are. He now has 1.8 million followers.
This was five years ago. The fact that the GOP has pretty much handed over to people like this the power to determine what their base believes to be true on a day-to-day basis is pretty horrifying.
This is a good example of the sort of asymmetrical slippery slope-ism that has inflected US political culture since the Cold War. It's an incredibly sticky thing that is easier to denounce than to dismantle.
Here’s another thread exploring how Cold War anti-communism continues to shape the apocalyptic, conspiracy-obsessed political culture of the US right and, to a lesser extent, center.