This Is What $44 Billion Buys You

 

This Is What $44 Billion Buys You

Elon Musk has turned X into a political weapon.

By Charlie Warzel

 

October 30, 2024, 5:23 PM ET

 

Elon Musk didn’t just get a social network—he got a political weapon.

It’s easy to forget that Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter was so rash and ill-advised that the centibillionaire actually tried to back out of it. Only after he was sued and forced into legal discovery did Musk go through with the acquisition, which has been a financial disaster. He’s alienated advertisers and turned the app, now called X, into his personal playground, where he’s the perpetual main character. And for what?

Only Musk can know what he thought he was buying two years ago, though it seems clear the purchase was ideological in nature. In any case, the true value of X—the specific, chaotic return on his investment—has become readily apparent in these teeth-gnashing final days leading up to November 5. For Musk, the platform has become a useful political weapon of confusion, a machine retrofitted to poison the information environment by filling it with dangerous, false, and unsubstantiated rumors about election fraud that can reach mass audiences. How much does it cost to successfully (to use Steve Bannon’s preferred phrasing) flood the zone with shit? Thanks to Musk’s acquisition, we can put a figure on it: $44 billion.

Nothing better encapsulates X’s ability to sow informational chaos than the Election Integrity Community—a feed on the platform where users are instructed to subscribe and “share potential incidents of voter fraud or irregularities you see while voting in the 2024 election.” The community, which was launched last week by Musk’s America PAC, has more than 34,000 members; roughly 20,000 have joined since Musk promoted the feed last night. It is jammed with examples of terrified speculation and clearly false rumors about fraud. Its top post yesterday morning was a long rant from a “Q Patriot.” His complaint was that when he went to vote early in Philadelphia, election workers directed him to fill out a mail-in ballot and place it in a secure drop box, a process he described as “VERY SKETCHY!” But this is, in fact, just how things work: Pennsylvania’s early-voting system functions via on-demand mail-in ballots, which are filled in at polling locations. The Q Patriot’s post, which has been viewed more than 62,000 times, is representative of the type of fearmongering present in the feed and a sterling example of a phenomenon recently articulated by the technology writer Mike Masnick, where “everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t bother to educate yourself.”

Read: Elon Musk has reached a new low

Elsewhere in the Election Integrity Community, users have reposted debunked theories from 2020 about voting machines switching votes, while others are sharing old claims of voter fraud from past local elections. Since Musk promoted the feed last night, it has become an efficient instrument for incitement and harassment; more users are posting about individual election workers, sometimes singling them out by name. In many instances, users will share a video, purportedly from a polling location, while asking questions like “Is this real?” This morning, the community accused a man in Northampton County, Pennsylvania, of stealing ballots. Popular right-wing influencers such as Alex Jones amplified the claim, but their suspect turned out to be the county’s postmaster, simply doing his job.

The most important feature of the Election Integrity Community is the sheer volume of posts: dozens per hour, such that scrolling through them becomes overwhelming. It presents the viewer with fragmented pieces of information—more than any casual news consumer (or most election offices, for that matter) might be able to confirm or debunk. And so the feed is the purest distillation of what Musk’s platform wishes to accomplish. He has created a bullshit machine.

There are three major components to this tool. The first is that X exposes its users to right-wing political content frequently, whether they want it or not. To test this theory, I recently created a new X account, which required me to answer a few onboarding questions to build my feed: I told X that I was interested in news about technology, gaming, sports, and culture. The first account the site prompted me to follow was Musk’s, but I opted instead to follow only ESPN. Still, when I opened the app, it defaulted me to the “For You” feed, which surfaces content from accounts outside the ones a user follows. A Musk post was the first thing I encountered, followed quickly by a post from Donald Trump and another from an account called @MJTruthUltra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower: “Vote, arm yourself, Stock up 3-4 Months Supply of Food and Water, and Pray.” After that was a post from a MAGA influencer accusing Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg of “censoring patriots,” followed by posts from Libs of TikTok (a video from a school-board meeting about girls’ bathrooms), MAGA influencers Benny Johnson and Jack Posobiec, and Dom Lucre, a right-wing personality who was once banned from the platform for sharing an explicit image of a child being tortured.

Read: I’m running out of ways to explain how bad this is

X is also experimenting with other algorithmic ways to surface rumors and discredited election news. The platform recently launched a new AI-powered “stories for you” feature, which curates trending topics without human review and highlights them prominently to selected users. NBC News found five examples of this feature sharing election-fraud theories, including debunked claims about voting machines and fraud in Maricopa County, Arizona.

This algorithmic prioritization represents the second prong of the approach: granting far-right influencers and the MAGA faithful greater reach with their posts. A Washington Post analysis of lawmaker tweets from July 2023 to the present day show that Republican officials’ posts go viral far more often than Democrats’ do, and that Musk's right-wing political activism has encouraged Republican lawmakers to post more, too, “allowing them to greatly outnumber Democrats on users’ feeds.” According to the Post, “Republicans’ tweets totaled more than 7.5 billion views since July 2023—more than double the Democrats’ 3.3 billion.” Musk has effectively turned the platform into a far-right social network and echo chamber, not unlike Rumble and Truth Social. The difference, of course, is X’s size and audience, which still contains many prominent influencers, celebrities, athletes, and media members.

The third and final element of X’s bullshit engine is Musk himself, who has become the platform’s loudest amplifier of specious voter-fraud claims. Bloomberg recently analyzed more than 53,000 of Musk’s posts and found that he has posted more about immigration and voter fraud than any other topic, garnering roughly 10 billion views. Musk’s mask-off MAGA boosterism has also empowered other reactionaries with big accounts to shitpost in his image. When they do, Musk will frequently repost or reply to their accounts, boosting their visibility. Here’s a representative example: On October 23, the venture capitalist Shaun Maguire posted that he’d heard a rumor from a senator about more ballots being mailed out in California than the number of legal voters. “Can anyone confirm or deny this?” he asked his more than 166,000 followers on X. Musk replied to the post, noting, “I’m hearing one crazy story after another.”

Read: Elon Musk says he would recognize a Harris election victory

On this point, I believe Musk. The billionaire is inundated with wild election speculation because he is addicted to the rumormongering machine that he helped design. This is the strategy at work, the very reason the volume of alarming-seeming anecdotes about a stolen election work so well. Not only are there too many false claims to conceivably debunk, but the scale of the misleading information gives people the perception that there is simply too much evidence out there for it all to be made up. Musk, whether he believes it or not, can claim that he is “hearing one crazy story after another” and coax his bespoke echo chamber to proffer evidence.

X’s current political project is clear: Musk, his PAC, and his legion of acolytes are creating the conditions necessary to claim that the 2024 election is stolen, should Kamala Harris be declared the winner. But the effects of that effort are far more pernicious. If you spend enough time scrolling through the Election Integrity Community feed and its unending carousel of fraud allegations, it isn’t hard to begin to see the world through the paranoid lens that X offers to millions of its users. It is disorienting and dismaying to have to bushwhack through the dense terrain of lies and do the mental calisthenics of trying to fact-check hundreds of people crying nefarious about things they haven’t even bothered to research. Worse yet, it’s easy to see how somebody might simply give in, beaten into submission by the scale of it all. In this way, even though X is Musk’s project, it may actually be built in the image of the MAGA candidate himself. A $44 billion monument to Trump’s greatest (and only real) trick, as he put it in a 2021 speech: “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.”

Speak Out Now Republicans, Or You’ll Regret It

 

Speak Out Now Republicans, Or You’ll Regret It

Going public with your concerns about Trump is vital, and it could still make a difference.

 

Sarah Longwell

Oct 30, 2024

 

I HAVE A QUESTION FOR FORMER Trump administration officials, Republican electeds (and former electeds), business leaders, and conservative writers and pundits who recognize Donald Trump for the threat he is. Actually, it’s a question for anyone on the right who knows what Trump’s re-election could mean for the country, for liberal democracy, and for the world—and, who, in the face of this threat, has decided to maintain either a posture of silence or both-sides-are-bad neutrality.

My question is this:

How are you going to feel if Trump wins on Tuesday by an extremely narrow margin?

I suspect you’ll spend the next four years holding your breath.

Because if Donald Trump does a tenth of what he has promised—pulls the United States out of NATO, abandons Ukraine and sides with Vladimir Putin, puts RFK Jr. and Elon Musk in charge of serious parts of the American government, rounds up 15 million undocumented immigrants into camps and deports them, seeks political retribution on those who opposed his candidacy—I suspect you’ll come to regret your silence when you could have made a difference. 

I can see you holding up your hands to show us how clean they are. Saying, “But I said Donald Trump was a threat! I said I wouldn’t vote for him! What more do you want from me?”

And I get that. I do. The problem is that this moment demands more from all of us. 

It demands clarity. And it demands your leadership. 

Over the course of your career you’ve asked people to trust you. Either by voting for you, or listening to your advice, or relying on your judgment and analysis. 

So why is it suddenly a bridge too far for you to tell everyone what you really believe?

I understand that this moment is hard. Trump could win. Even if he doesn’t win, coming off the sidelines could alienate you from career networks, business opportunities, or even friends and family.

But being a leader means standing up and telling the truth even when it’s hard, or costly, or scary. Especially when it’s hard, or costly, or scary.

It’s still not too late. Every day, more people are speaking out—people with reputations, and reservations, but whose consciences won’t let them sit this one out. 

You shouldn’t sit this one out, either. You should not decide, after a career in leadership, that this time you’d rather just be a spectator. 

Maybe you think that adding your voice wouldn’t matter to voters. After all, so few things  seem to move the needle. Well I’m here to tell you that it matters. It all matters. Every little bit. You do not know who’s listening as the moment approaches to cast their vote. You do not know who you might persuade at the eleventh hour. And you do not know what the margin will be. If this election is decided by 9,000 votes in Pennsylvania—which is absolutely a real thing that could happen—then every single input could be the tipping point.

I can’t see the future. I don’t know if your endorsement would be the difference maker. Just like I don’t know what price you would pay for speaking out more clearly. 

What I do know is this: If you abdicate the obligations of leadership in this moment and the thing you fear comes to pass, you will regret having stood down when the country needed you to stand up. You will regret it for all of your days. 

MAYBE YOU ARE A RETIRED FOUR-STAR GENERAL, or cabinet secretary, or someone who took a job as a political appointee in the Trump administration and saw things that shocked your conscience. And maybe you’ve told reporters about what you saw; or written about it in a book. That’s not enough because books have a relatively small reach and your words are mediated through paper. What’s needed is for you to look voters in the eye and give them a direct warning about what a second Trump term might mean. Especially now that you won’t be on the inside to try to protect the country from him. 

Maybe you’re a former Republican president, or presidential nominee. Maybe you were once the leader of the party Donald Trump has destroyed. I am sorry but the unpleasant fact is that you cannot preserve your influence for some future GOP. This is actually the last moment in which you have a chance to influence it. Your party, every bit as much as your country, needs you. Right now.

Maybe you’ve led venerable conservative publications. You’ve acted as a thought leader. Someone shaping our political culture. But today you want to keep your hands clean by writing in Edmund Burke on your ballot or some other nonsense protest candidate—as a sign that you kept your purity. I understand this impulse. But it’s wrong. You know that if yours was the single deciding vote, you’d vote for Harris. So just say so. This isn’t an academic exercise and it’s not about you. 

Maybe you’re a billionaire, to whom this country has given everything. Your wealth insulates you from the consequences of the worst case Trump scenarios. And yet, you see Trump’s transactional nature, his willingness to provide favor if you provide obedience, and instead of standing up to Trump, you cower. This might seem like wisdom, but it’s not actual safety. There will be more demands. The only way to actually protect your business is for the rule of law to be victorious and democracy to be stable.

FOR MONTHS, YOUR COUNTRYMEN have been waiting for you to tell them the full, unvarnished truth about the danger you believe Donald Trump presents. To tell everyday Americans the same words you say in green rooms, at dinners, and in off-the-record conversations. You haven’t gotten there yet, but you still can. Before you make your final decision, think about Liz Cheney’s warning that some day Donald Trump will be gone, but the choices we make today will be with us forever. 

Choose honor. It’s the choice you’ve made again and again in your professional lives. It would be a sin to stop choosing it because of a mountebank like Donald Trump.

I want to tell you about some Republicans who are already putting themselves on the line for democracy. They don’t have security details, or staff, or budgets. They’re just regular people who voted for Trump before, but refuse to support him again. They joined Republican Voters Against Trump to get the word out to their friends and neighbors. A few of them have lost jobs. Some of them have lost family. All of them have lost friends. None of them regrets it.

They’ve put their faces on billboards across the country. They’ve appeared in millions of dollars worth of paid ads running in their own communities. They’ve taken part in text campaigns, spoken to the media, knocked on doors, and traveled to swing states in the hopes of making a difference.

If Kyle from Alabama, or Jackie from Michigan, or Robert from Pennsylvania, or Jim from Wyoming can speak out, then so can the generals, politicians, and thought  leaders.

THE REASON I BELIEVE THAT every little bit counts is because conservative-leaning voters say that to me all the time.

In swing-voter focus groups, one thing I hear again and again is that voters are open to hearing from the leaders who served under Trump, who were in the room with him. The messenger is as important as the message, and these people are ready to believe the words of a lifelong Republican or flag officer much more readily than they’ll believe a Democrat telling them the same things.

So if you’re one of the small number of people who can make a difference in this moment, the question is: What are you going to do?

Courage is contagious. And I have one last piece of advice: No one ever regrets doing the right thing. 

You won’t regret it, either. So stand up. Do the right thing. It’s our last chance.

HOWARD TULLMAN JOINS LISA DENT ON WGN RADIO TO DISCUSS NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE 

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

TRUMP IS DESTROYING DEMOCRACY

 

TRUMP IS UNFIT AND DEMENTED

 

What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris? (Part Deux)

 

What More Do You People Want from Kamala Harris? (Part Deux)

She's done everything voters could reasonably have asked for.

 

Jonathan V. Last

Oct 29, 2024

 

Tonight we’re going to livestream Kamala Harris’s big closing argument rally for Bulwark+ members. The show starts at 7pm. If you’re a member, here’s how to join us live. If you’re not a member yet and want to join, we’d love to have you.

1. Precriminations

Kamala Harris has a 50-50 chance to win this election.²

But I want to head off arguments that if she loses it was somehow her fault. That she did something wrong, or didn’t do something important.

Because here is the rock-bottom fact: No reasonable observer could have asked her to run a better campaign.

Kamala Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee a hundred days ago. In that time she:

• Unified the Democratic party.
• Reversed Biden’s polling deficit and took the lead over Trump.
• Organized a successful convention.
• Created a policy framework for her prospective administration.
• Pivoted to the center on nearly every issue: From domestic energy production, to gun reform, to immigration.
• Absolutely schlonged Trump in their debate.
• Performed somewhere between adequately and exceptionally in every single media interview.
• Spent time with several non-traditional media outlets.
• Gave almost unfailingly good speeches in front of giant crowds.
• Performed heroic levels outreach to Republicans and swing voters by appearing on Fox News and campaigning with the likes of Liz Cheney—while explicitly inviting and welcoming Republican voters into her coalition.

Harris did not play perfect baseball—you or I could sketch out a handful of things we wish she had done differently. Or better. But the perfect campaign does not exist.

Seriously: This has been the most error-free presidential campaign in memory and yet Harris hasn’t played it safe. She combined aggressive strategy with disciplined execution. In terms of campaigns as they exist in the actual, real world? This is as good as it gets.

Which is why, if Harris loses, it will be incorrect to say that it was somehow her fault. That if only she had done [this thing I like] or said [this other thing that’s important to me], then she would have beaten Trump.

Because not only has Harris run the best possible campaign, but Trump has run an entirely mask-off campaign. He has told America who he is and what he wants.

He wants to round up immigrants and put them in camps.

He wants to deploy the military against domestic groups he disfavors.

He wants to eradicate the “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country.

He wants to put crazy people like RFK and Elon Musk in charge of large swaths of the federal government.

He wants to fire Jack Smith and make the criminal charges against himself go away.

He wants to force Ukraine to negotiate a ceasefire in terms favorable to Russia.

---

Believe me: If Trump wins, it isn’t going to be because Kamala Harris gave a bad answer to a question on The View.

It will be because some large percentage of the American public looked at these two candidates and decided that they wanted Trump.

Attempts to blame Harris or find an alternate reason for why voters didn’t consciously choose an authoritarian strongman will be an exercise in reality avoidance. It will be an attempt to avoid grappling with who, and what, our country is.

---

2. Stories We Tell Ourselves

In a sense, the 2024 election has been an exercise in creating rationalizations in order to avoid reality.

The pattern was simple: People would come up with a rationalization for why 47 percent of the country wanted Trump. Said rationalization would be demolished. Someone would come up with a new rationalization.

• The only reason people supported Trump was inflation.
• Then inflation came down, and people kept supporting Trump.³
• The only reason people supported Trump was high interest rates.⁴
• Then rates got cut, and people kept supporting Trump.
• The only reason people supported Trump was crime.
• Then we had two years with the steepest drops in crime rates in history, and people kept supporting Trump. ⁵
• The only reason people supported Trump was Biden’s age—they were deeply concerned about his mental ability to do the job.
• Then the Democratic nomination went to a nimble and vigorous Kamala Harris; Trump became the addled geriatric in the race; and people kept supporting Trump.

How many times do we have to do this?

Imagine that it’s November 10 and Trump has lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College. People will be desperate to come up with explanations.

• It was immigration. Sure, the Democrats passed the toughest immigration bill ever, only to have Trump kill it. And sure, Biden closed the border.
• But if only they’d done that sooner. Then voters would have rejected Trump.⁶
• It was Harris’s liberal past.
• If only she had the exact same policy positions as Tim Ryan or Joe Manchin. Then voters would have rejected Trump.⁷
• It was Joe Rogan.
• If only she’d gone to Austin and given him three hours. Then male swing-voters in [Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, whatever] would have rejected Trump.

But none of these rationalizations will be any more true than the arguments that what voters really cared about was crime, or Biden’s age.

I am not a Kamala Harris super fan. She is a gifted politician who has many of the assets and liabilities of normal politicians. For the hundredth time: Maybe she’d be a great president. Or a mediocre president. Or a bad president. We can’t know.

But she has been an exceptionally good candidate. And in so doing she has rendered to America a great service.

By running such an excellent campaign, Kamala Harris has disassembled our rationalizations and held up a mirror to America. When this election is over, we will not be able to retreat to comfortable illusions.

She will have shown us who we really are.

We may not be glad that she did. But we’ll be better off for knowing.

 

JUDGE LUTTIG - ENOUGH WITH TRUMP

 My Fellow Republicans, It’s Time to Say Enough With Trump

Oct. 29, 2024

By J. Michael Luttig

Judge Luttig was appointed by President George H.W. Bush and served on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit from 1991 to 2006.

We Americans live in faith with our Constitution and with the past generations of Americans who swore to protect it and fought to defend it. One week from today, we will decide whether Donald Trump is fit to be president of the United States again. He is not. When we entrusted our Constitution and our democracy with him before, he betrayed us. Campaigning for the presidency again, he now promises to exact vengeance against his fellow Americans whom he deems “the enemy from within,” those who have dared to challenge his betrayal, an enemies list that includes Republicans and Democrats alike.

There could be no higher duty of American citizenship than to decisively repudiate a man who betrayed the nation when he was previously entrusted with the highest office in the land and now threatens the persecution of American citizens who have crossed him. In the almost 250 years since the founding of the nation, no president before Donald Trump has ever so betrayed America.

This is not a difficult decision for voters, though my fellow Republicans and conservatives will finally have to decide what they have long hoped they would never have to decide — whether to put their country above their party. Republicans and conservatives have always proudly claimed they would be the first to put the country above all else when the time came. That time has come. If Republicans are unwilling to put America before their party now, they will never do so. They must be honest with themselves.

All Americans, but especially Republicans, will live with their decision the rest of their lives. This election is anything but politics as usual, no matter how desperately Donald Trump and the G.O.P. have tried to make it that.

As a lawyer and a judge, I have devoted my entire life to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. I took solemn oaths to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign as well as domestic. While most Americans do not literally take oaths to preserve and defend the Constitution, all Americans freely assume those same oaths and they should take their obligations seriously every single day of their lives without any reservation. The reason America is still the envy of the world after almost two and a half centuries is because so many of its citizens do take seriously their obligations as citizens.

The powers of the presidency are vast and its responsibilities commensurately immense. It is for those reasons that a president has no higher obligations than to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law, the foundational cornerstones of our republic. Through his words and deeds, Donald Trump has over and again demonstrated his palpable contempt for those cornerstones of America’s grand experiment in democratic self-government. He has proved himself to be an anti-democratic, anti-Constitution candidate for the presidency of the United States.

I am 70 years old and I have always voted for the Republican candidates for president because I never doubted they would honor their sacred obligations to our democracy and our Constitution. I have never doubted the Democratic candidates for the presidency would honor their obligations, either. But today, I do not recognize the Republican Party that I have known across my lifetime. It is not the Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln or Ronald Reagan and neither is it conservative, as that term has been inspiringly invoked by conservatives since the founding. Today, the party of Lincoln and Reagan stands only for one man and that man’s disfigurement of both republicanism and conservatism.

As I wrote in August when I endorsed Kamala Harris for president, Mr. Trump drove a stake through the heart of America’s democracy and Constitution on Jan. 6, 2021, inciting insurrectionists with his speech on the Ellipse and other actions in an attempt to overturn the presidential election he knew he lost to Joe Biden and prevent the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in almost 250 years.

For his grave offenses that dark January day nearly four years ago, he will forever have the ignominious distinction of being the first American president since the founding to be charged with crimes against the United States. With the assistance of a willing Supreme Court, he succeeded in delaying trial and accountability for his betrayal of the nation until after this election. Now, as he wished, he will never be held accountable for his offenses unless the American people first hold him accountable at the ballot box on Nov. 5.

Yet, to this very day, the former president; his running mate, Senator JD Vance; and much of the Republican Party persist in the fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from them, and in breathtaking defiance of American democracy and the Constitution, that they can be trusted to ensure a peaceful transfer of power only if Donald Trump wins. That is not democracy and the rule of law. It is autocracy and lawlessness. Respect for the electoral will of the American people and for the peaceful transfer of power are central tenets of our constitutional self-government. Without unhesitating adherence to those fundamental tenets of our Republic by every person who assumes the presidency, America would have neither democracy nor rule by law. Its Constitution would be meaningless words, not magisterial commands. Its greatest strengths would be its terminal weaknesses.

America’s democracy and the rule of law are the only truly consequential stakes in the 2024 presidential election. Yes, there are important policy issues about which we disagree. But that has always been the case and always will be. In this election, these policy differences are comparatively inconsequential, if consequential at all. It is our democracy, Constitution and rule of law that have made America the envy and the beacon of freedom to the world for almost a quarter of a millennium, and on the eve of the 2024 presidential election Donald Trump stands as an imminent danger to those foundational cornerstones of our nation.

Ms. Harris is the only candidate who can be trusted to honor the president’s sacred obligations to America’s democracy, Constitution and rule of law. The vice president understands and cares about what Donald Trump does not. She calls on Americans to “stand up for the rule of law. For our democratic ideal. And for the Constitution of the United States.” She believes we “have the power to chart a new way forward, one that is worthy of this magnificent country that we are all blessed to call home.”

America has never heard those words from Donald Trump. And it never will.

The choice for America next Tuesday could not be clearer.