Musk Opens The Door For Republican Ratf**ing
Cheating to win elections is baked into the GOP’s DNA. Deeply. This is why Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter reek of a Republican conspiracy.
by Justin Rosario
Last week, just a few days before the midterm elections, Elon Musk devastated the staff at Twitter. It wasn’t just a 50% cut across the board in some kind of blind mass layoff. It was very targeted. Among other departments, Musk wiped out the content moderation team. Those are the people who work to block disinformation from flooding Twitter. Yeah, Musk did that right before an election.
Despite the abject stupidity of his public tweets, Musk is not, in fact, an imbecile. He may not be the great and mighty genius his cult has cracked him up to be, but he is certainly not stupid enough to break the content moderation team right before a crucial election without understanding the ramifications. This was clearly a deliberate move designed to benefit whoever stands to gain the most from rampant disinformation on social media.
Now who could that be?
It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you
I’m not a big conspiracy guy. I don’t believe the Moon landing was fake or that aliens built the Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge. I do, however, tend to believe almost any story when it comes to Republicans cheating to illegitimately win an election. Because they have a long history of doing so.
Both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan colluded with hostile foreign powers to boost their chances of being elected. Nixon went on to be impeached for bugging the headquarters of the DNC to help him win reelection.
George W. Bush almost certainly did not win the election of 2000. The Republicans on the Supreme Court handed him the presidency with a ruling that was so narrow and partisan that even they said it couldn’t be used as precedent. This was after Republicans engineered a fake riot to delay the counting of the ballots in Florida just long enough to let the Court do its dirty work. When the ballots were counted later? Bush lost.
We all know the 2016 election was rife with GOP meddling. Massive voter suppression combined with Russian and Republican disinformation pushed by a deeply hostile press made the race closer than it ever should have been. The final blow was Comey being pressured by Trump loyalists to announce an investigation into Clinton while not announcing the FBI also had an investigation into Trump at the same time.
Do we even need to discuss what Republicans did in 2020? Trump extorting Ukraine for a fake Hunter Biden investigation? Tampering with the mail to slow down the delivery of mail-in ballots? Trying to stop the counts on election night? The lawsuits? The fake electors plot? The deadly insurrection?
Cheating to win elections is baked into the GOP’s DNA. Deeply. This is why Elon Musk’s mass layoffs at Twitter reek of Republican ratfucking.
“Whoops”
After the 2016 election, Mark Zuckerberg spun a fantastical tale about how they had no idea Facebook was being used to spread Russian disinformation even as they were being paid in fucking rubles. Sure, Jan. The only upside to that excuse is that it can only be used once. “Gee whiz, mister! I had no idea my social media platform was being used for rampant disinformation!” isn’t going to work if Musk tries it.
That doesn’t mean he’s not going to give it a go and he clearly is:
Musk whined that Twitter was losing $4 million a day. With his net worth of around $208 billion, musk was in imminent danger of going broke in just a short 142 years. All joking aside, he’s losing even more now because his cuts have deeply unnerved advertisers who are fleeing the platform in droves. No advertisers, no revenue because let’s be clear: $8 a month for a blue check is not a serious business plan, and turning Twitter into Onlyfans is not going to work. The combination of limited moderation, porn, and the new influx of hardcore white nationalists and their increasing penchant for pedophilia will be an unmitigated disaster.
Musk has lawyers, accountants, and a lot of random people telling him this but he went ahead and fired the staff a week before the election anyway. He could have waited a few weeks until after the election and sent a strong signal he was not going to be a disruptive influence but he was as disruptive as possible in the loudest way possible. Who benefits from that the most and how?
It’s only a few days left to the election so how much could disinformation change things? Probably not a lot overall, possibly a lot in individual races. It depends on how prepared Republicans were to take advantage of the sudden content moderation vacuum. Unlike a presidential election, midterms cast a very wide net and it’s hard to influence the entire outcome with a single narrative. Not that the press hasn’t been trying with the help of a flood of crooked Republican polls. Nate Silver of the once-trusted 538 amazingly confirmed not only the ratfucking but his own complicity:
Whether this helps or hinders Republicans remains to be seen. Republicans have a habit of getting high on their own supply and convincing their voters of impending victory which then suppresses their own turnout. The point is to demoralize Democratic voters but it can also make Republican voters complacent.
Considering that early voting is exceeding that of the 2018 midterm elections and Republicans appear to be underperforming while Democrats are significantly overperforming, hey, keep reporting on that inevitable red wave based on biased polling, guys. What could possibly go wrong?
The real danger to Musk gutting Twitter’s ability to handle disinformation is not the lead-up to the election, however. It’s what comes after.
Tinfoil hat time
If the goal was to allow disinformation to affect the outcome of the election, crippling Twitter only a week before is not a great strategy. A month ago or more would have been a much better time to pull the trigger. On the other hand, if you wanted the maximum amount of confusion on Twitter immediately after the midterms, firing half the staff one week before is pretty much exactly when you would do it. It gives people enough time to set their hair on fire before being distracted by other stories while leaving all the damage in place without enough time to do anything about it, thus leaving bad actors all the space they need to weaponize your platform. Those bad actors, of course, are the Republicans.
Is Musk a Republican? Not in the sense that he’s part of the party infrastructure. Then again, Musk told people to vote Republican on Monday because the president is a Democrat. I’ll bet you the $44 billion Musk spent on Twitter he will not say the same thing if Republicans cheat their way into the White House.
Regardless of Musk’s true political affiliation, he has certainly aligned himself with their ideology of perpetual white male grievance. This last week of Musk on Twitter has been a master class in the absolute fragility of the white male ego. He would be far from the first to throw a temper tantrum and embrace the right’s fascism because he wasn’t coddled enough. Now he’s in a unique position to help them burn democracy to the ground.
I wrote last week about the Republican Party’s post-election plans to throw lawsuits at every election they lose:
With the judiciary littered with Republican judges eager to trample on the rule of law, [John] Eastman will find many sympathetic courtrooms. Does he need to win every spurious lawsuit based on flimsy evidence and manufactured conspiracies? No. He only needs to win enough to hand control of the House and possibly the Senate to Republicans. Bonus if he can put several Secretary of State seats in the GOP’s hands or maybe flip a few legislatures red.
A necessary part of this strategy will be to create the perception of skullduggery. If the public does not think the election is corrupted in some way, they will not tolerate a Republican judge reversing the results.
How does one create a perception of a corrupt election? Flood social media with disinformation. Did you hear that mysterious vans were delivering ballots all night long? Did you know that the voting machines are owned by Hillary Clinton’s father’s brother’s nephew’s cousin’s former roommate? I heard a rumor that Republican ballots were marked with an “X” and thrown out.
For every 100 lies spread on social media, 2 or 3 will catch on and the rest will become deafening static, creating the impression that something fishy is going on. The press is ill-equipped to deal with the torrent of lies, not least because they refuse to call Republicans out as liars.
Fox News, AM hate radio, and right-wing hate sites will put all of it on blast 24/7, seeking to amplify the static and convince the GOP base that everything is rigged, even the elections Republicans won. The more chaos and confusion, the better. Twitter is very useful for this sort of thing and this kind of abuse is exactly what the content moderation team was meant to prevent. Once reality is obscured, anything goes.
Remember, while some Trump judges wouldn’t go along with Republican nonsense in their courtroom, others were all too willing to trample on the rule of law to further the GOP’s agenda. As I said last week, Republicans do not need to win all of the cases they’re going to bring, they only need to win enough to take control of the House and Senate. The real prize, though, is normalizing overturning legitimate election results by judicial decree. Get the public to accept that, and corrupt Republican judges can run the tables, securing GOP power forever.
So again I ask: Who benefits the most from Musk opening the door to disinformation at the exact time a massive Republican disinformation campaign is about to launch? What are the chances this was all just a giant cosmic coincidence and Musk is not colluding with the GOP to allow his new toy to be abused in exactly the way I’ve described? I’m just asking questions but the answers seem to be pretty obvious once you look at the facts.
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Members Only Podcast: If Republicans Win The Midterms, How Does Biden Come Back In 2024?
In the Members Only Podcast today, we discuss the elephant in the room: if the polls are right and Republicans dominate the midterms, how bad is this for Joe Biden in 2024?
Firstly, we discuss what the next two years will look like (be warned, it’s not pretty…) then we look at potential upsides for the Democrats should it all go to hell, historic comparisons, and how Biden might turn things around. What should the Democrats should be focusing on if Trump becomes the nominee, and how can they protect democracy from the GOP elected officials committed to destroying it?
Nixon wasn't impeached. He resigned rather than face the prospect.