Elon’s Inferno Has Already Turned Twitter into a Hellscape

On Elon’s Twitter, we can expect Anti-vaxers to vie for attention with Antisemites

Elon’s Twitter needs a new musk. Because something doesn’t smell right.

The company is devolving into an unseemly moral sewer where Nazis go to network and bigots like to bloviate. Twitter is quickly moving from a social media to a social menacing site. Within hours of Musk taking over the company, Twitter was flooded with racist, sexist, homophobic and antisemitic bile. Right wing “incels” (involuntarily celibate males) were so enraptured with their new “freedom” to spew, that they had their first orgasms that didn’t involve their own hands. Elon Musk must be so proud. 

The views of the part-time entrepreneur and full-time egotist have long been incoherent. Here’s a guy who has an electric car company that supports the GOP, a political party that doesn’t believe in climate change or science. Elon Musk wants to relocate to Mars. But based on his early ownership of Twitter, he’s already spaced out. His bizarre worldview doesn’t distinguish between free speech, false speech and hate speech. This creates dangerous conditions where haters suppress genuine free speech by harassing minorities into silence. When people are cowed into submission by bullies, it distorts and damages our democracy.

On Elon’s Twitter, we can expect anti-vaxers to vie for attention with Anti-Semites. This is particularly disturbing with 300 to 500 daily COVID deaths in America. The online attacks against Jews are metastasizing and jumping from cyberspace to our living space. In Charlotte, a man dressed as a Nazi walked into a bar before he was run out by disgusted customers. In Los Angeles, an antisemitic hate group, the Goyim Defense League, draped a gigantic banner over a busy Los Angeles highway saying, “Kanye is right about the Jews.”

The Goyim Defense League repeated their despicable antics in Jacksonville, Florida. Kanye’s hideous message was projected on buildings or flashed on screens throughout the city. This included TIAA Bank Field stadium, where the universities of Georgia and Florida football teams played.

While many public officials condemned the hate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis remained silent days after the antisemitic incidents. Charlie Christ, a Democrat who is running to replace DeSantis, slammed the governor:

“I am disgusted and horrified at the hateful, antisemitic rhetoric that was displayed in Jacksonville this weekend. Hate should have no home in Florida, period. But while antisemitism is spreading in our state, Governor DeSantis refuses to condemn it – even when it’s broadcast on the side of a stadium he is in.”  

This is a disturbing pattern with DeSantis, who attacks drag queens with gusto, but miraculously loses his voice when it comes to speaking out against Nazis. In May, I observed:

In January, a group of white supremacists marched in Orlando. They yelled anti-Semitic slurs and screamed “White power!”, while waving an anti-Biden banner.

DeSantis’s press secretary, Christina Pushaw, tweeted about the Nazi march (she later deleted it after blistering criticism): “Do we even know they’re Nazis?  

Instead of making it clear that Nazis aren’t welcome in Florida, DeSantis played the victim and whined, “So what I’m going to say is these people, these Democrats who are trying to use this as some type of political issue to try to smear me as if I had something to do with that, we’re not playing their game.”

Apparently, the Nazis noticed DeSantis’ welcome mat. They followed up their initial action by brazenly waving Hitler flags outside the entrance to Walt Disney World.

This leads us back to Twitter, where Elon Musk is providing a safe space for unsavory elements to spread their messages. If you think he will moderate the haters, consider that he can’t even control his own impulses and Tweets defamatory trash to his 100 million-plus followers.

For example, he had to delete his own Tweet responding to a post by Hillary Clinton. Musk Tweeted that, “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story”, referring to the failed assassination attempt of Nancy Pelosi and the brutal attack on her husband Paul Pelosi in San Francisco. Like a typical mindless, right-wing hack, Musk linked to an opinion piece in the Santa Monica Observer, a nutty right wing site without a shard of credibility. 

The article claimed, without providing any factual evidence, that Pelosi was drunk at the time of the assault and “in a dispute with a male prostitute.” The article was unsourced, and its author wrote the conspiracy theory was based on “IMHO” — internet lingo for “in my humble opinion.”

Here’s my humble opinion on Elon Musk. Twitter will be his downfall. One can have all the money in the world, but it’s useless in trying to repair a destroyed reputation. Musk is on the verge of moving from tycoon to buffoon. He has claimed that Twitter is the modern town square, but it’s looking more like a clown square under his so-called leadership. 

In trying to secure his new company’s finances, Elon pledged to advertisers that Twitter would not become a “Hellscape”. But as of today, it’s looking like “Elon’s Inferno”, and we’re already in the Fifth circle of hell and descending faster than one of his rocket ships. 

“Musk owning Twitter is like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse when it comes to political misinformation,” said Joan Donovan, research director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. “When he was just a user, that did not matter as much as it does now because people may come to distrust the platform if they don’t trust the owner’s core values.”

When he first bought Twitter, a celebratory Musk wrote, “The bird is freed.” In little more than a week, it looks more like a sick canary in the coal mine choking to death on the ashes of hate and discrimination. Musk’s naïve vision has quickly transformed Twitter into a grotesque den of ignorance and iniquity. A social media platform without serious attempts at moderation is proving itself worthy of liquidation.

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