Well, I finally deleted my X account. I should have done it long ago, but the tidal wave of hate and demonization this last few days convinced me that any research and networking possibilities the site affords me are far outweighed by the personal, social and political harms of supporting the world’s leading megaphone for extremism.
No sooner had Tylor Robinson pulled the trigger and murdered Charlie Kirk, than a wave of high-profile right-wing accounts on X were blaming ‘the Left’ and calling for a military putsch.
These accounts, including White House figures like Stephen Miller, were absolutely 100% sure that those responsible for Kirk’s murder were Antifa, the trans lobby, left-wing media, left-wing universities and the Democratic party, and they needed to be punished. Some figures close to the White House outright called for the dissolution of democracy and the instigation of a far-right dictatorship, like Marilyn Manson lookalike Laura Loomer, who is an unofficial advisor close to Trump.
It was horrifying to see accounts with millions of followers blaming ‘them’, calling ‘them’ the ‘party of murder’ (Musk’s words), telling people that ‘they hate you, they want you dead’. It gave me a sense of what it must have been like to be in Rwanda before the civil war there, with the radios pumping out dehumanizing messages about the Tutsi. Here’s White House advisor Stephen Miller, just spewing hate while somehow accusing the left of being hate-filled:
We still have barely any idea of what motivated Tylor Robinson - leftist political ideology, Groyper hate, or online meme lolz? But even when it becomes clearer, claims that ‘the left’ is the source of most political violence - a claim made by Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, and many other right-wing leaders - is obviously wildly wrong, utterly self-serving, and very dangerous. Any right-wing commentators with a shred of integrity understand this, like Tyler Cowen or Andrew Sullivan (both of whom wrote essays condemning the right’s demonisation of ‘the left’ in the last few days). Even Grok gets this, to Musk’s chagrin.
Also wildly untrue and dangerous is the claim that Bluesky was full of leftist accounts celebrating Kirk’s murder. There were some dumb accounts saying Kirk deserved it - maybe 5% when I looked, and they were all fringe accounts. No senior left-wing politician anywhere in the world celebrated Kirk’s death. The right-wing figures calling for violent retribution or even the dissolution of democracy are not fringe. They’re White House advisors.
And then on Saturday, Elon Musk went on a live video to a march of 150,000 anti-immigration protestors in the UK and said this:
As David Aaronovitch pointed out, imagine if this was the Iranian ayatollah, say, calling for the overthrow of British parliamentary democracy by video-link. It’s absolutely outrageous. This guy is a far-right extremist, just like Henry Ford before him. Even Nigel Farage said there was a dangerous ambiguity in what Musk meant by ‘fight or die’. Farge and Reform UK are too moderate for Musk.
And Musk had the audacity to wear a George Orwell shirt and tell British people ‘what would Orwell do?’ What would Orwell, a man who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, think about the richest man in the world speaking to an anti-immigrant rally and calling for the dissolution of the oldest parliament in the world? What would he think about a Big Brother on a giant video screen leading the daily two minutes of hate?
How can Musk even pretend he’s a nationalist? He’s a South African who moved to the United States and worked there illegally, a man who wants to leave for Mars at the first opportunity, speaking to a country thousands of miles away on Zoom and warning them of foreign interference. He’s so dissociated he thinks he’s playing Civilization, he doesn’t face the physical consequences of his incitement, like the 26 police officers injured in Saturday’s protest, one of whom had their teeth knocked out. He’s so high on ketamine he thinks he’s in Lord of the Rings. ‘They’re in a village somewhere, they just want to mind their own business…but other people are going to come and maraud them’.
The US Right, it’s clear, is spoiling for a fight, it’s gagging to do to the Left what it felt the Left did to it during the Great Awokening. It wants to turn Charlie Kirk into its George Floyd, its martyr, its casus belli. It wants to humiliate the Left and make it kneel.
The United States has turned into two nations who can’t stand each other, who don’t talk to each other, and who see the other side as demonic. And the US, like Saudi Arabia, exports its political extremism all over the world, but especially to poor dumb adoring UK.
In five years we’ve gone from ‘defund the police’ and ‘systemic racism is the source of all evil’ to ‘dissolve parliament and fight the rapist immigrants’. Our national football team still takes the fucking knee out of deference to our richer US cousins, now they’ll have to do a Nazi salute at the same time.
Both The Great Awokening and the Rightist Revenge show the same terrifying moral simplicity, the same terrifyingly-naive division of humanity into ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, angels and demons. As Graham Greene wrote about American foreign policy, ‘God save us from the innocent and the good.’
So that’s why I deleted my Twitter / X account, finally. It is a machine of polarization, extremism and hate, and my life and society will be better without it. My mind will be better if I spend less time scrolling on social media, and more time with my loved ones, walking on the beach or reading a good book. How much time do you think Elon Musk spends with his loved ones in his billionaire bubble? When was the last time he read a book?
When we read history or fiction, we see the complexity in life, the messiness, the paradoxes, we see that, in the words of Jean Renoir, ‘everyone has their reasons’. So let me tell you a little story to illustrate this point about how people are more complex than you think. It’s about Tucker Carlson, the acid head.
Tucker Carlson and Hunter S Thompson
Tucker Carlson is probably the leading right-wing demagogue in the US, and he’s also probably one of the most high profile sceptics of psychedelic renaissance. He thinks psychedelics may open us up to demons. So it was a surprise to me to discover that Tucker Carlson was a teenage acid head, the Grateful Dead are his favourite band, Hunter S Thompson is one of his favourite writers, and he claims to have done every drug mentioned in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
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