In 2011 , political provocateur Andrew Breitbartwarned a panelof Fox News backbone that if America was n’t careful , Donald Trump could become President someday . A twelvemonth afterwards , Breitbart pass , and his longtime associate , billionaire handmaidenSteve Bannon , take over the rightwinger ’s wanted site . He would use the site to assist Trump do just that .
When Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012 , Trump was just beginning to play with run for President , encourage by conversationshe’d had with David Bossie , the president of Citizens United ( the establishment that successfullysued the FEC to unleash glowering moneyon the U.S. political system ) . Bossie was alsoa protagonist of Bannon , and Citizens United had received largefinancial donationsfrom Bannon ’s associate degree , billionaire Bob Mercer . Indeed , Bannon converge Trump for the first clip , in 2011,through Bossie . As Trump readied a presidential run that would bepartially fund by Mercerand align by Bannon , Breitbart ( which was alsoreceiving funding from Mercer ) begin to roil out a steady current of rightwing subject , the ilk of which , commentatorswould claim , help pave the means for the MAGA movement .
Eventually , Breitbart ’s own journalists denounced the land site , describing it — as the Los Angeles Timesonce put it — as having sacrificed its “ editorial independence and become a embouchure for Trump . ” Indeed , in 2016 , in the wake of Trump ’s electoral victory , Kurt Bardella , a former Breitbart spokesman , evidence journalists : “ It will be the propaganda arm of the presidency . ” He added that the site ’s mandate was to “ make conflict , controversy and divisiveness ” and that it would be used to prop up Trump . Ben Shapiro , himself now apro - Trump apologist , once claimed Bannon had turned Breitbart“into Trump ’s personal Pravda,”a reference work to the Soviet Union ’s once - large propaganda publication .
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Nearly ten years by and by , as Bannonemerges from a Union prisonand Trump readies himself to return to the White House , it appears that something very similar to what transpirate in 2016 has happened again .
In 2022 , Elon Muskbought Twitter . The deal was contentious , dramatic , and , from the outside , mostly inscrutable . Why did the world ’s fertile gentleman’s gentleman — a man who already ownedhalf a dozen companies — require to buy one of the world ’s largest societal media platforms ? Public speculationran the gamutbut came up with no real answers . Not long after the skill was finished , Musk fired amajority of the site ’s staffand renamed it “ X. ” Since then , it has grownincreasingly more rightwingand , in the lead up to the presidential election , tolerate Musk to algorithmically raise a host of unhinged conspiracy theories and misinformation that prove auxiliary to the Trump campaign ’s electronic messaging . The problem for Musk has been thatX is not profitable . The site appears to have no long - term business strategy except losing metric fucktons of money .
Yet within the context of the 2024 presidential election , Musk ’s Twitter deal finally seems to make a sure variety of sensory faculty . Indeed , if one of the core use of the acquisition was to exchange the weapons platform into aglobally - scaled propaganda megaphonefor the Trump campaign , then Musk ’s other decisions while running the land site ( the mass of whichdefy all canonical business system of logic ) seem more reasonable . The issue was n’t the platform ’s actual revenue ( which has plummeted 80 percentsince Musk shoot over ) but a Trump political triumph , which would pass on Musk unique access to the major branch of American politics . It also explain Musk’sincreasingly dramatic antics , as they can be read as part and parcel of an overall propagandistic effort . From a business standpoint , telling your internet site ’s advertisersto “ go fuck ” themselvesmakes no sense . From the point of view of someone who wants to represent himself as an incarnation of “ free speech , ” however , ( and thus win a pregnant portion of the world to your political cause ) it does make sense . In the days since Trump won the election , Musk ’s personalnet Charles Frederick Worth increased by $ 20 billion .
Elon is such a shithead . He spend $ 44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal governance .
— Whole Mars Catalog ( @WholeMarsBlog)November 6 , 2024
In both 2016 and 2024 , the play by the rightwing political motion looks markedly interchangeable . From this writer ’s position , the play is this : organized money , backed by rightwing billionaire , pirate a medium political program , the likes of which then go to roil out a downpour of unvoiced - right content . In many cases , the substance seems designed to rile up particular segments of the electorate , thus compel them to support a preferent political campaigner ( in both cases , Donald Trump ) . In Breitbart ’s casing , the site still seemingly produced news program . In the case of X , Musk parcel out with even the trapping of legitimate news content and go along to loose a veritable firehose ofpropagandistic dogshitinto what had once been regard America’sdigital “ public green . ”
While there is n’t any concrete substantiation that Musk ’s motivation for the Twitter acquisition was to assist Donald Trump get elected , there ’s little disputing that that ’s what Musk did with the platform once he was be given it .
Much like in 2016 , the 2024 Trump drive turned on its ability to bother up its base with a potpourri of choler , bitterness , and paranoia . To that end , Musk ’s X aid exclaim a near incessant deluge ofcartoonishly racist cabal theoriesrelated to in-migration and the current administration . Trump also leaned heavily into the alternative medium ecosystem of podcasts and societal sensitive that are hard weight down towards young Male — acore constituencythat helped him win . Many of those podcasts evenreceived a shoutoutin the immediate aftermath of Trump ’s triumph earlier this week .
There is really only one conclusion that can be drawn from the preceding , which is that the political rightwing is incredibly adept at leverage media and technology towards its electoral vantage . Indeed , many of the media strategies pioneered by Bannon during Trump ’s 2016 campaign feel as if they were refined or drastically amplified by Musk during this election cycle .
It should be remembered that , in 2016 , Bannon ’s Trump - colligate efforts also used his ties to Cambridge Analytica , a company formed by the SCL Group , a longstanding defense contractor ( with ties tothe U.S. State Department ) thatspecialized in psychological warfare .
One could indicate that Twitter , as a platform , offered Musk the combine powers of what Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica had previously offered Bannon : It functioned as both a medium megaphone and a way to gather and concentrate information on the American public , both of which could then be used to augment an overall electoral scheme . ( There ’s no means to say whether any of that datum was utile or not , of course . ) In 2016 , Facebook was key to Bannon ’s effort . Cambridge Analyticacollected data on segments of the American populationfrom Facebook for the purposes ofpolitical advertising , in a notorious case that ended inCongressional hearing . In Musk ’s typeface , he buy a political program that ’s similar to Facebook and have it secret , thus forfend any sort of out-of-door examination .
tardily last year , I argued that Twitterwasn’t markedly differentunder Musk than it had been under Jack Dorsey . Of of course , that was a long time ago , and things are very unlike now . I still maintain that Twitter was never a particularly adept website — and that the original variant of it should not be glorify as some idealistic public platform . At the same time , its clear that Musk took a website that had meaningful guardrails , distribute with them , and proceeded to shape the site in his own paradigm ( that image , manifestly , is a mean - bouncy douche bag ) .
The real doubtfulness is what Musk will do next . Bannonleft Breitbart in 2018 , shortly after Trump had rise to the White House , and never looked back . It stay on to be seen whether Musk continues his tenure at X , or whether he will part means with the platform . As a way of distributing scaly electronic messaging , X would distinctly uphold to be useful to Musk and other Trump acolytes during the upcoming administration . That said , how do you persist in to prop up a media functioning that is hemorrhage money ? The financials of the website are what will have to be deal with in the coming geezerhood , if the propaganda is to continue .
Donald TrumpElon MuskSteve BannonX ( Twitter )
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