The Minister of Propaganda

How do you prepare someone to be lied to?

I spent an hour on Sunday warning two devout Fox News viewers that they won’t be able to trust what their favorite network tells them next month if Donald Trump loses the election. Especially the evening hosts: There might be some sobriety during the daylight hours when no one’s watching, but the highly rated Watters-Hannity-Ingraham bloc will be pure storytime.

Trying to convince Fox watchers that they’re being misled is like trying to convince fish that they’re wet, though. They’ve adapted to a media environment in which their political priors are relentlessly affirmed. Tell them that they’re more likely to find the truth about the election in the New York Times than on Fox and they’ll look at you cockeyed and say, “But the New York Times is biased!”

And they’re right. The New York Times is biased. I’d be surprised if less than 90 percent of the newsroom is voting for Kamala Harris. The editorial board has already endorsed her in hair-raising terms as “the only patriotic choice” in this election. Even one of the paper’s few conservative voices agrees and is crossing the aisle to support her.

The Times is biased. But there’s a difference between bias and propaganda.

Bias is having a rooting interest in a dispute. Propaganda is allowing your rooting interest to define your understanding of reality.

If Trump wins, the Times will overflow with thoughtful analysis about how he did it—turning out low-propensity voters, winning over union members, mobilizing young men, making inroads with working-class blacks and Latinos. There’ll be endless doomsaying about the outcome in the paper’s opinion section and many ominous (and justified) “news” pieces wondering how dark the next four years might get, but the reality of what happened won’t be challenged.

If Harris wins, right-wing media will overflow with conspiracy theories about how she did it—ballot stuffing, vote-machine tinkering, turning out illegal immigrants by the millions to vote fraudulently and, somehow, undetectably. The daytime hosts at Fox will engage seriously with the exit polls, as will legacy conservative publications like National Review. But across the broader industry, denying the reality of what happened will be treated as a supreme litmus test of tribal loyalty.

Most mainstream media is biased; most right-wing media is propaganda.

Interestingly, though, judging by the last few weeks, it appears that the locus of Trumpist disinformation about the election this time won’t be Fox News or one of its many gonzo populist competitors. It won’t be anyone employed in right-wing media, in fact.

It’ll be the richest man in the world. Come November, there’s every reason to think Elon Musk will be Trump’s de facto minister of propaganda.

Flooding the zone.

The devolution of The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter under Musk’s leadership is a subject of recurring fascination for me because of how its trajectory has mirrored the trajectory of the broader right.

Conservative media began as a check on left-wing bias in mainstream outlets. Talk radio, Fox News, blogs, social media accounts: Each was sold as a corrective to liberal misinformation and disinformation. To be a truly informed citizen, the industry claimed, you need to have the facts that the Democratic flunkies at the Times are withholding from you. As a guardian of truth and enforcer of institutional accountability, its civic ambitions were hygienic.

Good in theory, not so good in practice. Over 25 years, right-wing media went from trying to add nutritional balance to Americans’ media diets to behaving like an army engaged in information warfare. Its antagonism toward liberal bias mutated into antagonism toward facts that benefited liberals. By 2020, it was so far removed from its original mission that it backed a coup attempt propped up by a grotesque lie to try to prevent Democrats from taking power.

It went from draining the media swamp of bias to “flooding the zone with sh-t.” An army’s job isn’t to tell the truth, after all. It’s to win.

Musk’s ambitions upon acquiring Twitter were similar. The platform’s liberal management had grown too aggressive in suppressing information that benefited the right and hurt the left, the theory went. Elon would restore balance. “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral,” he declared in April 2022, “which effectively means upsetting the far right and far left equally.” Once again, a seemingly well-intentioned right-wing actor was entering the fray to improve America’s political discourse by riding herd on biased liberals.

And once again, that actor succumbed to a bias that’s considerably more cutthroat and pernicious than the bias he originally aimed to cure. Two years later, it’s safe to say that Elon Musk is not, in fact, upsetting the far right and far left equally:

Various pathologies of modern populism can be seen in how Musk has managed Twitter, starting with how easily his idealism tends to yield when it conflicts with his grubby interests. The man who touted Twitter as a civilization-saving bastion of free speech has colluded in censorship by authoritarian regimes. The man who vowed Twitter would no longer suppress truthful political news like the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 election has done that himself lately to protect his preferred candidate.

Elon has also allowed anti-elitism to trump more important civic concerns, like separating truth from fiction. (Yes, the world’s richest man is somehow anti-elite.) One of his first innovations upon taking over Twitter was allowing paid subscribers to acquire the same checkmark for their account that formerly was reserved for influential users whose identities were verified. By democratizing that status, he made it harder to tell at a glance which users were trustworthy and which were not. Which makes sense: To populists, the quality of information depends on how good it makes you feel, not the method with which it was obtained.

There’s also an intense narcissistic strain in Musk’s interest in the platform. “If I had to summarize the intent of [Twitter’s] algorithm at this point, it would be twofold,” podcaster Sam Harris said recently. “The first is to make Elon even more famous than he is. And the second is to make every white user of the platform more racist.” We’ll get to that second point later, but the imperative to boost Musk’s reach online is so overweening inside the company that Twitter engineers received an emergency middle-of-the-night text last year when one of Elon’s tweets during the Super Bowl didn’t get as much engagement as he would have liked.

Narcissists’ attraction to populism is a subject worth a newsletter (or a dozen newsletters) in its own right. A conspiratorial mindset is inherently a narcissistic mindset since it assumes the subject is possessed of insight that the average sheeplike mortal lacks, and populism is rancid with conspiratorial thinking. It’s not a coincidence that the two most influential figures in modern populism, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, are also two of the most obnoxious narcissists in global public life—and each the owner of his own social media platform, which isn’t a coincidence either.

Finally, as the culmination of all of the tendencies I just named, there’s the fact that Elon has become a pitifully credulous sucker for propaganda and an even more pitiful promoter of it to his 200 million followers. He routinely demonstrates the paradox of populist contrarianism, in which conventional information sources are met with defiant, exacting skepticism while unconventional sources are met with a gullibility so extreme and tender that it can only be called childlike.

“Racism in any form is abhorrent and those who push it should be shunned,” Musk tweeted on Saturday, highlighting an article titled “Yes, Diversity Is About Getting Rid of White People (And That’s a Good Thing).” But the article is a troll; rather than task someone with double-checking it before he beamed it out to the planet, Elon preferred to shoot first and ask questions later. The piece confirmed his priors about anti-white racism and that alone made it worth sharing. Whether it was true or not is a mere detail.

That attitude will come in handy for the GOP next month. In fact, it already is.

Fraud at the polls.

As Election Day approaches, Elon’s top priority is getting Donald Trump elected. So he’s taken to amplifying false allegations that the Biden administration is impeding the rescue effort in states hit hard by Hurricane Helene.

Trump is the chief instigator of those falsehoods, naturally, forcing everyone from FEMA to North Carolina’s Department of Public Safety to the state’s governor to local Republican representatives to interrupt their management of a major disaster to debunk rumors being spread by a major party’s nominee for president. But Elon has contributed too. On Saturday he showed off a text he’d received from someone alleging that the FAA was shutting down airspace in North Carolina and preventing delivery of Musk’s Starlink satellite Internet system. “The level of belligerent government incompetence is staggering!!” he marveled.

Three days later, that tweet has been viewed 28.5 million times. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg jumped in and replied to him that “No one is shutting down the airspace and FAA doesn’t block legitimate rescue and recovery flights. If you’re encountering a problem give me a call.” (The two did in fact speak afterward, apparently to Elon’s satisfaction.) Buttigieg’s tweet was viewed 6.9 million times, not even a quarter of the engagement that the original accusation had.

That’s emblematic of what Twitter has become. Before Musk took control of it, the platform was useful in emergency situations like recovery from hurricanes. Users could trust that verified accounts were trustworthy news sources and that rumor-mongers would be punished by having their tweets deleted or their accounts suspended. Elon’s free-for-all approach has undone all of that. Twitter’s highest use in a crisis now is as a megaphone for smear merchants to score points on the other side with inflammatory lies and AI-generated images that certain senators are too stupid to sniff out. And Musk himself is happy to participate.

Where he’s really gotten ugly, though, is with his recent obsession about a supposed Biden-Harris plan to use immigrants to swing presidential elections in perpetuity.

“Very few Americans realize that, if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election. Far from being a threat to democracy, he is the only way to save it!” Musk tweeted on September 29. He went on: “The Biden/Harris administration has been flying ‘asylum seekers’, who are fast-tracked to citizenship, directly into swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin and Arizona. It is a surefire way to win every election.” The idea, supposedly, is that these migrant usurpers will become naturalized citizens—like Elon—before the 2028 election and will use their votes to paint the map blue for Democrats.

Laying aside that Donald Trump has made major gains with Hispanic voters, undermining the logic of this supposed Democratic plot, the claim simply isn’t true. In fact, it’s so not true that even a right-wing publication, the Washington Examiner, felt obliged to fact-check Elon on it—and got a telling response when it reached out to him about it. “Mr. Musk unfollowed me and blocked me from DMing him and said asking him for comment for a story via DM was inappropriate—despite him being willing to engage in the past,” Examiner reporter Anna Giaritelli alleged.

But despite being warned directly by the Examiner that he was spreading lies, Elon kept going. Twice on October 3, he repeated the claim that Democrats are planning to use migrants to cement their hold on power. He did so again on October 4, then twice more on October 5. The October 4 tweet was especially zesty, incorporating some of Trump’s smears about hurricane relief: “FEMA used up its budget ferrying illegals into the country instead of saving American lives. Treason.”

“Treason,” said the richest man in the world. There are two points to be made about all this.

One is that Musk’s fantasy of a left-wing scheme to seed swing states with migrant voters is plainly a variation of the so-called Great Replacement Theory. In its nastiest form, the theory alleges that Jews are behind a plot to let millions of dusky foreigners into the United States and overwhelm the white race. Elon’s voter theory is weaker than that, more electoral than demographic—but he has shown interest in the theory’s stronger form. Last year he endorsed one user’s tweet about Jews getting blowback from the “hordes of minorities” they’ve supposedly allowed into the U.S. with the comment, “You have said the actual truth.”

He deleted that tweet, just like he deleted another one in which he touted Tucker Carlson’s interview with a Holocaust revisionist as “Very interesting. Worth watching.” He still has a reputation, sort of, to uphold. But it’s … interesting that he keeps glomming onto conspiracy theories to dilute the political strength of “real Americans” by importing foreigners. When Sam Harris talks about Musk-era Twitter trying to make every white user on the platform more racist, this is what he’s talking about. Except that, in some cases, it’s not just the algorithm Musk is using that’s promoting bigoted content. It’s Elon himself.

Which was inevitable, I think. If I’m right that Musk and his platform have succumbed to various populist pathologies, they were destined to develop a ravenous appetite for scapegoats too. 

The other point is that Musk’s obsession with migrants gaining the right to vote in the near future is transparently a way to prime the pump for more “rigged election” nonsense if Trump loses next month. I’m already on record as believing that illegal immigrants, not voting machines, will be the chief scapegoat of Stop the Steal 2.0. Elon is planting the seeds of doubt early by suggesting that plans are afoot on the left to reshape the electorate in swing states in 2028. It’ll be easy for him to claim in November after a Trump defeat that perhaps the plan was further along than anyone knew and that the reshaping has already begun, through nefarious means.

And that won’t be all. By indiscriminately amplifying populist hysteria about the hurricane relief effort to try to wound Harris, he’s positioning himself and his platform as an essential conduit of disinformation for the right next month. One could even view Musk’s hyperventilating about FEMA and immigrant voting as a sort of “dry run” for the election, beta-testing which sorts of smears are apt to travel furthest, which accounts are most important in making a smear go viral, and so forth.

Anything to delegitimize a Harris victory. This country will be drowning in right-wing lies in November if she wins, and I suspect Musk—more so than anyone except Trump himself—will be the one holding its head underwater. He’ll be the minister of propaganda. And he’ll relish it.

Musk’s arc as a media entrepreneur will follow the same arc as most other right-wing media figures: first exaggerating the corruption of the mainstream press and then treating that exaggeration as a moral license to behave more ruthlessly than they do. Instead of improving public discourse by undertaking to make it more truthful and virtuous, he’s “improved” it by exploiting his power over it to inflict vicious wounds on his political enemies—which, not coincidentally, is exactly how populists plan to “improve” the federal government if Trump prevails next month.

Why decent people continue to do business with him I can’t begin to imagine.