To paraphrase former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, you wage mimetic warfare with the unsubstantiated smear you’ve got, not the one you want. It just so happens that the one most recently deployed by Donald Trump is the kind that proliferates these days on X.
When Trump declared, seemingly out of nowhere, during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants living legally in Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs … eating the cats … eating the pets of the people that live there,” he drew incomprehension, followed by widespread ridicule, from mainstream audiences. What came next was a furious and revealing national conversation on important questions of immigration, race, assimilation, work ethic, diet, traffic violations, duty (to struggling native-born constituencies and to newcomers alike), the limits of tolerance, the inevitability of its opposite, the nature of truth, and much else besides. But on the social-media platform that had provided him with the paranoid talking point in the first place, the discussion and reproduction of Trump’s outburst immediately gave way to the naked and sustained expressions of racism that have become emblematic of the website over the past two years.
When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and changed its name to X, he promptly went about stripping its capacity for content moderation, reinstating extremist accounts, and boosting the reach and visibility of the worst trolls. I have heard many blithe rationalizations of the pragmatic and even salutary benefits of “knowing what people really think.” But the pervasiveness and normalization of what was, until very recently, niche and stigmatized bigotry has been astonishing to witness. Although there was plenty of racism on the internet during Trump’s first and second campaigns, it wasn’t this ubiquitous on mainstream networks such as Twitter. On Musk’s X, the racism has now become so relentless and self-confident that it amounts to a genuine qualitative difference.
“If I had to summarize the intent of X’s algorithm at this point, it would be twofold,” Sam Harris remarked this week on his Making Sense podcast. “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. If you could pipe the X algorithm into your brain through Neuralink, I think you’d probably jump off the table and go out and buy a Cybertruck and then join a white-supremacist militia. That’s the vibe I get when I spend a few minutes scrolling the homepage.”
Consider a story shared, in the aftermath of Trump’s tirade, by a woman named Rebecca Christophi posting under the handle @rquietlyreading. She generated 1 million views and 11,000 likes for an anecdotal screed about her undergraduate experience sharing a dorm room with an older Haitian student. The roommate had a boyfriend back in Haiti whom she talked with on the room’s landline until very late at night: “It was torture. I could not sleep, I was barely able to stay awake in classes, but I was afraid to say anything to her.” When she finally confronted her roommate, asking her to take the phone out the door to talk, the young Haitian woman “started to cry—how she was affecting me seemed to never have occurred to her. The complete lack of consideration and her shock when I addressed it was hard to wrap my head around. It’s just not how most Americans function.”
The post continues: “This is the issue, isn’t it? If you are bringing in thousands of ppl from other countries whose values/ideals differ drastically from yours, you are inevitably going to change your homeland.” At the end, she adds a “side-note” accusing the roommate of stealing clothes from her, and saying she “also cried when I asked her about it.”
When one user pushed back—“I am sorry that your parents did not prepare you to tell your roommate when you wanted to go to bed. They failed you. You are projecting this failure onto the American value system in a way that is quite unfair”—that response led to a round of even more vehement and explicit racial hatred. “You’re so smug when you know the problem is that blacks are loud, obnoxious, and inconsiderate. They also struggle with impulse control. You wouldn’t tell a black that was loudly and rudely blasting music on the subway to cut that shit out because he’ll probably try to kill you,” someone wrote. “Nigs are gonna nig,” wrote another account that was verified through a paid subscription.
I reached out to Christophi to ask if she’d intended her post to be read as invective against Haitians, and she replied in an email that no, it was just “a story,” its telling triggered by “the recent happenings in Springfield”; she “certainly did not expect so many people to see it or to respond with the hatred and vitriol that they did.” She said that people have since threatened her life and livelihood—which of course is egregious.
And yet, in her message to me, she also doubled down on what she said were “accurate details about the effect of mass immigration.” If, she wrote, “the details coming out of Springfield are conveyed accurately, they only support my statements, for example, the mayor and city council appear to be receiving financial kickbacks for replacing a third of the population of their town with immigrants.” This is a perfect example of the “Great Replacement” theory in action—the idea that immigrants are being welcomed as part of a plot to steal control of the country away from white voters—and it is not true. There is no evidence that the white residents of the town are being in any sense replaced.
The choice of a quote from G. K. Chesterton that she shared at the end of the email dampened the sympathy her message might have otherwise elicited: “The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts you; and howls when you hurt him.”
I am far from a hypersensitive snowflake on constant lookout for racial grievance, nor am I someone who could plausibly be accused of a lack of concern over creeping censoriousness particularly on the previous iteration of Twitter. On the contrary, I believe that maximal tolerance of free expression is crucial to American democracy, and I am deeply skeptical of both formal and informal censorship. I believe that it is vital for all of us—not just college students—to be put in contact with views we passionately disagree with. But through his revealed beliefs and example, Musk has debased the argument about the value of free speech and reduced the terms of this debate to its crudest possible units. With his nearly 200 million followers—a sizable portion of whom amount to cultists—he is responsible for tuning X’s digital culture into a gratuitously repulsive frequency. Astonishingly active and available on the platform that he so bombastically controls, he not only enables bad actors; he also personally praises and promotes them.
Just a week before the presidential debate, Musk wrote, “Very interesting. Worth watching,” about a conversation between Tucker Carlson and the amateur historian and Nazi sympathizer Darryl Cooper. In that talk, Cooper claimed that Hitler had killed millions of Jews unintentionally, and that Winston Churchill was the real villain of the Second World War. Musk has since deleted the post, but such an endorsement from X’s apex user makes the spread of anti-Semitism not just likely but inevitable.
One noxious meme that has been circulating lately depicts a smirking, hook-nosed figure wearing a kippah and rubbing his hands together. Behind him is a wall of cardboard boxes labeled Open Borders, Feminism, Cultural Decay, Globalism, “The Holocaust,” Hate Crime Laws, Climate Change, Gender Bending, Usury, Porno, and so on. “It’s all Jewish. Literally all of it,” a verified account claimed.
The image is, too, is a reference to the Great Replacement theory, and the idea that Jews are behind it. These sorts of grotesque posts predate Musk. But under his stewardship, they have absolutely lost their taboo. How could they not? As my colleague Yair Rosenberg has reported, Musk has endorsed that conspiracy theory himself.
Last year, a Jewish user responded to anti-Semitic content on X by posting, “To the cowards hiding behind the anonymity of the internet and posting ‘Hitler was right’: You got something you want to say? Why don’t you say it to our faces.”
A small-time white-nationalist account wrote back to attribute anti-Semitism to minorities, and blaming it on the Jews:
Jewish commun[i]ties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.
I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that [they] support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.
You want truth said to your face, there it is.
Rosenberg pointed out that “his exchange would have languished in obscurity had Musk not replied to this bigoted bromide with six words: ‘You have said the actual truth.’”
Here’s something else that Musk, Trump’s wealthiest and most prominent backer, lamented not long ago: “Racism against white people is the only kind of discrimination that’s allowed.” As the depressing discussions of Haitians—and Jews and Black people in general—have made so inescapably plain, from the top of the Republican ticket down to the most obscure account on X, that is anything but true.
