Musk Twitter Could Be a Disaster For MAGA Grifters and Republican Ostriches
With the news that the sale is final, it’s time to embrace the schadenfreude.
Liberals on Twitter are not happy about their new overlord. They are Godwinly concerned that Musk Twitter might signal the end of the American Weimar. They are upset that the news of his purchase is making insurrectionists happy. Some are even moving to social media Canada. And I saw the backlash first hand last week when I dared to post on the bird app an article from Puck positing that the Musk acquisition was serious, resulting in an avalanche of reply guys informing me that was a “laughably bad take” and predicting doom if it were true.
While concerns about the Russian bots and blarmy bigots returning to the hellfeed where news happens does have merit, let me offer a countervailing perspective about the impact of the Twitter acquisition. Musk Twitter might also be a disaster for a couple of groups who cosmically deserve it:
1) Mitch McConnell and the establishment Republican ostriches who are doing everything in their power to put their heads in the sand and pretend Donald Trump doesn’t exist (unless they need to cash in on his name and likeness).
2) The Nazi grifters who started the various Deploratwitter knockoffs like TRUTH, Parler, and Gettr and are now set to be totally pwned by Twitter offering these very fine people the same freedom to shitpost in front of bigger audiences.
So if the two-faced Trumpists and the worst MAGA scammers are going to suffer, might we consider squeaking out one cheer for Musk. Or a half a cheer? Or even just a mild affirmative grunt? The case for their suffering is as follows: In Georgia on Insurrection Eve, we saw how a big Trump megaphone could divide the Republican base, resulting in political success for the Democrats. The election fraud mass formation psychosis led Trump voters in rural parts of the state to stay home rather than participate in yet another RIGGED contest while a small percentage of Atlanta Kemp/Raffensperger Republicans refused to be a party to the anti-democratic horror show. As a result, Georgia elected the state’s first black and Jewish senators—on the same day!—despite the fact that both had fewer votes than their GOP opponents during the November election. A repeat of that is the worst-case scenario for the GOP at a time when the political environment is looking rather rosy for them. Back in January, Bloomberg’s Joshua Green interviewed experts on the possible ways Republicans could screw the pooch in the midterms. Liam Donovan offered this hypothetical: “For the last year Trump has been in a straitjacket where he can’t harm his own party . . . Maybe he gets back on Twitter, there’s no bigger wild card than letting the tiger out of its cage.” Rawr. Now I’m skeptical that Trump trash-tweeting the Republican haters and losers who don’t prostrate themselves before the MyPillow altar will be enough to cost Republicans Congress on its own. They’re surfing a wave, baby. But it certainly isn’t going to help. For instance, it’s not hard to imagine the Herschel Walkers of the world overcompensating to appease the Orange One in ways that harm their campaign, costing the party a few seats. And even if it doesn’t cost Republicans any seats, forcing these assholes to actually defend all the insanity Trump’s feed would push into the public square would be a good unto itself.
The case for MAGA grifter pain is even more cut and dry. The entire rationale for the social media sites launched by chinless deadbeat Jason Miller, heifer Devin Nunes, and the demonic Mercer family was that they were providing a safe space for the dregs of humanity who want to be allowed to anonymously post bile with total impunity. But if Elon is going to allow Sonic erotica and other MAGA obsessions back onto Twitter, why would people still send “regeets” into the ether on Gettr? There’s already some signs that the collapse of these bastions of human detritus is imminent. Chris Anderson noticed a filing that registered the officers of TRUTH social to the address of a business in his hometown. The business is 11 miles from the U.S. offices of Rumble, a Canadian video platform that hosts, among other things, Russian propaganda sites and Glenn Greenwald (though that might be a repetitive categorization). This is significant because Nunes has said that TRUTH Social’s website migrated their domain over to Rumble. Maybe an acquisition/bailout would make sense since TRUTH was already languishing even before having to compete with Musk. Put it all together and what we have is certainly not . . . good news. But maybe not entirely bad news either. As JVL put it, using Twitter is already “like drinking a daily cocktail of Liquid Plumber and battery acid,” so if things do go horribly south on the platform under Musk it’s not like The Discourse will be losing much. So at least, in the meantime, one might as well look at the suffering coming for people who richly deserve it and take a moment to bask in the schadenfreude.