Why Elon Musk is the useful idiot of Donald Trump (and the right-wing extremists) Australian court says not Bitcoin founder “Satoshi Nakamoto”

Last Saturday, the Aargau police temporarily took Martin Sellner into custody. The right-wing extremist from Austria was in Switzerland to present his new book on remigration. With this thesis he recently made the news in Germany for weeks with a secret meeting near Berlin.

Sellner’s performance in Switzerland would hardly have been noticed – only a hundred like-minded people showed up for his performance in Tegerfelden – if a much more powerful right-wing party had not spoken out. “Is this legal?” Elon Musk asked on his Platform X.

Musk added the following to the rhetorical question:

Musk now delights his 174 million followers with his posts almost every day. As a rule, they have a violent impact on the right. Sometimes he even crosses red lines. A few months ago he had to go to Canossa, not to Italy, but to Jerusalem, because he had approvingly reinstalled an openly anti-Semitic post.

This no longer surprised anyone. Musk, who originally declared himself a libertarian and expressed sympathy for the Democrats, has now switched to the far-right camp with flying colors.

Musk once took over Twitter with the promise of transforming the platform into an agora modeled on the ancient Greeks, a forum in which all opinions can be expressed uncensored and freely. The fact that Trump was banned from Twitter and right-wing extremist posts were censored was a stumbling block for the temporarily richest man in the world, which he immediately removed as soon as he bought the platform. Trump is now allowed to post on X again, but will not do so for the time being. The ex-president does not want to compete with his own ailing platform Truth Social.

Trump’s rehabilitation was just the beginning of Musk’s campaign against Twitter. When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, he immediately found a new home at X and was allowed to wreak havoc in his usual fashion. Tulsie Gabbard, the Democrats’ presidential candidate four years ago – albeit without prospects – will soon also have her own appearance on X. The former representative from Hawaii has now become a fixture in the conservative camp.

To maintain the appearance of an impartial platform and keep increasingly insecure advertising clients in line, Musk also tried to lure stars from the left-liberal camp to X. He is said to have made a lucrative offer to Rachel Maddow, the star host of MSNBC. Without success. Don Lemon took a bite. The former CNN star was fired by his employer for sexist comments against Nikki Haley.

The collaboration with X has already come to an end. Lemon had an interview with Musk that lasted about 90 minutes. However, it will not be broadcast because Lemon had the nerve to ask Musk some nasty questions about his drug abuse – the Tesla owner is said to be a fan of ketamine. Musk responded in his famously charming way: “The contract is terminated immediately,” he told Lemon.

Recalling that Musk had described himself as a “free speech absolutist,” the former CNN star quickly responded, “But apparently free speech absolutism doesn’t apply when it comes to questions about him from people like I.

If this was all just an argument between a billionaire and a vain TV host, it wouldn’t be worth mentioning. But it is about much more. X has now become the most important propaganda medium for right-wing extremists. Unlike Tesla or SpaceX, for example, this is not the result of Musk’s entrepreneurial genius – on the contrary, X is still deeply in the red – but rather the result of the weakness of the other conservative media.

The latest data from Comscore, an institute that collects media data, shows that the right-wing media has lost enormous amounts of readers, users and viewers. Here are a few examples: The Washington Times, a right-wing mouthpiece and not to be confused with the Washington Post, has lost 82 percent of its readers since 2020; The once critically acclaimed news portal Breitbart, run by Steve Bannon, has 87 percent of its users. Even Fox News is experiencing a 24 percent decline in its viewers.

This development has far-reaching consequences. David French, a conservative columnist, says in the New York Times: “This transformation is making the right even more radical.” The beneficiary is X, whose character has been completely changed by Musk. French again: “In the pre-Musk era, Twitter was a center for left-liberal journalistic views and a universe for activists. Both groups have left the platform. That is why X has become the most important phase of the right.”

All of this is made worse by the fact that Trump and his associates have managed to undermine efforts aimed at preventing lies from spreading on social media. After January 6, 2021, Twitter, Facebook & Co., partly in collaboration with the government, drew up rules that should either label obvious fake news as such or suppress it completely.

As a lengthy investigation by the New York Times shows, these rules are now gradually being weakened under pressure from the Trump camp.

The consequences of the plowed American media landscape are fatal. “When it comes to assessing developments in the right-wing camp, it is difficult to imagine a worse couple than Donald Trump and Elon Musk,” says David French. ‘But we got there. Trump controls who on the right has access to power, and Musk controls who has access to the public. (…) Like Trump’s unpredictable and ugly politics, Musk’s website contributes significantly to the devaluation of legal thinking. Ideas are on the decline. All that matters is the attitude.”