Javier E
Contents contributed and discussions participated by Javier E
Fwd: Dispatch No. 2: Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom - 0 views
-
Subject: Dispatch No. 2: Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization MaelstromDate: November 28, 2022 at 11:31:33 PST
The Dispatch
This the second installment of my new newsletter, which I introduced on Wednesday. As I noted, many members have been asking to receive at least some of my Editors' Blog posts this way. So we are trying it out. Today I'm including a post you have missed in Friday's food coma. It is about what I call it the Narcissism/Radicalization maelstrom which Elon Musk is undergoing and which mirrors Donald Trump's. I would love to hear your feedback, both on the post and this format. You can just hit reply to this email to send a note directly to me or you can always reach me at tpm at talkingpointsmemo dot com.
I'll also be sending a group of links in the Radar section of the newsletter which you'll find beneath the post. These will tend not to be on the driving political news of that particular day which dominates the TPM front page but on various topics which are interesting, consequential or important to know more about. Thanks for reading and for being a member. Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom
It's a fascinating thing to watch far-right radicalization unfold in real time. I've been watching the Elon Musk and Twitter drama with a mix of fascination and awe. He bought Twitter as part of his romance with the "free speech"/anti-"cancel culture" right and Donald Trump. Just what set him off on that path has never been adequately or convincingly explained, though there are a number of very plausible and not-mutually exclusive theories. Over the last four weeks Musk's attachment to this crowd and that ideology have been constantly apparent. He gave an early and even for him startling taste of this when he tweeted out a rank gay-bashing conspiracy theory about the QAnon dead-ender's hammer attack on Paul Pelosi days before the November 8th election. The process has only accelerated and intensified over the subsequent four weeks.As he virtually high-fives supporters on Twitter he's moved on from "free speech" and ending bans on people like Donald Trump to a much more explicit insistence that old Twitter management ran the site with the express purpose of elevating the left over the right. So just two days ago, for instance, he wrote: "Far left San Francisco/Berkeley views have been propagated to the world via Twitter. I'm sure this comes as no surprise to anyone watching closely. Twitter is moving rapidly to establish an even playing field. No more thumb on the scale!"Then a few hours later he followed up with this: "It is objectively the case that 'conservative' political candidates were more negatively affected than 'progressive' candidates. Anyone using Twitter knows this. Question is simply one of magnitude."This came in response to a comment from a Bitcoin enthusiast who wrote: "I heard from a primary source that political groups would regularly contact twitter to deboost their candidates' detractors and twitter would happily do that. That seems to put the finger on the scale of democracy."Comments like these have become commonplace from Musk. But in recent days he's increasingly been promoting far-right theories and white supremacist content that may be rife on Twitter but are not immediately tied to his claims about Twitter's old management or anti-"cancel culture" activism.Recent conversations he's engaged in have either been applauding him or encouraging him to crack down on "grooming" or pedophile or child exploitation accounts. Certainly management at any social network should be monitoring and rooting out such accounts. But it's highly improbable that Musk's team is more focused on combatting pedophiles and child exploitation than old Twitter management was. Indeed, Musk's Twitter would likely be hard pressed to crack down on anything at the moment since Musk has already fired most of the workforce that handled content moderation, hate speech and abuse of all kinds.But you don't have to look hard at these exchanges to see that pedophilia and child exploitation are not precisely what's being discussed. They're calls to crack down on gay, trans and other accounts which the far right have rebranded as "groomers" and "pedophiles." Increasingly, it's even more scattershot and general. It's a call to crack down on liberal or left-wing accounts or anything connected to the "woke mob," since all those groups are by definition "groomers" and pedophiles. There's far too little recognition of how much all of this amounts to little more than a mainstreaming or buttoning up of the PizzaGate and QAnon eliminationist conspiracy theories about Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton running pedophile sex rings.In recent days he's begun promoting explicitly white nationalist content too. Indeed, the two often meld together. Here he is, for instance, on Thursday. 
This tableau requires some translation. "Ramzpaul" is Paul Ray Ramsey, a notorious white nationalist. Here Ramsey casually equates left-wingers with pedophiles and Elon replies validating the slur and saying Twitter is on the case.Reducing pedophilia from a scourge to a cudgel isn't new for Musk. In 2018 he lashed out at British cave explorer Vern Unsworth during the effort to rescue boys trapped in a flooded cave in Thailand after Unsworth turned down Musk's offer to build a special submarine to facilitate the rescue. "Sorry pedo guy," Musk tweeted, "you really did ask for it." At his subsequent defamation trial, Musk explained that he meant the comment not as a factual statement but as an insult. The cave explorer's rejection was "wrong and insulting, so I insulted him back," Musk testified.A day before Musk's exchange with Ramsey there was this. 
Again, some decoding and context is necessary. "Kim Dotcom" is a German national and notorious internet fraudster who has been holed up in New Zealand for years fighting extradition to the U.S. to face charges of racketeering, fraud and money laundering. Here he makes a straightforward statement of so-called "Great Replacement Theory" and Musk responds with a straight up, "Just so."Just as I was writing this post, there was this. 
And there was this interaction with Ian Miles Cheong also this morning. Cheong is another far-right influencer who has been banned from numerous platforms for a mix of fraud, harassment, impersonation and simply being a far-right weirdo. 
Let's start with the simple observation that it's not ideal to have the owner of one of the world's largest and most influential communication platforms operating in a social and political milieu of white nationalists and international outlaws. What captures my attention, though, is the process, the trajectory. It's what we might call a narcissism/radicalization maelstrom and it mirrors what you could observe with Donald Trump in 2015 and 2016.
It's clear that Donald Trump had dark political impulses and beliefs going back decades. He put his cards on the table clearly enough when he announced his presidential campaign with denunciations of Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. But his politics weren't as fleshed out ideologically or as clearly articulated as they would soon become. You could watch in his online interactions how his ego followed the praise and fawning. His narcissism pulled him toward the people who became his most loyal online devotees and they were routinely and unsurprisingly the most ardent white nationalists and far-right agitators. They showed up increasingly in his Twitter timeline. He started engaging with them and promoting them. The point isn't that Trump was some kind of naif pulled into a radicalization spiral. He had all the building blocks. I doubt very much that in mid-2015 Trump had any real familiarity with the arcana of racist and radical right groups, their keywords or ideological touch-points. But they knew he was one of them, perhaps even more than he did. They pledged their undying devotion and his narcissism did the rest.
Elon Musk is on the same path. There are various theories purporting to explain Musk's hard right turn: a childhood in apartheid South Africa, his connection with Peter Thiel, disappointments in his personal life. Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He's done with general "free speech" grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He's routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to Great Replacement.
One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manqué. In an exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimedthat he had cut a deal with civil rights groups to create a "moderation council" but that they had broken the deal. 
Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk had actually announced the "moderation council" days earlier. So even on its own terms the timeline doesn't match up. We're hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he's already cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to "kill Twitter."
Not pretty.
Most of us know what it's like to be caught up in the moment. In a moment of tense confrontation or ego injury it is natural, if unlovely, to pull tight to those who are there to defend you. Some of this is simply human nature. But with the likes of Musk and Trump it operates on a qualitatively different and more explosive level, the consequence of an innate narcissism, an ingrained sense of grievance and entitlement and the unique dynamics of social media. Their power and wealth also make their meltdowns vastly more consequential than yours or mine. More From The Editor's Blog:
Radar
Almost all the demographic growth measured in the 2020 census was in non-white/non-Hispanic minority groups. But the number of minority legislative districts declined in the 2021-22 redistricting. Article This email was sent to jergueta@gmail.comYou've received this email because you're a TPM member. If you don't wish to receive this newsletter, you can opt out through the update your email preferences link. If you no longer wish to receive any TPM emails, you can click unsubscribe. PO Box #490 217 W 18th St, New York, NY 10011, United States© 2022 TPM MEDIA LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
1 - 2 of 2
Showing 20▼ items per page
This is Bloomberg Opinion Today, a cartoon cliffhanger of Bloomberg Opinion's opinions. Sign up here.
Today's Agenda
Through a Glass, Darkly
We all know that prediction is hard, especially about the future. But divining the global economic outlook in recent times has become increasingly difficult. Inflation continues to race ahead, defying economists' forecasts for a slowdown. Meanwhile, the recession that's been just around the corner for several quarters remains, well, just around the corner. The problem, according to Allison Schrager, is that this time really is different - unpredictably different.
The economic lockdown imposed during the pandemic was unprecedented. "We have never before turned the economy off, then turned it back on again," Allison writes. The war in Ukraine was unexpected and has exacerbated the rise in consumer prices, which is itself coming from novel directions, including supply chain disruptions, a ton of Covid-inspired fiscal stimulus, and interest rates that remain at historically abnormally low levels.
"If there has been one thing consistently true over the past two years, it is that what everyone consistently predicted has turned out to be wrong," Allison writes. "That's because we're in uncharted territory." As a result, the inflection point that the economy is expected to reach may prove illusory. "In this world, the economy is just sort of blah for a long while and we slog along full of uncertainty."
Tech Reckoning
It's been quite a week for the big US technology companies, which have suffered what John Authers describes as "a Wile E. Coyote moment."
CNBC stock-market pundit Jim Cramer got quite emotional about the collapse in Meta Platforms Inc., the company formerly known as Facebook. Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Inc. and Google owner Alphabet Inc. have also plummeted, with Amazon's market capitalization dropping below $1 trillion when US markets opened on Friday, down from a peak of $1.9 trillion in July 2021.
"The fall from grace has been staggering," John writes. "For investors who thought they were betting on the next big thing, it won't be surprising if they are starting to think twice. For more than a year, investors worked on the assumption that these companies would benefit from the pandemic, which they unquestionably did - but it is only now that investors have fully grasped that they shouldn't be valued as though the pandemic conditions would continue for ever."
Further Tech Stock Reading: Even Apple will need to eke out some growth. - Tim Culpan
The Secret of Red Bull's Success? Bull's Testicles Unconventional Marketing
Taurine is an amino acid found in many energy drinks, with some studies suggesting it improves athletic performance. "Is taurine made from bull's testicles?," the website of the world's dominant pep-me-up beverage asks. "No. The taurine in Red Bull is not derived from animals. It is produced synthetically by pharmaceutical companies."
The fact that Red Bull GmbH feels the need to even pose the question harks back to rumors about where the power of its fizzy drinks comes from. While the real secret of the company's success may be more prosaic, its 41% share of the US energy drinks market is testament to the marketing prowess of its founder Dietrich Mateschitz, who died last week aged 78, writes Chris Bryant.
Mateschitz eschewed traditional print advertising, instead pioneering an event-oriented approach. "We don't bring the product to the people, we bring people to the product," he told the Economist in 2002. The company owns several soccer teams, and its main Formula One team has dominated auto racing this season. Red Bull spent about one-quarter of 2020 revenue on marketing; in years not disrupted by the pandemic, the percentage was closer to 30%.
Red Bull is insanely profitable, with an operating return on sales in 2020 of 26%. Mateschitz marketed the drink as "a boundary-pushing, hip lifestyle brand rather than a blue-collar pick-me-up, and priced it accordingly," Chris writes. "As a private company, Red Bull isn't beholden to pressure from external investors and its capital structure is decidedly old-fashioned: It uses cash flow to fund investments, not borrowings."
Telltale Charts
Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda is sticking to his guns, even though inflation is ticking up. "Kuroda will be hoping that by resisting calls to raise rates and staring down the markets, he's timed things better than those others who have occupied his role before him," write Daniel Mossand Gearoid Reidy. "With just one more monetary policy meeting left this year, he may have weathered the storm of elevated inflation and the weak yen."
Further Reading
The mystery of America's millions of missing oil barrels. - Elements by Javier Blas
Don't exaggerate the cracks in the relationship between French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. - Lionel Laurent
Rishi Sunak walks right into a lose-lose immigration policy. - Therese Raphael
Sunak illustrates the growing influence of Indian talent in the West. - Tyler Cowen
The Chips Act won't work without including every part of the semiconductor supply chain. - Thomas Black
ICYMI
Elon Musk's $44 billion buyout of Twitter caps nine years of largely unfulfilled promise on the NYSE.
How the battle between Netflix and HBO forged a new era of television.
Xi's $6 trillion rout shows that Chinese markets serve the party first.
Retirement apartments with pools and cinemas are London's next property hotspot.
Kickers
Rihanna released Lift Me Up, her first solo track for six years, which will feature on the soundtrack to Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
A British cross-Channel kayaker was rescued after surviving on seaweed for two days after capsizing.
Eat mushrooms, cut back on meat and use the microwave to save the planet one forkful at a time.
This Piet Mondrian panting has been hanging upside down for 75 years.
Notes: Please send microwaved seaweed and feedback to Mark Gilbert at magilbert@bloomberg.net.
Sign up here and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook.