13 Jun 2025 3 min read

Reporters need to get off Elon's Twitter

Inside the Machine for Fascism, you can't even see that Biden won the 2020 election.

We don’t want him on Bluesky. But Josh Barro should get his ass off Twitter.

He should do it, even though it would hurt his business of selling “sensible” advice for Democrats to people who want Democrats to lose.

Earlier this week, Josh got the bi-monthly memo that it’s time to attack the microblogging platform where tens of millions have flocked to avoid Elon Musk. He says it’s good for the Democratic Party that Democratic politicians are now spared the opinions of “most neurotic and censorious liberal influencers.” (It’s me. Hi!)

And then he makes the classic error that indicates Elon has broken your brain: Josh forgets who won the 2020 election by seven million votes.

He does this when he asks, “But was that actually ever good for liberal causes?”

Pretty much all the arguments against “the left” and “the groups” and protests, like Donald Trump himself, must ignore who won that election. This allows them to overlook one of the most significant differences between 2020 and 2024. This change has made Democratic politics far less effective and more fragmented, coming from the exact platform he’s encouraging Democratic politicians to use.

Twitter has become a Machine for Fascism.

It’s been that way for YEARS now.

And far too many reporters, writers, and politicians who see themselves as bastions of “centrism” or generic liberalism have decided to invest most of their work day and all of their reputation in continuing to give the site the veneer of normalcy that makes it one of the most effective tools for Fascism the American right has ever had.

(And I continue to believe that the Democrats’ refusal to move away from the site during the 2024 election helped validate Elon as a good-faith actor, as he was doing something no one had ever done in the country’s history: personally buying the presidency.)

X, while shrinking and consistently one of the smaller social networks, continues to play a significant role in shaping and distorting the public narrative.

I’d argue that Democratic politicians remaining on the platform and doused in MAGA brainworms led them to make one of the biggest errors of the 2024 election: Running on their desire to pass Trump’s border policies.

They did this instead of emphasizing the wasteful cruelty of what he was proposing and a path to citizenship, which remains more popular than anything Trump offers on immigration, which is still his strongest issue.

But don’t believe me, a neurotic and censorious liberal influencer, when I tell you what you already know but don’t want to admit—that you are voluntarily dousing yourself in a sewer rigged to give America Elon Musk’s Apartheidist version of Fascism.

Believe Charlie Kirk.

A new CBS poll shows how right Charlie is in that former sentence:

A slight majority feel the administration's deportation efforts are prioritizing people they believe are dangerous criminals. Those who say this are very supportive of the program, and feel the program is making people in the U.S. safer.

But if people don't think it is dangerous criminals who are the focus of the deportation effort, support drops dramatically.

If your brain is on Elon’s X, you’re likely to buy the lies about Trump’s kidnapping machine that ignore headlines like:

Trump Voter Gets Choked Up After ICE Detains a Third of His Staff

The ability to see the truth about what Donald Trump is doing and his obvious intentions to overthrow democracy and rule us for as long as doctors can keep blood flowing through him is all that matters right now.