He was rather quick to amplify disinformation that served the Trumpian right. Two serious threats—Republican extremism and the takeover of Twitter by billionaire Elon Musk—intersected in one 16-word tweet this weekend. When Hillary Clinton on Twitter cited a Los Angeles Times article that reported the would-be assassin of Nancy Pelosi, who assaulted Pelosi’s husband Paul, was a QAnon fanboy who espoused right wing conspiracy theories and extreme MAGA rhetoric, Musk replied with a tweet promoting a false story disseminated by a known disinformation site that claimed that the assailant was a man Pelosi had met in a gay bar late that night. Flogging this baseless assertion to counter Clinton’s tweet and the Los Angeles Times article, Musk observed, “There is a tiny possibility there might be more to the story than meets the eye.” Reasonable folks on Twitter howled, but before Musk deleted this post hours later, it had been retweeted at least 24,000 times. The new owner of Twitter had helped spread a conspiracy theory designed to undermine the fact that a fellow propelled by right-wing extremism had apparently tried to kill Pelosi, who has long been demonized by the GOP and conservative media. There is so much that is wrong with this picture. This episode suggested that Musk, the guy now in charge of Twitter, is unable—or unwilling—to discern disinformation from legitimate material. (The source of the bogus article Musk boosted is well-known as a publisher of false information and once claimed Hillary Clinton was replaced by a body double for a debate with Donald Trump in 2016.) This was a stark demonstration of Musk’s severe lack of judgment and a cavalier attitude toward the importance of truth in the public square. There’s more: This tweet also illustrated how Musk was eager to push back against bad news for the Trumpian right. The brutal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, which sent him to a hospital for surgeries related to head and arm injuries, cast a bright light on Republican extremism. Trump has embraced QAnon conspiracism, which has repeatedly led to violence, and the GOP has accepted the merger of QAnon and MAGAism. As I reported recently, three prominent Republican secretary of state candidates, each QAnon-aligned, participated in a Florida conference that featured a white nationalist, assorted conspiracy nutters, and fellow 2020 election denialists. According to the Los Angeles Times, Pelosi’s assailant was a denizen of the dark and demented world of QAnon, Holocaust denialism, anti-vaxxism, and other far-right conspiracies, many of which are encouraged, amplified, or winked at by Trump, other Republicans, Fox News, and various conservative outlets. The right’s efforts to dismiss the meaning and significance of the Pelosi attack—Donald Trump Jr., Virginia Gov. Glenn Younkin, and other Republicans even joked about it—was a move to deflect attention from the GOP’s connection to far-right fanaticism.
via mother jones: Elon Musk and Right-Wing Extremism: Part of the Problem, Not the Solution