X Marks the Spot of the Normalization of Bigoted Political Violence

The upcoming Musk-Trump interview is illustrative of the deadly and anti-democratic conspiracies circulating from both of them to millions online.

Earlier this week the GOP presidential nominee announced he will be doing a “MAJOR INTERVIEW” next Monday. No, the presidential candidate will not be sitting for a substantive discussion with a serious journalist on the real problems facing working families. No, that's not the type of man that Republicans have chosen to put forward. Instead, Trump is heading to another one of the safest of media spaces.

The “MAJOR INTERVIEW” is with Elon Musk, a billionaire internet troll who has actively provided a platform for neo-Nazis where he regularly amplifies the white nationalist and antisemitic replacement theory to millions. This will be a meeting of two of the biggest purveyors of violent white nationalist rhetoric and election disinformation. As the lede from a Politico summed it up: "The biggest spreader of political divisiveness and incendiary posts on Elon Musk’s revamped Twitter is turning out to be Musk himself.”

While Musk prepares to interview Trump, the government of the United Kingdom also expressed interest in talking to Musk this week. Their interest stems from his role in promoting nativist disinformation and normalization of bigoted political violence that fed the violent white nationalist riots in the streets across the nation over the last week. As David Gilbert noted in Wired:

As asylum centers are boarding up ahead of another predicted day of violent protests across the UK on Wednesday, X owner Elon Musk has stoked tensions by labeling UK prime minister Keir Starmer “#TwoTierKier” and spreading a far-right conspiracy theory that claims white rioters are being dealt with more severely than minorities by police.

For days now, Musk has sought to use his huge influence to suggest that diversity was causing the riots: “If incompatible cultures are brought together without assimilation, conflict is inevitable,” Musk wrote. Responding to a video of riots in Liverpool on Monday, Musk warned: “Civil war is inevitable.”

The British Prime Minister’s office condemned Musk for claiming “civil war is inevitable” amid the white nationalist riots. Joe Mulhall, director of research at Hope Not Hate, a UK-based anti-racism and anti-fascism charity, told CNN that the return of far-right figures to X has “resulted in far-right extremists once again being able to reach millions of people with their dangerous and divisive propaganda.”

Musk is no stranger to amplifying bigoted conspiracies connected to real-world violence, spending the last several months amplifying the replacement conspiracy theory to his nearly 200 million followers on the platform. Rooted in white nationalism and antisemitism, the replacement theory is a false conspiracy about a cabal of globalist/Democrat elites internally facilitating an invasion of non-white migrants as a means to pollute the democratic process and replace the real/white people of the nation. In its most blisteringly sharp expression, it’s the “Jews will not replace us, you will not replace us!” chants from neo-Nazis marching in the street by torchlight. This inherently anti-democratic conspiracy has also inspired a pattern of deadly white nationalist terrorist attacks. Once contained to the red-faced bigots fond of giving the Sieg Heil salute, Musk is translating the racist theory into the banality of tweets normalizing the conspiracy for a broader audience.   

As Musk posted last month, “The Biden-Harris Administration is importing vast numbers of voters.” While stripped of the explicit antisemitic tropes, Musk’s posts are in some ways more pernicious, hiding an antisemitic conspiracy with plausible deniability, allowing some who otherwise would reject the bigoted conspiracy in its explicit form the permission structure to buy into the lie. In May of this year, Musk pushed a similar replacement theory line, falsely asserting that it is “clear as day that the reason the Democrats have an open border policy is to import voters.” This promotion of the replacement theory lie has become a regular pattern for Musk. Like in March when he wrote, “Increasing illegals boosts Dem voting power, causing them to recruit even more! If Dems win President, House & Senate (with enough seats to overcome filibuster), they’ll grant citizenship to all illegals & America will become a permanent one-party deep socialist state.” Musk doesn’t use the word “replaced,” but the racist conspiracy theory he is promoting is unmistakable. 

But Musk’s replacement theory promotion isn’t occurring in a vacuum. As Gabe Ortíz noted back in March, Musk has a pattern of interacting and boosting Republican Members of Congress who have used his platform and others to peddle the white nationalist conspiracy. Like a March 7 exchange with now-Vice Presidential nominee Sen. J.D Vance, where both men pushed replacement theory lies. 

Musk’s radicalization of adopting the replacement theory has come at the same time as the GOP came to adopt it as the central lens to view immigration. With an alarming increase both in volume and velocity, elected Republicans and Party outfits have used Musk’s social media platform to promote the white nationalist conspiracy. We track nearly daily posts from elected  Republicans who amplify the replacement theory rhetoric on Musk’s X. America’s Voice has identified over 165 Republican Members of the current sessions of Congress who have peddled the conspiracy in their official capacity, much of which is done through their office’s official X profiles. 

Musk is also profiting off this activity from Republicans who are running replacement theory political ads on the platform. After Musk told companies to “go fuck yourself” after they pulled advertising dollars over concerns of their ads appearing next to the hate speech proliferating on the platform, leading Republican outfits have been clear they have no such concerns. But that is probably because the ads fit so seamlessly into the bigoted hate filling the website. 

The National Republican Senatorial Committee, the main organization tied to Senate leadership tasked with electing Republican candidates, has been running replacement theory ads on X for months. One of their current ads shows a misleading image of a migrant wearing a Biden campaign shirt with text on the graphic that reads, “Should illegals be allowed to vote for Democrats?” In two different ads from the NRSC use this image with different versions of a replacement theory message. One reads, “Democrats know they can’t win at the ballot box so they IMPORTED millions of ILLEGALS to vote in our elections.” The other says, “Do you support illegal immigrants INVADING our border to vote for Democrats?” 

It is worth pausing here to note the disturbing echoes the NRSC X ads have to the replacement theory manifesto written by the gunman who carried out the deadly terrorist attack in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. “We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history. Millions of people pouring across our borders, legally. Invited by the state and corporate entities to replace the White people,” wrote the white nationalist who was admittedly radicalized online to these bigoted conspiratorial beliefs. Drawing the deadly downstream consequences of the NRSC’s message, the racist domestic terrorist asserted in his twisted logic that if an individual “advocates or even accepts the mass importation of non-whites to replace the native European populations, then that traitor must be destroyed.”

In a more coded version, the Speaker of the House is running ads on X that push the replacement theory lie about non-citizen voting. Or take Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno, himself an immigrant like Musk who is using the platform to promote the deadly anti-immigrant conspiracy theory. “Bernie Moreno will fight to STOP the invasion and keep illegals AWAY from our elections,” reads one of his campaign ads on X. These are just a handful of the many such replacement theory ads circulating across Musk’s X. 

Musk has also put his mind-boggling fortune to work to influence the election as well. His superPAC, America PAC, has already caught the attention of numerous Secretary of State offices across the country for misleading voters who are trying to register to vote in battleground states. Investigative reporting found that the website America PAC is operating was harvesting valuable personal information from voters instead of actually directing them to register to vote as was advertised.     

Known as a tech billionaire, Musk’s promotion of a deep fake AI-generated video that masqueraded as a Harris campaign ad is also deeply disturbing for what it could mean for the further proliferation of bigoted disinformation spreading on the platform. The threat from Musk and AI for causing havoc in the upcoming election is multifaceted. As the Washington Post recently reported,  

Five secretaries of state plan to send an open letter to billionaire Elon Musk on Monday, urging him to “immediately implement changes” to X’s AI chatbot Grok, after it shared with millions of users false information suggesting that Kamala Harris was not eligible to appear on the 2024 presidential ballot.

The problem of the proliferation of conspiratorial, racist disinformation online isn’t one that is contained there. The violent real-world downstream consequences of this hate online continue to horrifically manifest. The white nationalist riots in the UK are one example, but last weekend was the five-year marker of the replacement theory-inspired massacre in El Paso, Texas. Elon Musk is providing a platform for that deadly hate and actively taking part in its promotion.  

They are yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, knowing full well that their actions court deadly consequences. 

Nor is the bigoted political violence the only problem. The replacement theory prompted by Musk and the GOP on X is an active threat to American democracy. The conspiracy theory they are promoting socializes a justification for dramatically curtailing the ballot box or attempting another violent assault to overturn the results. Plan A, is that Republicans win and use the lie of imported voters as a pretext to erect massive barriers to the franchise. Or Plan B, they lose, and the lie is weaponized to promote the lie that imported voters stole the election. 

In a parasitic symbiosis Musk and the GOP are creating the conditions for tens of millions of Americans to abandon confidence in the American democratic experiment with the nativist lie that immigrants are polluting the ballot box. Not only does this actively create the conditions for destabilizing bigoted political violence – see the riots in the UK as a horrific reminder – it is the vehicle to realize the designs for an authoritarian nationalist state. The Trump-Musk sitdown is a glaring example of this threat, and we should treat it as such.