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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      Elon Musk’s ‘election integrity community’ on X is full of baseless claims

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      While Elon Musk faces his own election integrity questions offline, the X owner has deputized his followers to spot and report any “potential instances of voter fraud and irregularities”. The community he spawned is rife with unfounded claims passed off as evidence of voter fraud.Musk opted not to show up to a required court appearance Thursday in Philadelphia to respond to a lawsuit challenging his political action committee’s daily $1m voter giveaway. Meanwhile, online, he has started a dedicated community space on X, formerly Twitter, where he’s asked users to share any issues they see while voting. Users posting on the self-contained feed, the “election integrity community”, quickly began pointing out what they deemed as evidence of fraud and election interference.Tweets showing everything from ballots that arrived ripped, an ABC news system test, a postal worker doing his job and dropping off mail-in ballots were all presented as evidence that the upcoming presidential election had been compromised. Some users posted videos of individuals they deemed suspicious, despite providing little or no proof of suspicious activity and asked others in the community to help identify them.Among the tweets are attempts at doxxing and identifying people who users falsely accuse of ballot box stuffing or preventing Trump supporters from voting. In one case, a post with 14,000 shares and 31,000 likes includes a video of a postal worker bringing ballots into a polling location in Northampton county, Pennsylvania.The same video had been shared throughout X and other forums and retweeted by rightwing influencers like Alex Jones. The user asks for help identifying the man. “He says he’s with the post office but idk if I buy that,” the post reads. “He wouldn’t talk to us and was acting very suspect.” The man in question was the acting postmaster and a 25-year-veteran of the US Postal Service, the Northampton county executive Lamont McClure confirmed to NBC News. McClure told NBC News that the postal worker was already being harassed over the video.Experts say the community, which has more than 50,000 members, follows the same playbook used in feverish online forums after the 2020 election to fuel claims that votes were stolen. In 2020, it was the “Stop the Steal” Facebook group, Telegram groups and message boards on alt-right social media firm Parler.These groups amassed hundreds of thousands of followers who perpetuated the baseless claim that the election was being stolen from Donald Trump. Much of the anecdotal and often unfounded stories shared in these groups by individuals were leveraged by rightwing influencers and other figures to create the narrative that the election was compromised, according to a report by the Election Integrity Partnership.“These are real rumors by real people that are being picked up and used by a propaganda machine that really wants to get that view out there,” said Renee DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown University and former research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. “That’s what happened in 2020. [It was the same] process of ‘stop the steal.’ The slogan came from the top but it was ordinary people who provided the ‘evidence’ to back up the idea that the election was stolen.”Before anyone can determine whether the claims are true or false, users seize on the posts and assume the often unsuspecting person being shown are guilty or doing something bad, said DiResta. “Unfortunately the people who bear the costs are the random people whose photographs they take.”

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      The “election integrity community” provides another glimpse into the echo chamber of individuals across the country who believe the election will be or has already been rigged against Trump. Though the space is separate from the normal X feed, Musk has also shared some of the concerns posted in the community on his own page.Among the narratives being pushed in the community is one that has become a pet conspiracy theory of Musk’s. The SpaceX CEO has loudly and often made the false claim that the Biden administration was “importing voters” in the form of “unvetted illegal immigrants”. In the last few days, a Musk-funded super Pac has been pushing a fake pro-Kamala Harris initiative called Project 2028. The initiative has posted fake pro-Harris ads and sent texts to voters that include claims that Harris will be opening the country’s borders and is pushing for undocumented immigrants to be able to vote. Non-citizens are not allowed to vote in the US, and there is no available evidence they are voting in droves as claimed. Users in the community are sharing videos they say provides evidence that Democrats are “bussing” undocumented immigrants to cast votes in their favor. More

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      ‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

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      Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.From the media to far-right conspiracyThe materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”View image in fullscreenClean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting,” she said.From disinformation to violent threatsBeirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Joe Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit.The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFueling paranoiaOver the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.View image in fullscreen@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.‘Millions of illegals’On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”. More

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      Elon Musk is Trump’s biggest cheerleader. How could he affect election results?

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      Less than a month before the presidential election, Elon Musk has made himself a near-constant presence in the race. At a rally for Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, Musk jumps with glee wearing a custom black Maga hat. On social media, he posts AI-generated images attacking Kamala Harris. Behind the scenes, he bankrolls one of the largest pro-Trump political action committees.The billionaire CEO of Tesla and SpaceX has emerged as a unique influence on the campaign in ways that set him apart from even the most politically active billionaires and tech elite. He is all at once a vocal Trump surrogate, campaign mega-donor, informal policy adviser, media influencer and prolific source of online disinformation. At the same time, he is the world’s richest man and the owner of one of the United States’ most influential social networks, while also operating as a government defense contractor and wielding power over critical satellite communications infrastructure.On Tuesday, Federal Election Commission filings showed that Musk donated $75m in the last three months to his pro-Trump America Pac. The group has become a major ground game operative in battleground states, and Musk is its only donor.Although the ultra-wealthy have always tried to influence politics, few people in US history have possessed the mix of immense resources and intent to use them to sway an election that Musk does. He has become symbolic of the outsize power over democracy held by the ultra-wealthy and is relishing the spotlight that his unique position has awarded him, said Larry Noble, former FEC general counsel.“He clearly likes attention,” Noble said. “Unlike a lot of very wealthy people who get involved in politics who want to be in the background and want to work through dark money groups so their name isn’t attached to certain things, he’s out there. He wants his name out there. I think he wants to be adored.”Musk’s X becomes a megaphone for TrumpTrump and Musk have a contentious past: Musk called Trump “too old” to seek re-election in a series of tweets in 2022 and Trump referred to Musk as a “bullshit artist”. But the two men have become extremely intertwined during the 2024 presidential race. Musk announced his full support for Trump in July following months of telegraphing his opposition to Joe Biden and the Democratic party. In the months since, Musk has fervently committed his money and influence to the Trump campaign. The tech mogul is fond of saying this will be “the last election” if Trump doesn’t win.Musk’s most visible Trump support takes place on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter that he bought for $44bn in 2022. Musk’s account has more than 200 million followers, and he has directed the company’s engineers to improve visibility of his tweets – the algorithm now boosts Musk’s own tweets beyond that of other users so that more people have to see them. It was Musk who made the decision to restore Trump to the social network in late 2022.As election day nears, Musk’s feed has become a constant stream of praise for Trump and vitriol against Harris. A large percentage of his tweets amplify false or misleading information, and the people who Musk interacts with on the platform are often far-right accounts with a history of spreading misinformation. Musk’s AI image generator, Grok, has also become one of the most prominent sources of political deepfakes that have permeated the election.Musk has used X to help the Trump campaign, not only by echoing its talking points or amplifying the president, but by preventing the spread of material that could be harmful. Reporter Ken Klippenstein published a dossier of background information on vice-presidential candidate JD Vance in early October that was obtained through a hack of the Trump campaign allegedly by Iran. The New York Times reported last week that the campaign asked X to prevent links to the published dossier from spreading there, which X followed through on, blocking links to it and suspending Klippenstein’s account.The move stands in contrast to Musk’s frequent proclamations about being a “free speech absolutist”, and to the incessant attacks by Republicans on content moderation decisions made by social media platforms that they claim are akin to censorship. Suffocating the Vance dossier also ran contrary to his own stated reasons for buying Twitter. Musk had tweeted that he would ensure something like Twitter’s suppression of links to the initial New York Post story of Hunter Biden’s laptop would never happen again.“People like Musk, they’re the ones using their money and lawfare to try and suppress real work that’s just trying to contribute to the public discussion,” said Callum Hood, head of research at the Center for Countering Digital Hate. Musk sued CCDH after it published research that showed hate speech and extremism had risen under Musk’s ownership. He lost the case but has appealed.Musk the mega-donorWhile Musk has rallied online for Trump, he has committed large amounts of money to financing on-the-ground operations and media campaigns for the former president. His spending is an escalation of a yearslong, quiet funding of Republican groups that has turned him into one of the country’s largest rightwing donors.Musk’s America Pac, which was founded earlier this year, is currently doing get-out-the-vote work on the ground in battleground states. Musk has in effect moved his base of operations to Pennsylvania to support the effort, according to the New York Times, and he is planning a series of events in the state following his appearance at a Trump rally there earlier this month.“That is what will decide this election, especially in Pennsylvania,” Musk said at the rally in Butler. “And honestly, you want to just be a pest. Just be a pest to everyone you know, people on the street, everywhere. Vote, vote, vote. Fight, fight, fight. Vote, vote, vote.”The money is not only flowing to get-out-the-vote initiatives, though. Musk has donated to the conservative group Building America’s Future, which has set up cash awards for people who bring the group evidence of election fraud. Building America’s Future has also funneled money to a Super Pac that HuffPost reported has run targeted ads calling Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, “America’s pro-Israel power couple” in areas of Michigan with large numbers of Arab and Muslim voters. The Pac is simultaneously running ads aimed at Jewish voters in Pennsylvania that accuse Harris of being too pro-Palestinian.

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      Musk is different from other wealthy donors in recent decades who have divided their political engagement into two styles, according to Benjamin Soskis, a senior research associate at the Urban Institute who is an expert in the history of philanthropy. One is to craft a non-partisan identity and work with people in both parties, for either strategic or personal reasons. The best example of that: Bill Gates. The other is to engage directly with partisan politics, but with a level of discretion, like the Koch brothers or George Soros.Musk falls into his own category, working in a highly partisan fashion but with virtually no discretion. He’s displaying “a kind of gleeful embrace of partisanship”, Soskis said, embodying a style of politics that feels similar to Trump.“That feels unusual for the wealthiest individuals – the complete eschewal of discretion as a mode of political engagement,” Soskis said. “That seems new.”A plan to gut regulatorsIf Trump and Musk occasionally seem like an odd pair on paper – Trump has threatened to remove an electric vehicle tax credit, while Musk is CEO of perhaps the world’s most famous EV company – one point of alignment is a vehement dislike for regulators. Musk’s longstanding battles with government offices like the Environmental Protection Agency and Federal Aviation Administration could shift in his favor under a Trump administration that is likely to drastically cut their resources and weaken their authority.“I suspect on some level that this is just a pocketbook issue for him, that he also wants lower taxes,” Noble, the former FEC counsel, said. “He wants to have his companies freed from safety regulations.”Over the past several years Musk has faced investigations, fines and delays over public safety concerns on a range of his projects. The FAA alleged last month that Musk’s SpaceX broke launch safety protocols, and over the years has grounded the company multiple times for violating regulations. California officials last week cited Musk’s politics and falsehoods as they voted against a SpaceX plan to conduct launches in the state. Musk sued in response. The EPA has also launched investigations into SpaceX for complaints that it is dumping unsafe amounts of wastewater into the ecosystem, while the FDA has cited Musk’s Neuralink brain implant company for animal welfare issues.Tesla’s attempts at developing fully autonomous cars have also come under scrutiny, presenting complications for a company that has staked its future on the ability to produce a self-driving robotaxi. Tesla is facing additional investigations from federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission over its self-driving car claims, and earlier this year came under investigation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration related to a recall of its autopilot function.These constant fights with the full alphabet of regulatory agencies has coincided with Musk making numerous public statements in favor of deregulation, as well as calling for a full-scale audit of the federal government. That idea has found purchase with Trump, who announced in September that he would launch a Musk-led government efficiency commission that would audit federal agencies for places to cut. Musk wants to call it the Department of Government Efficiency, or Doge, invoking one of his favorite memes, an expressive shiba inu.Although the plan is vague on details and fails to address the obvious conflict of interest in Musk auditing the regulators that oversee his companies, both Trump and Musk have repeatedly brought up the idea of Musk holding some role in a potential Trump administration. During an appearance on Fox News earlier this week, Trump said he would create a new position called “secretary of cost-cutting” and appoint Musk.“He’s dying to do this,” Trump said.Musk’s Maga support goes beyond businessMusk’s public rightward shift is an extension of years of allying himself with rightwing leaders around the world. In recent years, Musk has cozied up to nationalist and nativist politicians including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and India’s Narendra Modi.Some of these relationships have appeared to be in service of Musk’s business interests. He has forged a friendship with Argentina’s anti-regulation, far-right president, Javier Milei, who he brought on a personal tour of Tesla’s Texas headquarters and repeatedly endorsed on X. Argentina, meanwhile, has some of the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key mineral used in electric vehicle batteries and one that Musk has previously demanded be processed in increasing quantities.Musk’s business empire is at risk when his relationships with governments sour, as evidenced during his recent conflict with Brazilian authorities that resulted in a judge banning access to X in the country. Musk ultimately capitulated to comply with local laws.But Musk’s promotion of far-right beliefs and support for Trump have also taken on a personal dimension that goes beyond business calculations. Musk’s rhetoric on X has fixated on conservative grievances and he has amplified racist and antisemitic narratives through his tweets. Anti-immigration and anti-trans views have become a frequent talking point.One of his 12 children is a trans woman, and Musk claims he was “tricked into” signing off on her medical treatment and that he “lost” his child in the process. He has since vowed to defeat what he calls the “woke mind virus”.This increasingly overt radicalization of Musk’s social and political views appears unlikely to abate following the campaign, leaving questions of how he may influence the country’s politics when the election ends regardless of its outcome.After the January 6 insurrection, Twitter, under its previous ownership, permanently suspended Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”. Under Musk, the tweets that got Trump banned seem quaint – and Trump is now back on the platform, as are a host of frequent superspreaders of election lies.A big test awaits Musk if Trump loses, something he joked would land him in either legal or bodily trouble with Democrats. Will he accept a loss? Or would he use X to keep spreading conspiracies he’s already promoted – that mail ballots are “too risky” or that non-citizens are swaying US elections, two of Trump’s pet election issues.X, under Musk, “is building now, as we speak, another fresh stolen election narrative, and we all know what the consequences could be”, Hood said. More

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      Musk steers X disputes to conservative Texas courts in service terms update

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      Elon Musk’s X has updated its terms of service to steer any disputes from users of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter to a federal court in Texas whose judges frequently deliver victories to conservative litigants in political cases.New terms of service that will take effect on 15 November specify that any lawsuits against X by users must be exclusively filed in the US district court for the northern district of Texas or state courts in Tarrant county, Texas.It is common for companies to include venue clauses in their terms of service specifying which forum would hear any disputes filed against them. But the choice of the northern district of Texas stands out because X is not located in the district.Following a move from San Francisco, X is headquartered in Bastrop, Texas, near Austin, whose federal court is in Texas’s western district. That district has far fewer Republican-appointed judges than the northern district, which has become a favored destination for conservative activists and business groups to pursue lawsuits seeking to block parts of Joe Biden’s agenda, a tactic Democratic lawmakers say smacks of “judge-shopping”.“It’s hard to imagine that’s unrelated to this new language,” said Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University.X did not respond to a request for comment. Musk, the world’s richest man, has increasingly embraced conservative causes and become a major financial supporter of Donald Trump in his campaign to win the 5 November presidential election.Texas’s northern district already is the host of two lawsuits X has filed after several brands pulled ads from Musk’s platform, including one against liberal watchdog group Media Matters after it published a report that said ads had appeared next to posts supporting Nazism.X, which the billionaire Musk bought in 2022, sued Media Matters last year, alleging the group defamed the platform. The lawsuit will go to trial in Fort Worth, Texas, next year. Media Matters has called the lawsuit meritless.X has also filed an antitrust lawsuit accusing several advertisers of conspiring to stage a boycott, causing it to lose revenue. Both of X’s lawsuits were initially assigned to the US district judge Reed O’Connor, a Fort Worth judge who once declared the Obamacare health insurance law unconstitutional in a ruling that was later overturned. He has since blocked Biden administration policies on gun control and LGBTQ+ rights.The judge, an appointee of George W Bush, the Republican former president, stepped aside from X’s antitrust case in August after National Public Radio reported that financial disclosure reports showed O’Connor had owned shares of another Musk company, Tesla. But the judge has declined to recuse himself from the Media Matters case.O’Connor is one of two active judges in Fort Worth’s federal courthouse. The other is Mark Pittman, a Trump appointee. More

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      ‘Every day is a new conspiracy’: behind Trump’s ironclad grip on rightwing media

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      In the last few months, Donald Trump has done interviews with rightwing Twitch streamer Adin Ross and a host of podcasters, including Dr Phil, comedian Theo Von, computer scientist Lex Fridman, and YouTuber Logan Paul – part of what the Atlantic has dubbed Trump’s “red-pill podcast tour”.He’s posted incessantly on his own social media platform, Truth Social. He did a live space on Twitter/X with the platform’s owner, Elon Musk. He talked with Fox’s Laura Ingraham and called into Fox & Friends and spoke to other Fox hosts and personalities.His media strategy aligns with the current state of the rightwing media landscape: Fox is still a dominant source, but for the most Maga-adherent, it’s not Trumpy enough, despite some of its hosts embracing election denialism around the 2020 US election. Instead, there’s increasing fragmentation thanks to influencers and lesser-known outlets built around Trumpism.This is the first election since Tucker Carlson, once Fox’s loudest voice in a primetime spot, was reportedly fired by the network, and his solo ventures so far haven’t taken on the prominence he had on TV. It’s also the first election since longtime Republican heavyweight Rush Limbaugh died. These big changes have left holes in rightwing media, which were filled by an increasing cadre of influencers, content creators and smaller outlets.Adrianna Munoz, a 58-year-old from Queens, New York, who attended a Trump rally earlier this year in the Bronx, told the Guardian that she mostly gets news from YouTube, X and conservative commentators she follows, such as Tim Pool and Benny Johnson.“I used to watch TV news every morning – network news and the local news channel in New York,” she said. “Now I don’t. They sold out. They don’t tell you the truth. I don’t want to hear that rubbish.”Trump’s grip on rightwing media is ironclad, said Julie Millican, the vice-president of Media Matters, a progressive center that tracks conservative media. In the past, the Republican party and its candidates would follow what rightwing media did and align its policies that way – but now, the media follows Trump, she said.“If you don’t capitulate to what Trump and his enablers and his supporters are looking for, then they’ll shut you out,” Millican said. Since his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his influence has only increased, and “now he has a stronger control over the entire media ecosystem than he did previously”, she added.As rightwing outlets rise, the stories they cover differ more from what’s on mainstream news, furthering the bubbles a divided United States lives within. While in years past, you’d find different takes on the day’s news in left- and right-leaning outlets, you’ll now find stories that exist solely on rightwing media, Millican said.“It’s like every day is a new conspiracy or a new attack, and it’s just hard to even keep up on it anymore,” she said. “Half the time, when you listen to somebody who consumes nothing but rightwing media, you have no idea what they’re talking about.”TV news and rightwing websitesTraffic to news websites, including rightwing sites, is down compared with 2020. Howard Polskin, who tracks conservative media on his site The Righting, said a few factors play into the decrease. Facebook and other Meta social media de-emphasize news content now, sending less traffic to news outlets. And 2020 had several major news events colliding: a pandemic that kept people online more, nationwide protests over racial justice and a hotly contested election.Polskin tracks monthly visits to rightwing sites and produces traffic reports. The top 10 for August 2024: Fox, Outkick (a sports and commentary site owned by Fox), Newsmax, Epoch Times, National Review, Washington Times, Daily Wire, TheBlaze, Washington Examiner and Daily Caller. Gateway Pundit is not far behind, and InfoWars, the once-maligned site headed by bankrupted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, is in the top 20.View image in fullscreenNo single star has taken the place that Carlson or Limbaugh once held. Some conservatives told the Guardian they stopped watching Fox as often after Carlson left or because the network isn’t Maga enough. Fox agreed to pay $787m to settle a lawsuit from Dominion Voting Systems over defamation claims for spreading lies about the voting machine company’s role the 2020 election. Carlson abruptly left the network shortly after the settlement, and he has claimed his firing came as a result of the settlement. Fox denies that his removal had anything to do with the Dominion case.Frank Lipsett, a 63-year-old from the south Bronx who works as a residential housing superintendent, said he watches Fox because it’s “the most honest and most informative outlet, though I’m not saying they are perfect”.Like many on the right, he has stopped reading mainstream newspapers because “they are not telling the truth.” He said he sometimes reads the New York Post, a rightwing tabloid paper owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, the same owner as Fox.Another paper, Epoch Times, a far-right and anti-China outlet associated with the Falun Gong religion, continues to rank highly among conservative news outlets despite a justice department lawsuit that alleges it operates as a money laundering and cryptocurrency scam. Its stories are often shared by rightwing politicians or influencers. “Their cultural impact and political impact seems much smaller than the distribution,” Polskin said.Carlene, a 58-year-old from the Upper East Side who attended the Trump rally in the Bronx, said she gets news from the Epoch Times, Daily Wire and X and sometimes tunes into CNN and MSNBC to get the other side.“I watch less Fox News now after they got rid of Tucker Carlson,” she said. “It made me think Fox was just like everyone else.”For the less online Republican, talk radio shows, especially those that run the airwaves in rural areas, play a strong role in setting the conservative message. As newspapers in rural areas have shuttered, creating a crisis in local news, these radio shows are “reaching voters that aren’t tapped into the same media spaces that we often see in these large metropolises on either coast”, Tripodi said.To fill Fox’s void on TV, some conservatives have turned to Newsmax or One American News Network, which are farther to the right than Fox.“One American News Network and Newsmax did a very good job at establishing themselves as a place that would verify whatever Trump was saying,” Tripodi said.David Fiedler, a 67-year-old retiree from Rock county, Wisconsin, told the Guardian at the Republican National Committee’s Protect the Vote tour in September that he and his wife don’t watch Fox or local news, but they stream podcasts by the Daily Wire or watch Rumble, the rightwing video platform.“Our biggest news thing we watch is Newsmax,” he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPodcasts and influencersBeyond television and news sites, a rightwing news consumer will find a growing landscape of podcasts, YouTube channels, Substack newsletters, documentary film-makers and social media influencers all trying to build a following.“For every laid-off journalist, another Substack is born,” Polskin said. “And that just … fractionalizes the news audience even more.”The top of the podcast charts on Spotify and Apple shows a host of conservatives: Shawn Ryan, Candace Owens, Carlson, Megyn Kelly.Ben Shapiro, the conservative commentator, has his own podcast, and his network, the Daily Wire, hosts some of the biggest rightwing pundits. “In terms of just influence and power in the media landscape, to me, he would be someone that’s at the top of that space,” Millican said. Polskin called Shapiro the “800lb gorilla of rightwing podcasts”.Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, is also a major player. His organization is focused on turning college-age people conservative, and he’s been on a tour around the country to college campuses in recent months, in addition to his podcast and social media presence.“He’s almost become like an establishment media figure in his own right, except you would never actually see him on Fox News – his audience tends to be pretty old,” Millican said.While he doesn’t grab a huge share of the podcast market and he’s currently in prison for defying a congressional subpoena related to the January 6 investigation, Steve Bannon has an outsize influence on the right with his War Room show. He gets big-name rightwing politicians as guests and still has Trump’s ear, but he’s never cracked the top 20 in Polskin’s ratings.“Because of him, Project 2025 got on our radar last year because he was one of the early backers in hosting people who were involved with writing it, promoting the key tenants in it,” Millican said. “Small audience, but still influential audience.”Then there are also conspiracy-based websites and social media accounts from unnamed creators, such as End Wokeness, that spread rightwing attack lines that can filter up to the mainstream.David Jansen, who attended a Trump town hall event in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in August, said he watches FrankSpeech, a platform founded by pillow salesperson and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, which streams conservative content, often centered on election denialism.Social mediaAlongside the rise in rightwing influencers and outlets, social media platforms have loosened their content moderation and made changes to how they manage political content. Republican elected officials and outside legal groups have attacked platforms, government employees who interact with them and misinformation researchers, claiming a broad censorship plan is at work to limit conservative voices online.Some organizing on the right happens on closed-off apps such as Telegram, where public figures from the conservative mainstream and the far-right fringes have channels to share news and commentary.The underbelly of Telegram skews darker than other social media: the New York Times called it a “global sewer of criminal activity, disinformation, child sexual abuse material, terrorism and racist incitement”. Neo-Nazis have used the platform to coordinate their activities and have been scrambling after the app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was arrested in France for facilitating criminal activity on the app, Frontline reported.But rightwing organizing isn’t happening solely in far-flung corners of the internet. There is increased rumor-making and amplification on Musk’s X, including by Musk himself, who has shared a wide variety of election-related falsehoods. Trump returned to the platform last year after he was kicked off after the insurrection, but he still posts mostly on Truth Social, where he often rants in all-caps, shares clips from his rallies or reposts content from rightwing media who boost his campaign.Munoz, one of the Bronx Trump rally attendees, uses Telegram and Truth Social. Munoz loves Musk and his changes to X because “you can talk freely now”, he said. “I left Facebook and Instagram because they don’t let you talk.”Ed Pilkington and Alice Herman contributed reporting to this story More

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      Musk’s millions in rightwing gifts began earlier than previously known – report

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      Elon Musk has given tens of millions of dollars to rightwing groups in recent years, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday, revealing his backing for Republican groups began earlier than was previously known.Musk endorsed Trump earlier this year and has been a prolific booster of misinformation in support of the president’s re-election bid on X, the website he owns. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Musk had said he planned to donate $45m each month to a Super Pac backing Trump (Musk has denied the report).But the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on Thursday revealed that Musk has already been spending tens of millions of dollars to back conservative causes. In 2022, he spent more than $50m to fund anti-immigrant and anti-transgender advertisements by a group called Citizens for Sanity. The group’s officers are employees of America First Legal, a non-profit led by Stephen Miller, a close former Trump aide.Musk also has donated millions to another rightwing group, Building America’s Future, Reuters reported on Thursday. The outlet reported the timeline and exact amount he has given were not clear.The group has focused on reducing Kamala Harris’s support among Black voters, according to NBC News. The group has also launched advertising criticizing Joe Biden and Harris for their support at the border.A Super Pac started by Musk, America Pac, has spent at least $71m on the presidential election, according to Bloomberg. The Trump campaign has largely outsourced its get-out-the-vote operation to the Pac.In 2023, Musk also gave $10m to support the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, in his bid for president, the Wall Street Journal reported. Musk publicly said in 2022 he would support DeSantis for president.“My preference for the 2024 presidency is someone sensible and centrist. I had hoped that would the case for the Biden administration, but have been disappointed so far,” he said at the time.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMusk’s donations to the groups were kept quiet, Reuters and the Wall Street Journal reported. He funneled money through social welfare groups that are not required to disclose their donors. People involved in his donations to Citizens for Sanity would use Signal, an encrypted messaging app, to discuss the transactions, the Wall Street Journal reported. More

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      Elon Musk has gained a concerning level of power over US national security | Robert Reich

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      Shortly after the apparent second assassination attempt against Donald Trump, Elon Musk wrote in a now deleted post on X, formerly known as Twitter: “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala,” with an emoji of a person thinking.Musk later said his post was intended as a joke. But it could be interpreted as a call to murder Joe Biden and Kamala Harris – at least by one of Musk’s almost 200 million followers – which is presumably why the Secret Service is investigating it.Under 18 US Code Section 871, threatening a president or vice-president or inciting someone to harm them is a felony that can result in a large fine and up to five years in prison.Yet even as Musk posted a potential death threat against the sitting commander-in-chief, his multiple defense contracts with the US government have given him access to highly sensitive national security information.Musk has reportedly gained national security clearance notwithstanding his admitted use of drugs, not necessarily illegally: the tech billionaire, who says he has submitted to random drug testing at the request of the government, has smoked weed in public and also uses ketamine (for which he claims to have a prescription).Apart from the drugs, when was the last time the US government gave access to sensitive national security information to someone who posted a potential death threat against the president and vice-president?Underlying this is a broader question: when in history has one unelected individual held such sway over US national security?Musk’s SpaceX has nearly total control of the world’s satellite internet through its Starlink unit. With little regulation or oversight, Musk has already put more than 4,500 Starlink satellites into orbit around the globe, accounting for more than half of all active satellites. He plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming years.SpaceX and its Starlink system have become strategically critical to the American military. Starlink is providing connectivity to the US navy. The US space force signed a $70m contract with SpaceX late last year for military-grade low-Earth-orbit satellite capabilities. According to Reuters, the National Reconnaissance Office, which oversees US spy satellites, has a $1.8bn contract with SpaceX.This gives Musk, the richest person in the world, remarkable power. Single-handedly, he can decide to shut down a country’s access to Starlink and the internet. He also can also gain access to sensitive information gathered by Starlink. “Between, Tesla, Starlink & Twitter, I may have more real-time global economic data in one head than anyone ever,” Musk tweeted in April 2023.Meanwhile, Nasa has increasingly outsourced spaceflight projects to SpaceX, including billions in contracts for multiple moon trips and $843m to build a vehicle that will take the International Space Station out of commission.Conflicts of interest between Musk’s ventures around the world and US national security abound, and they are multiplying.When Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine, Musk and SpaceX’s Starlink provided Ukraine with internet access, enabling the country to plan attacks and defend itself. (This was not a charitable move by Musk; most of the 20,000 terminals in the country were funded by outside sources such as the US government and those of the United Kingdom and Poland).But in the fall of 2022, when Ukraine entered territory contested by Russia, Musk and SpaceX abruptly severed the connectivity. Musk explained at the time: “Starlink was barred from turning on satellite beams in Crimea at the time, because doing so would violate US sanctions against Russia!”But who was Musk to decide what actions would or would not violate US sanctions?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn fact, it seems as if Musk was trying to push Ukraine to agree to Russia’s terms for ending the war.At a conference in Aspen attended by business and political figures, he appeared to support Putin. “He was onstage, and he said: ‘We should be negotiating. Putin wants peace – we should be negotiating peace with Putin,’” Reid Hoffman, the co-founder and executive chairman of LinkedIn, recalled. Musk seemed to have “bought what Putin was selling, hook, line, and sinker”.Soon thereafter, Musk tweeted a proposal for his own peace plan, calling for referendums to redraw the borders of Ukraine and grant Russia control of Crimea. In subsequent tweets, Musk portrayed a Russian victory as virtually inevitable, and attached maps highlighting eastern Ukrainian territories, some of which, he argued, “prefer Russia”.US foreign policy experts also worry about the conflicts of interest posed by Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X), given his business relationships and communications with the Chinese government. China has used X for disinformation campaigns.Some are concerned that China may have leverage over Musk due to his giant Tesla factory in Shanghai, which accounts for over half of Tesla’s global deliveries and the bulk of its profits, and the battery factory he’s building there. “Elon Musk has deep financial exposure to China,” warned Mark Warner, US senator from Virginia, who chairs the Senate intelligence committee.Most of these concerns, by the way, came before Musk reactivated the accounts of conspiracy theorists and white nationalists on X and began pushing his own rightwing narrative on the platform, and before he announced his support for Trump in the upcoming election and posted a potential incitement to assassinate Biden and Harris.Elon Musk poses a clear and present danger to American national security. The sooner the US government revokes his security clearance, terminates its contracts with him and the entities he controls, and builds its own alternatives to Starlink and SpaceX, the safer America will be.

      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California Berkeley and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More