Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks to Lobotomize.

The public square is turning into a grotesque idiocracy

Last month, a fake news account claimed, based on no evidence at all, that Zelensky had a 4% approval rating in Ukraine. This was Community Noted, which led Elon Musk to lash out and declare that the system was “being gamed” and in the process of being fixed. It was becoming increasingly difficult to see how real time factchecking could last on X when it was constantly making a fool of its owner, who has decided to take a very hands-on approach to using the platform to shape discourse in his preferred direction.

This happened a few weeks ago now, and I still see Musk getting Community Noted on a regular basis. It doesn’t happen as much as it should, since so many of the things he says about DOGE, government spending, and many other issues turn out to be lies. Most, if not all, of the recent Community Notes I see attached to Musk tweets are fact-checking a person he approvingly quotes, rather than him directly, so it seems likely he is putting his thumb on the scale, or engineers at the company have gotten the message to look the other way when faced with his constant stream of misleading statements.

At first, I thought that it would be concerning if Musk changed Community Notes to hide the fact that he was spreading so much false information. But on further reflection, the fact that the system is still constantly exposing him as a liar and he doesn’t seem to care all that much is even more disturbing.

A liar under normal circumstances would try to hide the fact that he’s lying. Musk, in contrast, is something much worse. He’s a man who has contempt for the entire concept of truth, and doesn’t care if the world knows it, as he poisons the public square. Being caught lying doesn’t embarrass him, since he is not trying to win over anyone who is independent minded and honest. Similarly, Grok will cheerfully tell you, accurately, that Musk is the biggest source of misinformation on X. Presumably, Xi Jinping censors Chinese AI models because in CCP circles being known as a transparent liar reduces one’s status, but this is clearly not true on the American right.

What all of this means is that the harmful effects of Musk’s influence go beyond policy disagreements one may have with him, and get to the question of whether rational thinking about political, social, and economic issues is even possible in the world he is trying to create.

When it comes to arguing about platforms and media outlets, we usually think in terms of political bias. It is true that the old system at Twitter disadvantaged conservative voices. Historically, the right has tried to build its own media companies and platforms to correct for liberal bias. Fox News emerged after CNN pioneered the 24-hour news format, while more recently sites like Parler and Gab were created as alternatives to the old Twitter. Conservatives within academia similarly call for more ideological diversity and less groupthink in their fields.

The underlying premise of these projects is that left-wing news, social science, and analysis should be answered, countered, and perhaps replaced by their right-leaning or more politically neutral equivalents. Yet Musk’s takeover of X and the changes he has made there, along with his personal dominance over the discourse and communication style more generally, are something different. In the past, conservatives and liberals would argue about what books you should read or where you should get your news from. Musk’s rule of X, in contrast, stands in opposition to the idea that anyone should read any news in the first place, or serious work on public policy issues for that matter. This is a war on the human intellect, distinct from and in many ways more sinister than liberal bias or censorship. Musk does not usually suppress knowledge or facts, but denigrates the entire idea that anyone can live in a universe where knowledge or facts matter, and seeks to reduce the prominence of anyone who would be naive enough to think they should.

The Rise of Fake News Accounts, the Decline of Independent Intellectuals

Tyler Cowen has noted that one way we can classify intellectuals is according to whether they seek to raise or lower the status of elites. We can similarly see platforms as raising or lowering the status of different types of public figures. The old X was tilted in the direction of amplifying the voices of liberals and those attached to established institutions. The disinformation censorship machine reduced the reach of not only conservatives and reasonable covid skeptics, but haters and conspiracy theorists more generally. Musk tilts the platform towards the other side of the political spectrum, while at the same time scrambling status hierarchies within the right to the advantage of some of the worst people in public life. Part of this is due to simply taking a hands-off attitude towards censorship in a world where the right is the lower human capital side of the political spectrum. People like Alex Jones, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson certainly have organic appeal, but Musk has made the problem worse by using his influence to amplify such voices, along with making other policy changes at X.

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form. He constantly announces “you are the media now,” as he elevates the voices of anonymous fake news accounts over those of real journalists. On a daily basis, the right-wing echo chamber runs with completely fabricated narratives. Any reasonable person who has the least bit of familiarity with what X has become since 2022 should have increased their respect for normal journalists. I consider “Why the Media Is Honest and Good”, written in early 2023, to have held up extremely well in light of recent events.

The ultimate effect of this is the suppression of smart independent voices who base their analysis on facts. Musk has expanded the Overton Window by allowing open Nazis, Russian propagandists, and anti-vaxxers to spread their messages, while limiting the reach of most people worth listening to. I started getting attention for my work on the old Twitter when my Substack posts would go viral. I had no connections and no reason for anyone to take my work seriously. Purely through the strength of my ideas and writing, essays reached a large audience and some of the most influential people in the world, including thinkers I had admired for a decade or more. It wasn’t just that they saw my work. I had become a thing, meaning smart people knew that other smart people were reading my articles. I’ve always been proud of my essays and books and half-ashamed of a lot of the twitter output. But that’s fine – one may act like a drunk fool one night and give an important lecture the next morning. Just as like how you talk about ideas at a party but it would be a misunderstanding to think that is the main purpose of the gathering, Twitter can teach you some things even though it is mostly for socialization and entertainment.

There was never anything wrong with this, as long as there were some portals to the outside world where serious discussions could occur. Without the essays, I would’ve never been able to monetize my efforts, nor produce work that I was proud of and ultimately had a deeper impact. Growing the Substack was so effortless at first that I regularly encouraged people to try and make it as writers. In retrospect, my case was pretty unique, and it wasn’t that easy even in the best of times. But there was at least a chance that you could be a nobody and see your ideas take off back when links could circulate freely. As Philippe Lemoine (Substack here) noted in an X thread,

I can't stress enough how much the fact that X now penalizes external links sucks. I don't know why I even bother sharing my posts here anymore, since the algorithm smothers any tweet with a link. Twitter used to be great to share my writing, but now it feels totally pointless.

In fact, it's not just sharing my writing here that now feels almost pointless, it's writing in the first place. For someone like me, with no institutional backing, Twitter was essentially the only way in which I could share my work effectively.

My rate of growth, in absolute if not relative terms, is actually higher now than it was under the old X regime due to having achieved enough launch velocity. Part of my continuing success is that I’m good at X, and even if the linked posts don’t go as far as they used to, I drum up so much controversy and generate so much attention that people still stumble their way onto this newsletter. So I’m doing fine, but things could be better, and I feel bad for those who are just starting out as independent writers, and moreover don’t have the skills or temperament to constantly be getting attention on X, much of it negative as that is in most cases the only way to go viral. Musk taking over the platform has probably been good for me overall since I have the trolling instinct and only needed to be free from the fear of censorship to take off, but the part of the Venn diagram where “good at trolling” and “has something substantive to say” intersect does not contain many others. The new X elevating trolls, liars, and fake news accounts means that the reach of more sensible and honest voices declines in relative terms.

Musk didn’t set out to throttle independent writers, but has it as his goal that people not leave X. On multiple occasions, I’ve sent DMs telling him he should not be killing links. Musk would reply that people can post articles on X, yet when I would point out that the article feature is pretty awful and he had not made a priority of fixing it, I would be ignored. Even if it did work, I doubt many serious people will ever post essays on X since it has a terrible brand for high quality discourse. This was true before Elon’s takeover, and it is much more so now. Moreover, without having access to the emails of their readers, writers remain at the mercy of a platform, which is another reason that Substack is better for their purposes.

Clearly, Musk does not see long-form communication as something worth cultivating. He killed links and didn’t bother creating a serious replacement because sensationalist right-wing accounts provide all the information he thinks anyone needs. Musk wants everyone to be on X for all their news, while he also lets the site turn into a fake news swamp that facilitates only the shortest and most simplistic forms of communication.

Explaining Musk’s Contempt for the Intellect

This must partly be an issue of control. As the owner of X, any independent source of news is now a threat to his ability to shape dominant narratives. Yet it’s deeper than that. One could imagine Musk strangling the reach of The New York Times and Substack writers because he had well considered ideas on public policy that he wanted to see implemented. One could even imagine him boosting some links to preferred sources of news and analysis that share a similar worldview. This would be akin to normal platform bias we have seen before. None of this has happened, however, as Musk does not appear to be a man who sees the value of having access to true and reliable sources of information, no matter what their ideological leanings, for himself or others. And I don’t think he is just playing dumb. As I’ve previously written,

If Musk is smarter than he looks on government and policy issues, he is doing an amazing job of hiding it. You’d think that once in a while he would let it slip that he reads a serious newspaper, or has been influenced by a thoughtful book or article on a major political issue. But despite his prodigious tweeting, we see no indication that he gets information from anywhere but viral posts and memes.

Talking to people who know him personally confirms that he doesn’t actually read anything. I think drugs or some kind of mental disease might be at play here, but one way to understand what is going on might be to make a comparison to how a reasonable person might think about Critical Race Theory or other left-wing academic ideas. When wokeness is criticized, you’ll sometimes hear the response that you should become familiar with the ideas of experts in the field before expressing an opinion. Admittedly, I don’t spend a lot of time reading feminist or Marxist scholars, for the same reason I don’t read treatises on astrology. When the premise of a field is that wrong, there usually isn’t much to learn from it. Basic knowledge of biology is enough to preempt anything that one might argue based on the premise that there are no significant inherent personality differences between the sexes, and Economics 101 provides sufficient grounds to toss Marxist analysis to the side.

I think that one key to understanding Musk is that he feels exactly this way not just about woke academic fads, but everything having to do with politics and government. He believes you can figure out all you need to know based on first principle grounds as long as you come equipped with a half-baked anti-woke and libertarian leaning ideology and understand that the media, government, and liberals more generally are corrupt. If you want to cut spending, who needs to know what government actually spends its money on? You can assume massive fraud is going on while ignoring the possibility that this is something that has already been looked into and dismissed for good reasons.

Recently, Musk justified his mass email to federal employees telling them to list their accomplishments by saying it was a “pulse check,” as he thought that there were dead people on the government payroll. I’ve read a lot of criticisms of big government and liberal corruption, and never once in my life have I heard anyone make this allegation before. Not only has Musk not sought out unbiased sources of information regarding the issues he has made his own; he has refused to even look for high-quality information that confirms his biases.

Being interested in shrinking the size and scope of government, Musk could have found the best and brightest individuals who have been thinking for decades about how to accomplish his goals, learned from them, and elevated their voices. The same is true with regard to his interest in heredity. Instead, he let Catturd shape his understanding of the world. There is no explanation for this other than he must not believe there is anything out there worth knowing.

Why Knowledge about Government Actually Matters

While you can ignore blank slate feminists and not be any worse for it, Musk’s contempt for knowledge about governance and law will make it much more difficult to accomplish even his stated goals. It is little wonder that he hates the media, because they’ve been doing an excellent job of factchecking his false claims about DOGE. The New York Times reports that each of the five biggest “savings” on its original list were wrong, adjusting the amount saved on those items from $10 billion to $19 million. The total amount on the DOGE wall of savings has gone from $16 billion to less than $9 billion, in light of typos, items being double counted, and Musk’s team giving itself credit for terminating contracts that in some cases ended years ago. Meanwhile, DOGE is claiming $100 billion saved, and Musk has promised $1 trillion or more.

It doesn’t matter what your opinion is of what should be done with the federal budget. You might agree with him or not on the need to cut spending, but Musk personally dominating the discourse on this issue leaves no room for rational center-right ideas and proposals. If his aim is smaller government, he has gone about achieving it in the wrong way, as he has focused on where relatively little money is spent and operated on the false assumption that fraud is both ubiquitous and relatively easy to find.

The overwhelming focus on firing employees in the name of savings and efficiency similarly reveals ignorance about how government works and a lack of engagement with the world of ideas. While I’ve previously written that the goal of DOGE is to gain control over the federal bureaucracy, I’m coming around more to the idea that even if that is an ultimate effect of all this, mostly they’re just bumbling around based on a false view of the world. Jesse Singal makes a compelling case Musk is going about his work like a video game streamer, looking for accessories, power-ups, and other forms of immediate gratification as he fires people and cuts government spending. His involvement in the budget debate in December amounted to wanting to make sure the continuing resolution bill had as few pages as possible.

If Musk cared to rely on experts who know what they’re talking about, he might learn that the stringency of government regulations is far from perfectly correlated with the number of federal employees (or the number of pages in a bill). If the law requires certain approvals and permits in order for individuals and firms in the private sector to take action, then having fewer workers will simply slow things down.

The Trump administration started off by deciding to deprive the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the National Labor Relations Board of quorums so their work had to stop, which might seem like a good thing if you’re a conservative who wants less stringent labor and civil rights laws. Yet if Trump appointed his own majorities to each body and let them get to work, then conservative officials could actually undo some of the policies of the Biden administration. As things stand, they remain on the books. Regardless, a federal judge just ruled that Trump must reinstate the NLRB board member he fired, so even if the original plan somehow did have a logic to it, the administration has likely been wasting time for no good reason. In fact, with the recent reinstatement, Democrats now have a majority! Admittedly this could all turn into a victory for executive power if the Supreme Court overturns the decision in this case. No matter what happens to the NLRB and EEOC, however, the point is we can see here that deregulation and stopping government from functioning are not the same things.

Similarly, workforce cuts at the Department of Education look like they’re going to make it difficult for the government to collect outstanding student loans. This is ironic, since Republicans steadfastly opposed Biden’s attempts to wipe out student debt. The Trump administration looks like it’s going to have a de facto loan forgiveness program itself simply due to a lack of state capacity. The FDA is likewise going to have trouble approving new drugs in a timely manner with fewer employees, which is not in any sense a win for deregulation.

All of this is to say that knowledge about government and what it does actually matters. Deregulation or making the state less powerful is a matter of working with a scalpel, not an axe. What DOGE is doing is like trying to improve your financial situation simply by cutting expenses at random. If you fire your accountant or stop paying college tuition, you may end up worse off from a purely financial perspective in the long run. This is not so different from a government letting go of IRS agents or people who collect student loan debt in the name of efficiency and fiscal health. When you factor in the cuts, or at least delays, to medical and scientific research, probably the most cost-effective things that the federal government spends money on, these policies look even worse.

The effect of all this is to not only end up with poor policy decisions, but to make reasoned discourse impossible. In a sane world, one party may want to increase taxes to balance the budget, and another may want to cut spending. But saying that the deficit is due to Ukraine or fraud simply shuts down any possibility of having productive conversations. Fifteen years ago, Republican leaders talked about cutting entitlements, because they had enough of a grounding in reality to know that is where the budget goes. Today, all discourse on the right is polluted by a stream of misinformation. No serious budget analyst can get anywhere close to the administration, or have influence over large numbers of conservative minds, since practically every project that Trump and Musk undertake is now built on a mountain of lies.

The Human Capital Gap Continues to Grow

Musk’s world is one where it becomes difficult if not impossible for intelligent thinkers to see their status raised on the right. The marketplace of ideas he has created on X rewards a combative and pre-literate approach in style along with sharing false information and partisan cheerleading in substance. There are to be fewer Lemoines, more LibsofTikTok going forward.

I was going to say that Musk has made the entire discourse dumber, but that doesn’t appear to be completely correct, as it seems that liberals have gotten a lot saner over the last few years. This is partly a sorting effect. The right-wing clubhouse Musk has created is just repulsive to anyone who is independently minded. I wasn’t surprised when Musk unfollowed me, rather I wondered what had taken so long, as I knew that it was over as soon as I saw the Catturd follow. He is unable to maintain good relations with any writer who has a bare minimum of intellectual credibility or moral integrity. Long before he unfollowed me, Musk had ended up fighting with Bari Weiss and Matt Taibbi, journalists he had originally promoted.

Sam Harris recounts how his relationship with Musk ended after he won a bet over covid, after which his former friend started making false attacks against him on X. You’d think Musk would prioritize maintaining and cultivating at least a few such relationships for the sake of maintaining credibility with smart people. Unfortunately, his contempt for the intellect extends to Musk being indifferent to what informed people think of him. That he can be as smart as he is – assuming something of the mind that founded SpaceX and helped build Tesla still exists – and bask in the approval of the dumbest people in public life feels like treason against everyone who believes that honest and rational thought has value.

Even if a smart right-leaning intellectual doesn’t go to the left, Democrat supporters, or at least conservatives not favored by Musk, are at this point the only kinds of people he can hope to be in any kind of reasonable dialogue with. All of this has meant that the quality of discourse on the left has improved, with sensible policy and messaging shifts, as the brain drain away from the right continues.

Recently, I had a friend close to the administration tell me that I shouldn’t care so much about Musk’s lies, because politically he’s a check on the protectionists and economic nationalists and therefore closer to me on policy than most other people in the Trump orbit. My response was that, even if we get a smaller and less intrusive government in the end, and that’s far from certain for reasons discussed above, I truly hate the thought of living in the kind of idiocracy that Musk is creating. People are usually involved in politics because they have an aesthetic preference for the world they would like to see, and I don’t want to live in a society where half the political spectrum operates in a constant haze of lies and misinformation, as the most shameless grifters and liars rise to the top. Liberals may in many cases want to censor certain ideas and not treat them fairly. This is a lot less horrifying than a new influencer-driven culture where no one cares to censor because truth has no hope of winning out against a constant avalanche of lies anyway.

There is probably little that can be done about Musk’s control over the conservative movement at the moment. He has twitter, the megaphone, and the money. The only way he is out of power is if Democrats regain it. At that point, he will probably face a large number of investigations regarding his companies and work with DOGE, some of which will be deserved. Perhaps discouraged by these setbacks, at some point he hopefully decides politics is no longer fun, hands over the day-to-day operations of X to someone else, logs off, and goes back to building cutting edge technology companies. I never believed that anyone could do as much damage to public discourse as Trump has, but when he leaves the scene he is apparently going to hand the conservative movement over to the man who may be the only person in public life who lies more than he does. Once might be a fluke, but this happening twice shows that it is no accident. The right is deeply broken, and all credit goes to those who recognized the real meaning of the rise of Trump from the beginning.