PROOF EXCLUSIVE: How the Killing of Jordan Neely Broke Elon Musk
PROOF EXCLUSIVE: How the Killing of Jordan Neely Broke Elon Musk
While no one thought Twitter would die honorably, the last few days have been an uglier stage in the platform’s inevitable demise than anyone expected—with Musk daily encouraging vile neo-Nazi memes.
{Note: This article includes non-graphic but candid discussions of homicide and rape data, and a significant consideration of content accurately described as “neo-Nazi” and “white supremacist” whether or not its authors publicly identify with these “movements” or are in fact formally involved in them—a subject on which Proof expresses no opinion and has no information, in part because the individuals in question choose to remain anonymous. An episode of animal cruelty is also briefly and non-graphically recounted in this Proof report.}
Introduction
In the darkest and rankest corners of the internet, a massive far-right disinformation machine focused on spreading white-supremacist narratives about the U.S. criminal justice system has just spun up. This machine is run by anonymous persons who use the language of “social justice” to obscure their intentions—though as most of their readers are well aware they’re reading re-packaged neo-Nazi propaganda, the use of words associated with DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives is tongue-in-check. The new Nazism is intent on getting more yucks from the peanut gallery than the old one did.
The brazenness of these far-right disinformation merchants is stunning and even, at times, disorienting. One of the most infamous individuals behind this disinformation machine authors a website entitled Datahazard and posts anonymously on Twitter as “Fentasyl.” Presumably this anonymity is required to shelter this individual from any professional or even legal repercussions for melding white supremacy and Big Data.
Fentasyl, who claims to be a “civil rights advocate” for “whites and Asians”—Asians have nothing to do with Fentasyl’s criminal-justice disinformation, but they’re added to his self-declared mandate to increase the opacity of his white supremacy while only semi-seriously framing Asians as a “good minority” (as compared to Blacks, Jews, and Latinos)—amplifies the yuck-yuck component of his bigotry by advertising his mass-disinformation “project” as being about “diverse data”, “equitable statistics”, “inclusive history”, and, in a half-hearted bid to also land a glancing blow against persons with disabilities, “accessible subversion” (emphasis supplied). Part of the joke here is that Fentasyl cares so little about these social justice-cum-DEI adjectives that he doesn’t care if he uses them coherently or consistent with their definitions.
Of course, because Fentasyl and his ilk have no apparent training in data analysis, the law, journalism, or sociology—despite anonymously authoring websites that claim to tell America the truth about race relations in the United States using data analysis, the law, journalism, and sociology—it’s necessary for other accounts with very large followings on social media to point readers in the direction of Fentasyl and thereby “vouch” for him. Such individuals act, wittingly or otherwise, as carnival barkers for the Big Data wing of the new American white nationalism; without them, the “work” of far-right trolls like Fentasyl would never be seen or read. One of the biggest barkers for Fentasyl of late has been a Twitter account that posts under the anonymous handle “TheRabbitHole84.”
We’ll return to both Fentasyl and TheRabbitHole84 in a moment—as both are key to the narrative that’s being unfolded here.
As a professional writer who would never dream of publishing anything anonymously, let alone seeking to be a central part of social media discourse without the courage to identify myself and recite my bona fides, I want to take this moment to briefly say the following about my background in data analysis, the law, journalism, and sociology:
My background in data analysis comes from being a data journalist at a national trade magazine for six years. During that time I constructed a methodology for simultaneously quantitatively and qualitatively ranking national and international graduate programs in what at the time was the fastest-growing academic field of study in the world. My research was ultimately compiled in a book published by Bloomsbury, one of the world’s largest trade presses. I spent six years of my life daily collecting and publishing data online and in print and I was paid to do so. But I also had a concurrent career in data analysis, as I gave lectures at colleges and universities around the United States and Europe to synthesize my data and answer questions about it from scholars, university administrators, and students.
My background in the law comes from having a Harvard Law School degree, being a member of the state and federal bars in my jurisdiction, practicing law for nine years, having taught pre-law courses at an R1 flagship public university (University of New Hampshire) for years, having worked as a federal criminal investigator, working as a legal columnist for years, and much more. There’s so much to say about my legal career that it’s best for me to just point you to my bio.
My background in journalism comes from working in the field for 29 years, being a tenure-track journalism professor for six years, publishing three works of journalistic nonfiction that became trade-press national bestsellers, being one of just ten freelance journalists in the U.S. and United Kingdom to receive an annual honor from a notable trans-Atlantic journalism organization, many paid positions as a journalist and editor, and much more. Again, it’s best if I just direct anyone looking for more information on my career in journalism to my bio.
My background in sociology is less advanced than these other three categories, but it’s still notable enough. I received my Minor in Sociology from Dartmouth College in 1998, I built my career as a professional writer—including 130 million retweets on Twitter and millions of “shares” of my HuffPost articles—by writing about Sociology and Sociology-adjacent topics, and I’m a leading cultural theorist in the area of metamodernism, a cultural paradigm that is academically situated as critical theory (a subdivision of English, one of the three disciplines in which I hold a terminal degree, in this case a Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin-Madison) but has commonly been discussed in popular media, including in my own significant corpus of work on the subject, as a sociological phenomenon.
So what background do Fentasyl and TheRabbitHole84 have in any of these areas?
We have no idea. We don’t even know their names.
As I wrote about at Retro here, one of the reasons Twitter is collapsing is that it was originally built on digital content provided to the platform for free by experts who were, in recognition of their expertise—and the billions of dollars in free expert labor they were gifting to Twitter—given so-called “blue checkmarks” next to their names.
The purpose of these emojis was to prevent the impersonation of these experts and thereby protect their professional reputations and expertise (to the extent possible) against common forms of cultural-capital dilution such as plagiarism, misattribution, and libel.
When Elon Musk took over Twitter in October 2022, he came into possession of an asset he had grossly—some might even say grotesquely—overpaid for, spending $44 billion on an asset that a matter of weeks later he would concede was worth only $20 billion (and even this latter valuation is, many feel, generous and self-aggrandizing).
While by no means Musk’s primary plan for how to get back his historically unwise investment in a nearly-impossible-to-monetize digital platform, Musk’s strategy of forcing engaged, long-term Twitter users into a $132/annum ($1,320/decade) “Twitter Blue” service—which essentially just sells back to Twitter users site features they had previously gotten (or been promised) for free—necessitated him eliminating all “blue checks” his corporation had previously awarded to experts (again, persons who had given Twitter, and were continuing to give Twitter, billions of dollars’ worth of time, labor, and knowledge for free).
Needless to say, those who’d previously been in possession of what Musk came to call “legacy checkmarks”—all of which he announced, without evidence, had been given out “corruptly”, at once libeling both his predecessors at Twitter and the very experts whose content had kept Twitter running for sixteen years—didn’t take kindly to the world’s second-richest man breaking an implied contract with them to enrich himself.
As cover for this naked money grab, Musk claimed to be a small-d “democrat” who simply no longer believed in expertise as such. Nor, he made clear, did he believe in several of humankind’s major professions (such as journalism) at all. In short, Musk justified stripping experts of their anti-impersonation, pro-reputation-management emojis—and charging everyone who uses Twitter a huge fee for services they had previously not paid for or been told to expect gratis in the future (while quietly axing some features, like the increasingly popular “tip jar”, altogether, as they sent money to creators rather than to him)—by going to war against the very notion of knowledge.
According to Musk, as told to journalists in print and digital interviews and to his new legions of “Elongelicals” on Twitter, the average person is far better equipped to comment on matters conventionally thought of as requiring expertise than an expert is, even if the non-expert in question is posting online anonymously and even if their motives remain opaque. While Musk would not apply this morbidly anti-intellectual philosophy to any commercial enterprise from which he drew his own wealth—he did not replace the engineers at SpaceX or Tesla or The Boring Company or Neuralink with Twitter Blue users posting under inscrutable handles beside a Shiba Inu avatar—any discipline in which Musk himself lacked any gravitas or voice, for instance all the Humanities and all the Social Sciences, were marked by him for immediate expulsion from their past eligibility for expertise.
As if to drive the point home, Musk “liked” a tweet opining that America needed more engineers—people like Musk—in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C., and fewer people from the profession that has dogged Musk his entire professional life due to the many, many allegations of illicit and illegal conduct against him: lawyers.
In Musk’s new, supposedly “democratic” (in actuality, dogmatic MAGA Republican) Twittersphere, topics like law and journalism and sociology were rightly seen as the collective inheritance of all posters, whether these posters had spent three years in law school at a cost of $150,000+ and thereafter passed one of the hardest exams in American life—the bar—or not. To be a journalist, Musk averred, one did not need to submit to the conventional ethos of the journalist (objectivity, accuracy, transparency, and honesty, collectively known as the “OATH principles”), one simply needed to have an opinion and be willing to share it on Twitter while subscribing to Twitter Blue at an exorbitant cost.
All this would be bad enough. But it was made worse by Musk’s increasingly evident attraction to white supremacy.
In addition to systematically lying in spectacular fashion about an apartheid-era South African emerald mine having made possible his immigration to the United States with plenty of money to support himself, Mr. Musk has given Americans of conscience ample reason to fear that his views on race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, and immigration status are every bit as far to the right as those of Donald Trump—though whereas Trump’s rhetoric is “merely” opportunistic and disingenuous, Musk’s appears more terrifying by virtue of apparently being sincere.
After all, it was Musk, not Trump, who invited neo-Nazis, foreign trolls, and active insurrectionists back to Twitter en masse purely to make Twitter more “fun” and— consistent with his reason for doing most of what he does—to try to squeeze more money out of Twitter users, particularly those on the political right willing to pay through the nose for a digital “safe space” for their culturally unacceptable bigotries.
So when Fentasyl, aided by TheRabbitHole84, began using Twitter, an increasingly Truth Social–like digital platform, as a stage for his anonymous far-right “project” aimed at spreading white-supremacist views through disinformation—worse still, disinformation masquerading as hard data—it was a perfect synchronicity of all that Musk (and perhaps his pro-Trump business partners in the Saudi royal family, who co-own Twitter with him) sought to turn Twitter into.
And fortunately for the untrained, non-pedigreed, self-declared expert Fentasyl, in America we’ve made it easier to lie about the criminal justice system than just about anything else. Musk’s coddling of faux expertise was just icing on the proverbial cake.
The Truth About the U.S. Criminal Justice System
I first started writing about my experiences as a criminal defense attorney for the indigent in the 2000s, shortly after I left the regular practice of law (while remaining, as I still am, a licensed attorney with bar memberships). You can find my earliest piece on the subject of the American criminal justice system in Boston Review, here. I also published work in this sphere in The Washington Post and as a columnist at HuffPost.
At the time—and still—my favorite work on the American criminal justice system was a hard-data-filled treatise on the subject called The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. I’d first encountered and written on this excellent book while studying for my Sociology degree at Dartmouth in the mid-1990s.
One of the first things you learn as an aspiring sociologist studying criminal justice—taking academic courses, as I did, in the sociology of criminal justice, the history of misinformation in American socioeconomic discourse, and the sociology of what Americans deem “deviant” and/or “dangerous”—is that the criminal justice system has been demagogued by the Republican Party since it effectively switched places with the Democratic Party as America’s chief white-supremacist political instrument in the 1960s. (The Big Switch occurred as a result of The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1965 Voting Rights Act; as most Proof readers will know, Republican demagogues continue to lie about the Big Switch by pretending that the pre-1960s Democratic Party is the same sociological phenomenon as the post-1960s Democratic Party, and that the pre-1960s Republican Party is the same sociological phenomenon as the post-1960s Republican Party; this lets the GOP continue calling Civil War-era president Abraham Lincoln, who unquestionably fits the praxis of the post-1960s Democratic Party—as evidenced by Democratic president Barack Obama’s hero-worship of him—a “Republican” in the contemporary mold).
I’d like to now give an example of how the criminal justice system is demagogued, and specifically an example that presages the dire events now unfolding over at Twitter.
It is a well-known, undisputed fact among those who study criminal law, crime data, legal journalism, and the sociology of crime that certain crimes are most likely to be committed between people who know one another, whereas other crimes are most likely to involve strangers. In particular, violent crimes—and, even more so, the most serious violent crimes, like Rape and Homicide—tend to occur when two people who already know one another to some degree are in close proximity. By comparison, the far more common crimes of Burglary and Unarmed Robbery, the former of which is classified as a property crime rather than a violent crime and the latter of which has a violent component but usually doesn’t result in serious (or any) injury to the victim, typically manifest as “stranger-on-stranger” incidents.
It is equally well-known, and undisputed, that the most common crimes of all are those either without a third-party victim (such as drug crimes in the subcategory of Drug Possession) or those with a non-human (e.g., corporate or government) victim, like Shoplifting or Embezzlement or Tax Fraud or Bank Fraud. Meanwhile, the most uncommon crimes—and thank goodness for this—aren’t drug or property crimes but violent crimes.
All of the above, while true, poses a real problem for white supremacists—as the best way to make people scared about interracial interactions is the do the following:
Focus Americans’ attention on the rarest type of crime, that being violent crime;
focus only on the rarest violent crimes, that being Homicide and Rape, because these are the two crimes people are most scared of ever being the victim of; and
make people believe a falsehood: that the most serious violent crimes are likely to occur between strangers—specifically, a Black offender and a White victim who do not know one another.
There is virtually no advantage whatsoever to white supremacists in discussing drug crimes, as these are usually nonviolent and victimless and (particularly in the midst of the ongoing opioid epidemic) involve predominantly White people. Moreover, it’s well known that rehabilitation rather than incarceration is a far better way to deal with drug crimes—for many reasons, among them that jail and prison inmates tend to see their attraction to hard drugs worsen rather than self-suspend while incarcerated. The only time white supremacists want to talk about drugs is when and as they find that drug use can be counterfactually linked to nonwhite users, who in fact make up a minority of drug users, or illegal immigration, which has nothing to do with the drug trade because whether drugs come to America from countries around the world historically has no link to immigration policy—even if it seems to some that it would, should, or could.
Just so, property crimes are of little interest to white supremacists for a few reasons. One, they don’t scare White people enough—mostly because they’re nonviolent and usually occur without the victim even being aware the crime is happening (and far more often than not the victim isn’t even on-site as the crime is underway). Moreover, because such an overwhelming percentage of property crimes are committed by drug addicts, and because drug addicts are so often White people, there’s little utility in harping on property crimes if you’re a far-right race hustler. It lacks the zing you need, and many of the fact-patterns in play fail to include any tantalizing racial component at all.
But white supremacists can’t focus on “garden-variety”—though still serious—violent crimes, either, as domestic violence is more common in “red states” than “blue states,” is more often committed by Whites than non-whites, is all too often undergirded by a patriarchal philosophy the far-right is sympathetic to, and usually doesn’t result in serious enough bodily injury for it to be useful as a staple in fearmongering propaganda.
But Homicide and Rape? These are gold mines for racists. Rural Whites in the United States have for centuries consumed media that implicitly warns them of the dangers of violent Black people, with the most significant dangers being Homicide and Rape.
So why do I keep writing “homicide” rather than “murder”?
Because most homicides aren’t murders.
A homicide occurs whenever one person unlawfully kills another. But there are many statutes prohibiting the killing of one person by another, and by no means are all of them “murder” statutes. For instance, Proof readers may have heard of the following statutes prohibiting the unlawful killing of another: Voluntary Manslaughter, Involuntary Manslaughter, and Negligent Homicide. None of these are “murders” under the law.
Among murder statutes we generally find, depending upon the state, at least two: First-Degree Murder and Second-Degree Murder, the latter of which is less serious because it’s not premeditated, doesn’t involve “malice aforethought”, and may “just” be—note the scare-quotes there—the result of “reckless indifference to human life.”
As you might imagine, if you’re a white-supremacist race hustler the only one of the statutes above that gets you the fear component you need—the psychological terrorism of the nation’s White population—is First-Degree Murder. While no one wants to be killed in a “crime of passion” (Voluntary Manslaughter); or in a crime in which death wasn’t intended or explicitly expected at all (Involuntary Manslaughter or Negligent Homicide); or even in a crime that results from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, that is, when another person’s fundamentally sociopathic heart compels them to violence (Second-Degree Murder); the two types of criminal incident Americans truly fear are (1) premeditated murder, and (2) rape of any kind. For this reason, whenever you encounter a far-right disinformation operation motivated by white supremacy, its overriding emphasis will always be on First-Degree Murder and Rape.
And so it is with Fentasyl and his enablers, which include Twitter CEO Elon Musk.
The Twittersphere Devolves into a Hothouse for White Supremacy
If you look at the most recent readily available full year of homicide data in the United States—the data from 2019 that anyone Googling such data would find immediately—you encounter this chart:
As you can see from the data above, there are a few clear, top-level “takeaways” here:
Black offenders do not commit the majority of homicides. White offenders committed 2,948 homicides in 2019; Black offenders committed 3,218 homicides; the race of the offender was unknown in 187 homicides; and 225 homicides involved an offender who was neither White nor Black. The total number of homicides was 6,578, with less than half committed by Black offenders (48.9%).
Based on incidents in which the race of both the offender and victim are known, more White people kill White people than Black people kill Black people. While the numbers are close—2,594 to 2,574—they are also unambiguously not the same.
Homicides in which the offender is Black are significantly less likely to involve a female victim than a male victim, compared to homicides committed by Whites. Among homicides with a Black offender, 21.5% involved a female victim; among homicides with a White offender, 35.7% of the victims were female. For those wondering the most likely reason for this disparity, this too is extremely telling: a disproportionate number of homicides committed by Black offenders are gang-related killings—which overwhelmingly (but of course not always) means that these are the sort of homicides anyone not in a gang doesn’t need to fear—whereas a disproportionate number of homicides committed by White offenders are DV (domestic violence) incidents, which, if you’re inclined to think in alarmist terms about crime, means you should think twice about getting involved in an intimate relationship with a White man.
What we can take from the three points above is nothing less than a total demolition of the white supremacist agenda as it relates to race. The talking point that falsely says Black offenders commit the majority of homicides is gone. The talking point that Black-on-Black homicide is a bigger cause of death in America than White-on-White homicide is gone. The talking point that the average White woman should fear death at the hands of a Black man is replaced with two accurate talking points: Black men should avoid gangs, and White women should be wary of intimate relationships with White men.
But what about rapes? Well, we can go here to read the most recent data available:
From the three charts above, we can draw three important top-line conclusions:
Racist White women who are raped are almost always raped by White men—quite often, White men who share their views. If, as the charts tell us—and every similar chart ever made confirms—Rape is a crime usually committed by someone the victim knows, the odds that a racist who doesn’t socialize with Black people will be raped by a Black man are vanishingly small. Certainly there are instances in which a rape victim knows their rapist from a racially integrated workplace, but given the racial demographics of a racist’s total network of family and friends and acquaintances and professional associates, and given the data we have (see below) about where rapes occur, it couldn’t be clearer that if 80% of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows, White women who are racist need to be most fearful, when it comes to fear of serious sexual assault, of White men who are also racist. (Keep in mind that even a woman victimized by a work associate is most likely to be victimized in a non-work location—thus, one where, if the woman is a avowed racist, she’s unlikely to be approached or engaged by a Black man voluntarily, and much more likely to be approached or engaged by a White work associate.)
The race-and-age demographic racist Whites most want people to fear—Black men aged 18 to 29—is not a significant contributor to American rape data. If only a third of rapes are committed by persons aged 18 to 29, and only 27% of all rapes are committed by a Black offender, the percentage of all rapes in which the offender is a Black male aged 18 to 29 is vanishingly small. Certainly, it’s more than small enough to be completely impotent as a racist trope commonly used in white supremacist rhetoric.
Rape is overwhelmingly committed by White people. At least 57% of all rapes are committed by a White person.
In response to data such as the data above, white supremacists often note that only 13.6% of the U.S. population is Black (though sometimes they fudge this accurate number by lowering it) and 75.8% of the population of the United States is White.
The implication here is that if 27% of rapes are committed by a Black offender, and 57% are committed by a White offender, this still means that the offender in a Rape case is twice as likely to be Black as demographic data would suggest “should” be the case—which racists use, grotesquely, as evidence of a race-based propensity to rape.
If you know nothing about law, crime data, legal journalism, or the sociology of crime, this might even seem a reasonable observation to you at first blush. But it’s not. Let’s return to our RAINN data—recalling that the target of far-right crime disinformation on Twitter is categorically adult, non-incarcerated White civilians—to start to see why.
As we see here, of the approximately 593,148 rapes that occur each year in the U.S., 159,500 (26.8%)—well over a quarter—do not involve the target audience of white supremacist rhetoric, as the victim is incarcerated, a minor, or in the U.S. military.
As for the other 73.2% of Rape cases, we can review this Office of Justice Programs data:
If we consider only the “urban-vs-rural” distinction—eliminating the suburbs for the moment—we see that 89% of rapes and sexual assaults that occur in either an urban or rural area occur in an urban area. And what percentage of Black Americans live in an urban or suburban area, as opposed to a rural one, according to a Pew Research Poll?
81%.
Indeed—and this is so ironic—white supremacists are actually the first to opine about the fact that cities with high crime rates also have large Black populations exceeding the 13.6% national average. What these white supremacists don’t seem to clock is that this means, for many types of crime, that the “13.6%” figure isn’t the right one to use as a point of comparison. For instance, in our nation’s capital, 45.4% of the residents are Black, meaning that we would expect, all things being equal, 45.4% of rapes in D.C. to be committed by Black offenders. This is simply a shorthand way of reminding us all that the nation’s criminal justice system is divided into legal jurisdictions, and it is jurisdictional data that must be used to determine whether a given locale is generally free of crime, crime-ridden, or (as is most often the case) somewhere in-between. In other words, that “13.6%” figure is almost never useful or important, because the most serious crimes are more common in urban areas—there is, understandably, a clear correlation between population density and crime—and urban areas are much more likely to be racially diverse, with Black populations (and thus, the baseline for race-based crime data) often sitting between 20% and 60%.
So what happens when we start looking at jurisdictional data rather than using the broad-brush rhetoric of white supremacists with no background in law, journalism, data analysis, or sociology? Well, things start to get interesting. Consider this data on the American municipalities with the highest rates of Rape per 100,000 residents:
Again, these are the Metropolitan Statistical Areas with the highest per capita Rape rates.
Of these 13 MSAs, five are in red states (AK, AR, MO-KS, SD, and WY); two are in blue states (IL, NM); and six are in purple states (CO, MI, and NV).
So what about the next 13 MSAs?
Of these 13 MSAs, eight are in red states (AK, AR-OK, FL, LA, NE, and TX); one is in a blue state (NY); and four are in purple states (CO and MI). So what about the next 13?
Of these 13 MSAs, eight are in red states (AR, FL, MT, ND, OK, TX, and UT); two are in a blue state (IL and NY); and three are in purple states (CO and MI). And if we now round out the Top 50 American MSAs where one might most fear a rape, we see this:
Nine of these eleven MSAs are in red states (AR, IA, MO, MT, TX, and WV) whereas just two are in a purple state (MI) and not even one is in a blue state.
Given that the red states listed above almost universally have GOP-led legislatures and GOP governors, why do so many of America’s rape capitals seem to be in their jurisdictions? It’s a question Fentasyl should answer—or his new booster, Elon Musk.
Elon Musk Goes Full White Supremacist—And In Public
The basic details of the killing of Jordan Neely have been reported on by the New York Times, and are discussed in more detail below. But Proof would like to first offer some context for Musk’s startling reaction to the Neely case.
Some readers may question whether all that precedes this section of this report, and all that is contained within it, and all that follows it, necessarily means that a White billionaire from a nation famous for apartheid—who got his seed money from a dodgy emerald mine that operated sub rosa during apartheid—actually believes that Black people are naturally more violent than White people, which just so happens (by the by) to be the ethos that dominated the country he was born in during his formative years.
It’s a reasonable question to ask, but it’s also one answered by the sum total of Musk’s public Twitter replies and likes. For instance, in the context of a series of other tweets and tweet-replies and “likes” about the alleged (in fact wholly illusory) predisposition of Black men toward violence, Musk decided to publicly “like” the tweet below, which was prompted by the Jordan Neely case and the ultra-racist disinformation about the American criminal justice system that it quickly launched on Twitter:
The implication of this Musk-approved public declaration is clear: White people are justified in thinking Black people more naturally violent than White people—again, a cultural view endemic to the White community in Elon Musk’s home country at the time he lived there—as, per this tweet Musk endorsed, hard data proves it to be true and therefore it is “not…a slander.” What we can take from Musk endorsing this view is that a core tenet of systemic racism and bigoted animus is not only not going to be subject to moderation on Twitter, but will in fact be encouraged as an idea that is just “obviously true.” This is horrifying to a degree this author cannot properly express.
Nor can we read the above Musk “like” in isolation. Rather, it is part of a trend of him consistently implying that Black Americans are both less intelligent and more violent than other Americans. Consider that, in the midst of ongoing debates about whether the structure and content of the college-admission SAT exam is racist—as evidenced by the otherwise inexplicable underperformance on the test by Black teens—Musk is pushing the false claim that not only is the SAT race-neutral, but should be used more robustly (including in hiring) as a reliable indicator of a person’s Intelligence Quotient:
Consistent with the Musk-admired Fentasyl falsely framing himself as a champion of Asians’ civil rights as a way of obscuring the fact that his sole interest appears to lie in white supremacy—and consistent with Musk himself using an Asian-avatared person named “Simon Young” to spread an anti-Black/pro-White trope—here, below, we see Musk liking a tweet that insists that Black people and feminists are lying about White men and Asian women to justify their own inadequacies (note too that Musk is here amplifying, as he so often does, Fentasyl’s digital carnival barker, TheRabbitHole84):
(Perhaps it’s no surprise that one of Musk’s favorite tweeters—someone he regularly amplifies on Twitter—is a White man named Billy Markus who facetiously poses as Asian man “Shibetoshi Nakamoto.” For those wondering, (a) Markus is co-founder of Dogecoin, and (b) White people using made-up Japanese names as digital handles was last funny… well, it was never funny, actually.)
As noted in the title of this Proof report, Musk’s newly aroused interest in discussing race and crime appears to have been sparked by the killing of an unarmed Black man on a New York City subway car a few days ago. The killer is a White military veteran who ignored his training and held the victim in the chokehold that ultimately killed him for—depending on the outlet you’re reading—between three and fifteen minutes.
While the victim is now said to have been acting erratically at the time of his death—something on the order of a nonviolent, noncriminal Disorderly Conduct course of conduct that would induce police contact and (if it extended beyond that) an arrest by trained law enforcement personnel—we have also learned that Jordan Neely was both homeless and suffering an acute mental health crisis at the time of his untimely death.
Can a vigilante intervene in a nonviolent Disorderly Conduct with deadly force? No.
The “self-defense” and “defense of others” legal defenses are only available when an individual reasonably perceives a person is imminently going to cause physical harm to either them or another, and the physical force used to repel such an attack is proportional.
There is no evidence that any of the elements of a self-defense or defense-of-others defense exist here. For this reason, Democrats looking at this homicide have decried Republican cuts to services for the homeless and mentally ill; major-media coverage that appeared to sympathize with the White killer despite any known facts supporting a self-defense or defense-of-another claim; and social media users who instinctively leapt to the defense of a White man dispensing vigilante justice in shades of both Kyle Rittenhouse and—for those a few decades older—Bernard Goetz, the White man who infamously shot four Black men on a New York City subway train in December 1984.
It’s in this context that Musk liked the tweet below, sent by active insurrectionist and public inciter of domestic-terrorist violence Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA):
As noted, everything about this political statement that Elon Musk endorsed is a lie.
The Marine in question appears to have no valid “defense of others” claim by law.
Jordan Neely has certainly not been cast by anyone as either a hero or a martyr.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is neither a Communist nor an anarchist.
This case has a racial component, given the extraordinary interracial force used on a man who wasn’t imminently threatening violence, so to say that acknowledging this is a “[racial] dog whistle” is preposterous. And while the 30-year-old Jordan Neely had indeed been arrested on a number of charges in his comparatively young life (actually quite common for mentally ill homeless people in a community-policing jurisdiction, where arrests of erratically behaving vagrants can become a daily occurrence simply to “keep them off the streets”), the number of charges he had faced (around forty) is not so different from the number of criminal counts Donald Trump, Greene’s political patron and the head of the Republican Party, is now facing—Trump’s tally is 34—with the notable distinction that Trump’s charges are all felonies and are (a) expected to be joined in short order by dozens more, (b) do not include his civil conviction today on a Rape allegation, and (c) do not include dozens of Sexual Assault and Rape allegations lying outside the statute of limitations, or the still more civil lawsuits brought against Trump for tortious acts that in some cases could easily have been charged as felonies.
As the debate over the Neely case heated up on Twitter, Elon Musk joined the fray by publicly endorsing a series of increasingly deranged and misleading tweets about race and the U.S. criminal justice system. These tweets weren’t just posted by a very small number of accounts that all seemed to be interacting with one another, they were then bolstered by this same conspicuous network of Twitter users. Not surprisingly, Musk-endorsed tweeters Fentasyl, TheRabbitHole84, EndWokeness, and Ian Miles Cheong were key nodes in this network (more on these last two Twitter users in a moment).
One viral post emanating from the white-supremacist disinformation machine that seized on the Neely case and received Musk’s eager public endorsement is this one:
Below is the viral tweet in which the graph above first appeared. It’s an account Musk often “likes” on Twitter (and a tweet, in particular, that Musk—as seen below—liked).
So what’s wrong with the above graph? Is it just that progressives like me dislike what it shows—as Musk, Ashley St. Clair, and the anonymous “EndWokeness” user imply?
No.
It’s that attorneys, data journalists, and degreed amateur sociologists like me know that this graphic is intentionally misleading.
Why?
Well, first things first: if you’re going to talk about media coverage in this decade, why choose to use victimization data from last decade? I retrieved the 2021 edition of the report cited in the graphic above in under ten seconds, suggesting that anyone choosing to talk about the media in 2023 using data from half a decade ago must have had some reason or agenda in doing so.
Not surprisingly, what the 2021 version of the BJS data used in the far-right tweet above shows is very different from what we see in the five-year-old data the right favors:
Interesting, right? Let’s compare the two datasets:
The Musk-Endorsed-Meme Data
“547,948” Black-on-White violent crimes
“59,778” White-on-Black violent crimes
The Most Recent Data, Direct From the Department of Justice Rather Than a Meme
“61,644” Black-on-White violent crimes
“18,514” White-on-Black violent crimes
Whereas the Musk data suggests Black-on-White violent crimes are well over nine times more frequent than White-on-Black violent crimes, the actual data puts that figure at only 3.32—still a notable figure, yes, but not in the universe of (a) what Musk endorsed and (b) the figure St. Clair arrogantly hounded people for not instantly treating as true.
So that’s the first sign that something is amiss here—that neither Musk nor St. Clair nor the anonymous people barking for the two of them made an effort to use recent data, let alone exhibited concern at how different the data Musk favorite EndWokeness chose to use is from the most current and relevant data.
But then there’s the premise of the graphic writ large: that major media habitually obsesses on White-on-Black crime as a way of attacking White people. But is that true? Is there any evidence for this at all? In fact, I think Proof readers will agree—even bigots might grudgingly agree, if pushed to do so—that the White-on-Black crime that major-media news coverage does focus on a great deal is White-on-Black homicides in which the killer is a White cop and the victim is an unarmed Black man.
So is it maybe a bit different to say that major media focuses on White officers killing Black men because the White officers are White than it is to say—as this writer deems self-evident—that media actually covers these cases because when people tasked with stopping crimes instead commit crimes it’s pretty clearly a striking, newsworthy story?
Indeed, it’s a story made all the more striking—and all the more sufficient to meet the ten-step “newsworthiness” test that I used to teach as a University of New Hampshire professor, and speak on at length here—when (a) the victim is unarmed, (b) the officer doing the killing is extremely well-trained, and (c) sociologists have been talking for decades about the problem of cross-racial identification in the criminal justice system, an issue adjacent to and illuminating of the clear trend of White officers killing Black citizens without legal justification.
So who is it, exactly, who’s pushing race-based discussions of crime when on the one hand we have a far-right meme that tells readers the only things that matter in a criminal incident are the respective races of the offender and the victim, and on the other we have activists demanding that police get better training, that police departments become more aware of the problematic history and sociology of cross-racial policing, and that journalists don’t make special “crime” or “race” exceptions in choosing what to cover but continue to do as their profession’s ten-step “newsworthiness” analysis has long demanded and report on (a) trends, (b) events of an unusual character, and (c) events deemed proximate, relevant, and urgent to a discrete community of news consumers?
I’m happy to answer that question here.
It is, in fact, Musk and his ilk who are the racialists, looking to explain everything by recourse to race essentialism: Blacks (these avid white supremacists claim) are more violent than Whites, and crime data reflects that, they say (which it does not); Blacks (these white supremacists claim) are less intelligent than Whites, and the SAT data we have reflects that, they say (which it does not); Blacks (these white supremacists claim) are more likely to lionize and martyr dubious figures, and—well, I’m just going to stop there, as the leader of the political party all the Whites I’m thinking of here belong to is a career violent criminal, white-collar criminal, adulterer, traitor to his country, child abuser, pathological liar, and would-be incestuous lover of his own daughter, and yet these people still lionize and martyr him more than any figure in American history.
Surely some of this rampant hypocrisy stems from the fact that, for all that they love to opine on the law, far-right ideologues like Musk don’t believe—as we’ve established—in putting in the time to become an expert on anything besides that which instantly gratifies them (unless we count MAGAs being expert in feeling their own feelings), with the result that these individuals don’t really know anything about the law despite wishing to talk about it incessantly.
For instance, consider that we live in a nation in which (now) protection of vulnerable minorities is enshrined in our Constitution through the Fourteenth Amendment.
Add to this that, on the basis of the Fourteenth Amendment, state and federal laws have been written—which laws one is free to disagree with, but the fact remains that they do exist—which add certain enhancements to criminal penalties if a given crime is committed by (among other such examples) a White person against a Black person while the former is acting under a demonstrated racial animus.
Add to this that legal journalism is required to (a) focus particularly on criminal cases that are newsworthy because they are unusual or unusually severe in their potential punishment, and (b) focus with objectivity and accuracy and transparency and honesty on the facts of any criminal case covered, including hate-crime enhancements. Would we expect, in a country like the one I’ve just described, that journalists would more frequently mention the race of a violent criminal offender in cases where the offender is White and the victim Black as opposed to the opposite? Well, of course we would—if we know anything about the law, journalism, or the United States. But if you’re Elon Musk and interested only in Whites’ specious racial grievances, you “like” this tweet:
What that tweet does is make data that relates to the law into data that relates to race.
As the post-Neely outcry against Musk increased, he naturally ran to his white-supremacist-sympathizing fan accounts, most notably Fentasyl’s carnival barker, TheRabbitHole84:
The defense Musk and his fanboys are using—it’s all just statistics!—is a very old one.
There’s a reason American author Mark Twain sought to popularize the European saying, “There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” And there’s a reason the phrase “lies, damn lies, and statistics” has its own Wikipedia page, and a reason that page identifies the phrase as “describing the persuasive power of statistics to bolster weak arguments.”
What Musk, Fentasyl, and TheRabbitHole84 are doing here is in fact as old as racism itself: presenting (sometimes) accurate data in furtherance of a claim those statistics in no way support, let alone dispositively prove. And in the far-right hothouse-cum-echo chamber Musk has created at Twitter—in which those with blue checkmarks, who are overwhelmingly more likely to be Musk supporters than those who recently lost their blue checkmarks, get algorithmically elevated to the top of every comment field—it’s an easy leap to go from publishing dubious data and false conclusions allegedly arising from that data to accusing anyone who calls you out on what you’ve done as suffering from what Musk now habitually calls “the woke mind virus.”
No lawyer, journalist, data scientist, or sociologist would defend the conclusions some people draw from misreading certain data (or looking at the wrong data altogether) by simply shouting, “It’s actual data!” It may or may not be, but even if it is, that does not conclude a responsible analysis of whether it is relevant data or probative data or (for that matter) misleadingly framed and/or applied data. Treating data as a static, self-sustaining good is something that people with an agenda do, however—though it’s as silly as trying to bolster one’s own fallacious argument on a matter of importance by shouting, “I’m using words! It’s only words I’m using!” Statistics are used to lie about public policy just as frequently as words are, in fact perhaps even more frequently.
In any case, the result of the KanekoaTheGreat tweet endorsed by Musk above—yet another example of Musk gleefully endorsing anonymous persons with unknown bona fides on the false claim that every statistic can be taken at face value no matter its source or application—was that instead of data on major-media coverage of interracial crime being used to prompt a conversation on hate-crime enhancements or the conventions of “police-blotter journalism”, it was used to counterfactually tell white supremacists that the media is systematically biased against them and trying to libel White people as more dangerous than everyone else (a characterization that the white supremacists don’t mind so much when it’s being applied by them to Black Americans).
And Musk and his cadre’s inciting of white supremacists to believe en masse that they are being systematically libeled by media could have very dangerous consequences.
The “Blood Libel”
There is a term now used in the circles Fentasyl runs in (and helps create) that is as dark and ugly a phrase as exists in the English language. It has been associated with violent antisemitism for not just years or decades but centuries. The term is “blood libel”, and it refers to an ancient antisemitic canard that falsely claims that Jews put the blood of Christians in their food. Not to put too fine a point on it, but this trope frames Jews as literal monsters—vampiric cannibals—who must be killed to ensure the future safety and security of all White people generally and all Christians specifically.
In America in the twenty-first century, the phrase has necessarily taken on a slightly different meaning. Even ardent antisemites don’t believe Jews to be actual vampires anymore; rather, the key antisemitic trope in the United States is that Jews control both Hollywood and the media industry, and that they use their influence in these spheres to metaphorically rather than literally do violence against Whites. As a result, far-right neo-Nazi discourse on Twitter and certain other social media platforms often references “blood libel” if a Jewish journalist (or someone believed to be a Jew) says or does anything perceived as being contrary to the interests of White Americans. It’s a way of redirecting an antisemitic slur to make it seem like nothing more than an act of rhetorical self-defense.
And so it was that when I publicly called out the disinformation the Musk-encouraged Fentasyl has been putting out about the American criminal justice system, it was seen as an offense against Whites—keeping in mind that antisemites don’t consider Jews to be White—and earned me these haunting words from Musk’s newest digital associate:
The accusation that I am “blood libeling” the paranoiac Fentasyl (who I have never put on a “list”, and in fact don’t even know sort of list he’s referencing) indicates his belief that I’m a Jewish journalist who’s anti-White and out to do metaphoric violence to Whites (a “blood libel”) through my written journalism. That Fentasyl is focused on me being Jewish by birth—needless to say, the fact that I haven’t practiced Judaism for over three decades is immaterial, as the sin of being Jewish is permanently in my blood—is underscored by his use of the infamous Jews-as-vermin trope Adolf Hitler’s right-hand propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, developed. If the use of the old antisemitic slur “blood libel”—here perverted, twisted, and reversed, just as Fentasyl’s use of DEI words is (presumably because he thinks his ironic bigotry is so clever it will be missed by his critics)—didn’t bring in all the antisemites to rally around Fentasyl, he made sure to also call me vermin (a “rat”) in order to bring home the message to his readers.
And my oh my, was the message ever received! Here’s a sampling of the responses to Fentasyl’s several tweets about me (readers should know that the phrase “early life” is an antisemitic, 4chan-derived code for discovering that someone is Jewish from reading the “Early Life” section of their Wikipedia page, and should further know that “every time” or “every single time” is shorthand for an antisemitic, 4chan-derived trope which says that “every time” someone is found to be doing something that purportedly undermines America and White people, that person turns out to be a Jew):
Note the 26 “likes” on the antisemitic tweet directly above, and the 15 on the second. Or the 39 likes on the second “early life” tweet above—despite the fact that my long-standing Wikipedia page doesn’t mention my religion as of the time of this article’s publication, nor should it given that I have not practiced Judaism for decades and there is no analysis of my work that attributes it to the religious practices I was part of as a child (at a time I was not in a position to make weighty decisions for myself).
And of course virulent antisemites always denote Jews on Twitter using two or three parentheses on either side of their name, as also happened in the comment section of Fentasyl’s feed when I debunked his disinformation:
This is what the comment section of Fentasyl’s feed—endorsed by Musk—looks like.
And when I say “endorsed,” I do mean that literally. Here’s Fentasyl’s new Twitter bio:
And “Fentasyl”/“Datahazard” is clear in supporting the antisemitic canard that the purportedly Jewish-run American media is—for reasons never explained, though presumably it owes (white supremacists would say) to the evil native to international Jewry—deliberately trying to destroy America from within by creating racial division.
That this argument repeatedly comes from those with a long history of trying to create such racial division, such as Fentasyl and (below) Ian Miles Cheong—much more on him in a moment—just gets swept under the rug as an inconveniently revealing fact.
And whose else loves this canard? You guessed it.
The idea that evolving media coverage reflecting a changing culture—in other words, basic journalism—is some eldritch left-wing conspiracy orchestrated by shadowy elites is a profoundly dangerous self-delusion. Coverage of racism began increasing in the 1990s because it finally became culturally acceptable in that decade to wrestle publicly with America’s horrifying past; in the twenty years before that, public discussions of race were deemed (mostly by Whites) dangerously fraught and destabilizing due to the nation’s ongoing hangover from the turbulent 1960s. There’s nothing more mysterious to the data above than that.
Only conspiracy theorists see in it a transnational scheme to demonize White people.
{Note: It should also be observed that the 1990s saw the advent of “24/7” cable news—which seemed to feel it needed to focus nonstop on divisive issues to hold its viewers’ attention. The most artful and successful operators in this regard were far-right ones like Fox News and, just before that, the then-popular, Roger Ailes-produced, syndicated The Rush Limbaugh Show. These programs were all positively obsessed with racial division and the discussion of race.}
A Sidebar
There isn’t enough room in any Substack report, even a report as long as this one, to debunk everything Fentasyl posts about the criminal justice system. Fentasyl’s feed is a firehose of disinformation, and only some of it can be debunked through a single link.
For instance, this disinformation is easily debunked:
Numerous studies by actual experts in criminal justice confirm that, controlling for all other factors, Black Americans are stopped by police more frequently, searched by the police more frequently, arrested more frequently, charged more frequently, convicted more frequently, and given long sentences more frequently than White suspects are.
This is an entirely non-controversial understanding of the hard data of the American criminal justice system. But of course Fentasyl isn’t part of either that system or the professional discourse that surrounds that system—rather, the dialogue he’s a part of is a dialogue between white supremacists who have no understanding of the criminal justice system whatsoever.
But now that dialogue also includes the second-richest man in the world—a man who is, quite clearly, a white supremacist in his worldview if not his formal associations.
Elon Musk and the “Fentasyl” (a.k.a. “Datahazard”) Entity
So did Musk really call Fentasyl’s disinformation “interesting”, as is the buzz around the internet? You bet he did. Using some preposterous algebra, a TikTok user whose video Ian Miles Cheong published to Twitter tested out Fentasyl’s claim that “60%” of all “murders” are committed by Black people—putting aside that “murders” isn’t a formal category for the reasons explained above—and Mr. Musk hurried in to call this disinformation “interesting.”
{Note: Musk again uses an Asian bigot as cover for his own bigotry. This TikTok user actually perpetuates anti-Asian stereotypes in his own video, saying his math can be trusted because “God made me Asian for a reason.”}
Note that the Musk-endorsed, Fentasyl-propagated 60% canard has been a white supremacist staple for many years. Here it is popping up in a neo-Nazi rant in 2022:
In fact, the Anti-Defamation League cites the slightly less egregious “13/52” meme as a known racist trope intended to portray Black Americans as “savage and criminal in nature”:
And here’s Elon Musk directly amplifying a component of Fentasyl’s “13/52” data:
So where does this racist meme come from? Well, as Channel 4 (UK) reports, it is true that according to extremely out-of-date numbers—a time range that begins forty-plus years ago and ends over a decade and a half ago—Black Americans commit “52%” of “homicides” and White Americans commit “45%” of homicides—or at least that was the case many, many years ago. But as we have already seen, “homicides” are a much, much broader category than “murders,” and include all sorts of fact-patterns that are not the sort of violent event white supremacists are invested in scaring White people about. It’s for this reason that white supremacists, who of course know little about the criminal justice system to begin with—and care about the gaping definitional gulf between the words “murder” and “homicide” even less—often change this homicide statistic to a murder statistic even as they’re claiming to be sticklers for the truth. It’s a transparent bid to scare White people even harder. Yet it’s this very switcheroo that confirms they’ve something emotionally invested in framing Black people as naturally savage and violent.
So why do white supremacists use old data rather than newer data? For many reasons, but one is that after 2008 the FBI began recording data in a way that for the first time underscored how unsure of the race of the perpetrator in many homicides law enforcement is. By 2013, the data looked different—a heck of a lot less compelling for the racists, given that, as noted above, Black Americans are far more likely to live in the areas in which homicides often occur, meaning that the “13%” percent-of-total-US-population figure is actually immaterial. Here’s the relevant screenshot from the Channel 4 report:
So in a high-crime city like Baltimore, where 62.6% of residents are Black, how would the stat that 38% of homicides are committed by Black offenders (the article confirms that Channel 4 has also made the decision to use the terms “homicide” and “murder” interchangeably, underscoring that white supremacists know about as much about the American criminal justice system as people who don’t even live here) serve to scare White people into becoming more racist? The “13/52” (or Fentasyl’s preferred “13/60”) neo-Nazi trope does the trick just fine in that regard, presumably, which is why both he and Musk respond so positively to it, but would “63/38” have the same ring to it? I don’t think so. What about another city white supremacists love to harp on, Chicago? Would “29/38”—which at least has numbers in the ascending order white supremacists prefer—be sufficiently compelling a disparity between population demographics and homicide data to send White men and women to local KKK meetings? Seems unlikely.
Just as unlikely is the notion that someone who is a white supremacist will choose to light upon the other, far more compelling shibboleth to this debate: the issue here is poverty, not race. Many studies confirm as much, but the notion is hardly discussed in white supremacist circles—perhaps because “pro-meritocratic” white supremacists like Musk believe that poverty is entirely the fault of the Black people experiencing it anyway, so the difference between attributing crime data to race or poverty is actually rhetorically inconsequential. And that is… definitely a pretty racist way to look at it.
But it does help explain why Neely’s poverty (he was homeless) and mental health issues (he had a history of mental illness) meant nothing to Musk in view of the fact that Neely had been arrested for crimes in the past, something his killer didn’t know, something not legally relevant in a homicide trial, and something that may well be misleading because we’re talking about arrests and not convictions here and (as the Republicans keep reminding us with regard to Donald Trump) “mere” arrests are irrelevant and hardly to be mentioned at all.
(We’re again invited to presume their double standard on this, which falls neatly along racial lines, has nothing to do with race.)
For Musk, past allegations of violence are most definitely the point here—not a present certainty of poverty and mental illness, or the fact Neely wasn’t engaged in violence at the time he was killed.
But did Musk really approve of a poll saying that Neely “deserved” to be killed? Yes.
And did Musk really amplify a tweet claiming that Neely’s life was “worthless”? Yes.
This is the second-richest man on Earth, a hero to MAGAs and libertarians, and the CEO of what was at one time the most important social media platform on the planet.
Fentasyl (“Datahazard”) Redux
To be sure, not every single thing posted by Fentasyl is a lie. Rhetorical deceit is—as even Hitler well knew—most effective when lies are interlaced with truth. (Donald Trump may be one of the first villainous autocrats to not even have the decency to on occasion present accurate information). For instance, Fentasyl is not wrong in writing that Black offenders are, statistically speaking, more likely to engage in interracial crime than White offenders. Of course, give that potential White victims outnumber potential Black victims by 550%+ in the United States—because of how many more White people there are here than Black people—and given that wealth in the United States is (and dramatically so) differentially distributed to White people, meaning that those in the United States with money and property to steal are disproportionately White, it’s not so surprising that we discover more Black-on-White crime than White-on Black crime. And needless to say, Fentasyl has no interest in unpacking further any data that without additional analysis seems to some to make the fallacious argument that he most wants to make: Black people are inherently more dangerous and disposed to crime than White people, a connection between melatonin and antisocial conduct that has been preposterous, and its advancement the sign of a dangerously diseased mind, since it first appeared to become a scourge of humankind many hundreds of years ago.
What must be stated clearly here is that Fentasyl knows the audience he’s cultivating.
Whereas the Twitter account connected to Proof habitually deletes all replies that are racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, ableist, or otherwise bigoted—and indeed goes further than this by blocking the bigoted poster—Fentasyl, whose fans crow about how often he instablocks any expert who challenges his data, can clearly see the sort of disgusting cheers his “research” generates. Here are just a few examples (keeping in mind that this content is entirely false, disgusting, and worth the immediate blocking of the author on any feed run by a decent person):
I could post hundreds of comments like this that appear on a feed Musk is boosting, but I won’t. It makes me nauseous to do so, so I’ve just dipped my toe in recent ones.
But this is also—arguably—unfair to Fentasyl. What if he never saw these comments? What if he saw them and was troubled by them but he also thinks it’s wrong to argue publicly with commenters (admittedly an unlikely scenario, given how obsessively he’s come after me for commenting on his “work”)?
Perhaps we should look only at the comments we know the Musk-endorsed Fentasyl has himself endorsed because he “liked” them. That seems fair. Here’s what we find:
{Note: This last “like” from the preceding few hours of Fentasyl’s feed is most assuredly my favorite, as “bigotry porn” is the perfect term to describe Fentasyl’s ongoing vile “project.”}
The evidence is clear: Fentasyl, like Musk, is obsessed with race, and specifically with the idea that White people are being mistreated by the media and by Hollywood—two cultural institutions antisemites claim are controlled by Jews who hate White people.
(Apparently we must put aside here that most of these Jews, this author included, are non-practicing atheists or agnostics married to White Christians. Most of us have many White Christian family members and speak in glowing terms about the values inscribed in the New Testament. Even antisemites’ abiding belief in the sinfulness of Jewish blood doesn’t explain why Jews would avidly detest so many they openly love.)
One of the premises Musk and fans like Fentasyl take as gospel—as evidenced by the charts above that the latter recently liked on Twitter and too many Musk tweets and quote-tweets and tweet-replies and “likes” to name—is that the “woke mind virus” is best defined as a sensitivity, indeed really any sensitivity at all, to the suffering of any vulnerable minority population in the United States. Look at how Musk described it in speaking with Bill Maher recently:
For those who don’t want to watch the whole video, here’s the definition, incoherent as it is, that Musk offers for what he terms the “woke mind virus”:
I think we need to be very cautious about anything that is anti-meritocratic and anything that results in the suppression of free speech. Those are the two aspects of the woke mind virus that make it very dangerous: it’s often anti-meritocratic [and] you can’t question things. Even questioning is bad. Another way to put it—almost synonymous [with “woke mind virus”]—would be “cancel culture.”
…
I was trying [recently] to figure out where it [the “woke mind virus”] is coming from, and [I think] it’s actually been a long time brewing in that I think it’s been going on for a while. The amount of indoctrination that’s happening in schools and universities is, I think, far beyond what parents realize.
I came to this [realization] somewhat late, but the experience we [GenXers] had in high school and college [in the 1980s and 1990s] is not the one that kids today are having and hasn’t been for ten years, maybe twenty years.
{Note: I never understand how men like Musk, who haven’t attended a high school class or college lecture in decades, claim to know better than long-time professors like me what is happening in academia. The only basis of knowledge Musk offers to Maher is that he has a friend with a child in high school, and that friend told him one anecdote about something his child learned in a single class. Is that what passes for bona fide knowledge in Musk’s milieu?}
Musk goes on, as noted, to give just one example of what kids are being taught today—namely, that George Washington was a slaveowner—which he claims is problematic not because it is false but because, at the high school level (Musk falsely claims) no other facts about Washington are being taught. Putting aside how ridiculous this is, as high school students are taught via textbooks that have quite a bit to say about all aspects of Washington’s life, it nevertheless helps clarify what Mr. Musk thinks he’s angry about.
Musk’s complaint here actually shows up in a great deal of what he posts and “likes.”
Consider the tweet below, which was liked by Musk and tap-dances around a claim made thousands of times a day on Twitter by antisemites: Jews not only run the media but have a native penchant for destroying societies from the inside; in America, the aim of the Jew is first and foremost to destroy White Christian culture and secondarily to bring down American society from within via artificially orchestrated racial strife.
Musk appears convinced that this media plot launched sometime around the turn of the century—a claim shows up in every interview he gives on the subject and many of the graphics he amplifies online—and he seems absolutely certain that the cause of racial strife in the United States today is not (say) the very far-right trolls whose racist disinformation he gleefully and systematically amplifies daily but, rather, anyone who deigns to talk about racism. If you’re following all this, you’ll note a trend (or theme) in it:
White men need to be allowed to think about and talk about race constantly, without repercussions for expressing wildly offensive non-expert opinions on the subject;
meanwhile, progressives—mostly nonwhites, but also (implicitly) Jews in the media—need to stop talking about race, ceding that discourse to White men like Musk himself; and
most social ills in the United States are caused by one of two things: progressives discussing what is wrong in America and White men being held back from hiring people via “meritocratic” processes that somehow result in outrageously male-dominanted, White-led corporations like Elon Musk’s own SpaceX and Tesla.
This, in a nutshell, is the tripartite ideology undergirding most of what you hear from Elon Musk. And it has nothing to do with free speech as it is understood by American history and jurisprudence.
Clearly, Musk is not primarily focused on the suppression of free speech as the law identifies it—undue restraints on speech authored or orchestrated by a government entity—for as much as he mentions the First Amendment in his discussion with Bill Maher and uses the term censorship (which also definitionally requires government action; indeed, the word censor comes from the Latin term for a government official tasked with reviewing and editing publicly accessible content), Musk doesn’t even tread in the vicinity of discussing government censorship with Maher.
Rather, Musk’s focus is (a) on private speech that White people might engage in that gets them in trouble because it exhibits little or no sense of U.S. history or current cultural mores in America, particularly on matters of racism, sexism, misogyny, transphobia, and Islamophobia, and (b) on the premise that historical and systemic injustices might justify particular sensitivity to the plight—past and present—of vulnerable minorities in a way Musk deems “anti-meritocratic.” This is the classic “America could become color-blind tomorrow if we just stopped talking about race” wish-casting that, ironically, most commonly comes from the lips of those who plan to continue practicing racism in their daily lives but want to stop being called out for it.
Finally, Musk’s concern about “cancel culture” isn’t focused on what we might expect from a self-described “centrist”—the fact, and it is a fact, that sometimes digital mobs get the essentials of a situation wrong, and thus destroy the reputation of a person who is blameless—but on the idea that (usually White) people should face no consequences for anything they say despite America being a nation in which we can react to others’ speech however we like as long as we don’t do so with violence or other law-breaking.
What’s odd, here, is that Musk doesn’t even seem that concerned with the fate of those who say unpopular things. He tells Maher that getting “cancelled” is something one can easily just “ignore” because in fact, online, getting cancelled “increases” the engagement one experiences. So Musk’s worry seems to be, instead—this is a critical distinction—that people, particularly White people and particularly men like himself, will be chilled from saying certain things in the first place. And what sort of things is he worried White men will be discouraged from saying? Why, the very things he’s now encouraging Fentasyl to say: things that are bigoted and without any factual basis at all.
In short, neo-Nazi propaganda that falsely implicates Blacks and Jews as having innate qualities they simply do not have.
In other words, Musk wants far more disinformation in the public sphere, including disinformation provided confidently by non-experts with no idea what they’re talking about, as long as that disinformation creates a more comfortable private cultural environment for White men—and makes it less likely that White men will be at all disadvantaged on the job market in what he perceives to be an anti-meritocratic way.
And who exactly is making the cultural environment unfavorable to White people? In the view of those Musk is publicly encouraging, it’s Jews. And whose past and current individual and systemic mistreatment at the hands of White people has created, in the present, a job market and cultural ecosystem that Musk considers anti-meritocratic? Black people. And what group of Americans does Musk not seem to spend much time on because he doesn’t often hire them at SpaceX or Tesla? Women. (SpaceX is 86% men and Tesla is 78% men, lagging well behind other carmarkers. Moreover, while Tesla, like SpaceX, is racially and ethnically diverse in significant part because Musk relies for labor on legal immigrants whose visa status may compel them to be more compliant than they otherwise would be, Musk’s reputation for elevating nonwhite employees to positions of power is so abysmal that reports have been written on it.)
In short, there’s every reason to think that Musk’s grudge is a deeply personal one. His rampant transphobia comes in the wake of his trans child publicly disowning him; his attitudes about how White men are treated in America appear to be based on his own, highly emotionalized dissatisfactions and mores; and his knowledge of the subjects he claims to be obsessed with—the Constitution and professional journalism, for starters—appears to approach nil.
Yet what is most concerning about Musk’s embrace of white supremacy is how linked it appears to be—in a horrifying echo, again, of Donald Trump—to his need to be not just liked but perpetually feted. So many of the structural changes Musk has made at Twitter, from firing anyone who criticizes him to putting those who adopt his views on the platform atop every comment field, seems calibrated to remove from Musk’s sight those who disapprove of him while surrounding him at every turn with fanboys.
And there’s no bigger Musk fanboy on Twitter these days than Ian Miles Cheong.
Ian Miles Cheong
Proof is by no means the first publication to discuss Elon Musk’s public fraternization with known antisemites, but it bears repeating that Ian Miles Cheong—known for a long time, to the extent anyone knew him at all, as a misogynistic gaming “journalist” and avid “Redditor” (registered Reddit user)—does have a history of antisemitism we must discuss.
But this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg with Cheong.
In 2012, Cheong was banned from Reddit—the website The Atlantic reports is deemed to feature “the most violently racist content on the internet” according to the highly respected Southern Poverty Law Center—for allegedly scamming its users for profit.
Not just once, but repeatedly. Including after he got caught doing it the first time.
In 2014, The Daily Dot reports, “old chat logs show[ed] Cheong praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.”
And in 2015, Cheong infamously “switched sides” during the Gamergate scandal to aid the White men who were then, en masse, engaged in sending terroristic threats to female video game developers who’d criticized the portrayal of women in video games.
As has been reported of this disgraceful “heel turn,” Cheong decided to court some of the most dangerous and violent misogynists in the United States as part of “an effort to court his growing far-right audience” on YouTube—in other words, he spread hate for money. Cheong soon began “amplif[ying] the very viewpoints about the gaming industry that he once condemned”, and doing so to a large audience for a lot of cash.
More recently, Mr. Cheong appeared on far-right propaganda organ Newsmax as a political journalist—which he is not—to declare that he was “on Elon Musk’s side” as Musk began banning actual political journalists from Twitter without any basis at all.
While far-right fake-news websites may call Cheong a “journalist,” Cheong recently confessed that he’s being paid $35,000 annually to “shill” for Florida governor Ron DeSantis on social media and in interviews—a paid position with Elon Musk’s favored Republican presidential candidate that of course instantly disqualifies him from any public recognition as a “journalist,” corporate or independent or otherwise.
As Ian Miles Cheong has emerged in American culture as an “Elon Musk reply guy”, daily seeking to interact with Musk on Twitter and usually finding success in doing so, an even greater light has shined upon his history—and certain troubling facts about his present. Even popular far-right YouTube channel The Quartering, which presently has 1.53 million subscribers, has criticized Cheong, with one of its leading anchor/editors claiming on video that Cheong stole $645 from him via fraud—a sum of money sufficient for the charging of a felony in most U.S. jurisdictions.
Fortunately for Cheong, though he for some reason spends all day commenting on American politics and carefully stoking strife inside America, he actually lives and works in Malaysia.
In the same video, The Quartering (a) claims that the money Cheong “stole” was from public donations to a nonprofit, (b) provides an audio confession by Cheong of having “swatted” an American citizen (now a felony in many U.S. states) as retribution for a perceived slight, (c) details Cheong “trying to get another YouTuber killed” by falsely reporting to the Mississauga Police Department (Ontario, Canada) that a resident of the city was “armed and dangerous”, (d) points out that Cheong has bizarrely opined that the “age of consent [for sexual intercourse]” in the United States should be much lower (Cheong called the “18 year-old” standard used by some U.S. states “draconian”, then references a hypothetical “12 year-old” age-of-consent in approving terms), and (e) reveals that Cheong has publicly said that under certain circumstances “it’s okay [for a government] to be fascist.”
The Quartering also shares some chat logs since attributed in media to Mr. Cheong:
This is more than passing Hitler worship—which needless to say would be bad enough—it’s virulent antisemitism. The chat logs also include (see the video discussion and images here) the rampant use of anti-Black racist slurs (including, repeatedly, the most infamous of these by far) by Musk chat-pal and Newsmax commentator Cheong.
The Gathering concludes that Cheong has had a “long career as a liar, a grifter, a thief….and a [political] chameleon….[and] he is the literal definition of a grifter.” The outlet specifically notes that Cheong will publicly express whatsoever political views are most financially profitable—which historically has included the most divisive and disgusting views imaginable.
{Note: According to respected commentators in the YouTube community, Cheong’s illegal swatting of the Canadian YouTuber referenced above led to the death by immolation of the YouTuber’s dog in the ensuing police action. Proof has not independently confirmed this, but reminds readers that there is a place in Hell for any person whose actions lead to the harming of a dog. Proof notes, moreover, that the link above includes audio of the swatted YouTuber confirming, via firsthand account, that his family’s yellow Labrador Retriever was killed in the police raid that Cheong has since admitted—repeatedly—to instigating as a form of revenge.}
It’s in this context that we find Musk, just within the last 24 hours, liking a racially charged post by Cheong about the American criminal justice system (and specifically about Black-on-White crime—a topic Cheong has previously been reported on by international media as distorting, in one case falsely identifying a Black man as the killer of two White police officers apparently in an effort to accrue clout with white supremacists on Twitter). In this latter horrifying case, reporting by the Los Angeles Sentinel correctly implies that Cheong’s conduct could have led to the death of the innocent man he pinned a murder on. But in the tweet Musk amplified, Cheong had this to say about the very subject he’s employed for purposes of racist disinformation:
Cheong is very focused on getting Whites to pay attention to Black-on-White crime—and is willing to do so at any cost while simultaneously blaming racial strife on media.
It’s in this context that we find Cheong, who this author has had blocked on Twitter for years, interacting directly with Fentasyl about my critiques of the latter’s racist disinformation. In the below exchange, Cheong is referencing a thread I wrote about Fentasyl and Musk before deleting my Twitter history to remove my work product from Musk’s platform (which removal had nothing to do with Fentasyl, and everything to do with my unwillingness to continue using a hothouse for bigotry as a space in which to socialize).
But I’m not the only journalist with Cheong on his mind right now with respect to Elon Musk and what the Musk-Cheong axis portends for social media. Slate recently reported the following about Cheong:
Ever since Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter in October, he’s been replying to the tweets of a man named Ian Miles Cheong on a near weekly basis.
Cheong is a minor flunky of the bygone MAGA cultural revolution; like his contemporary Milo Yiannopoulos, he first came to prominence in 2014, during Gamergate—when, basically, crypto-Fascist teens on Xbox Live cried fat, salty tears because Activision had the gall to add a few female characters to Call of Duty—which paid off beautifully a few years later, when Trump ascended to the White House and ushered all of that retrograde social ideation into mainstream politics.
Cheong maintains an atrophying empire (about 300,000 Twitter followers) by brazenly promoting the most unhinged policy proposals imaginable—like mandatory capital punishment for all shoplifters—which are eagerly lapped up by his audience, a group that seems to comprise mostly men who owe at least one of their children a phone call.
{Update: As a result of Musk’s repeated promotion of him, Cheong now has nearly 600,000 Twitter followers.}
More recently, CBR has reported on Cheong’s virulent (but also, presumptively, Musk-pleasing) transphobia. And Rolling Stone has written the following about Cheong:
Musk has accepted counsel [about how to run Twitter] from Ian Miles Cheong, a right-wing culture warrior who continually weighs in on American politics from his home in Malaysia.
Cheong has criticized COVID-19 vaccine mandates—recently arguing that Americans who die of the disease “are typically fat as hell”—and thinks trans rights advocates “force their beliefs” on others.
In the past, he’s praised Adolf Hitler, and, like Catturd, he hates anything he considers “woke” — which is probably why he told Musk to “stop appeasing the activists”, i.e. anyone raising the alarm about hate speech on Twitter. Musk replied, “You’re right.”
Cheong also liked Musk’s post about Twitter becoming “the most accurate source of information about the world”, which to his mind means affording unsubstantiated rumor and misinformation the same platform as mainstream media.
Cheong is so odious a personality that he’s even been permanently banned from using PayPal.
It’s not clear what in any of this justifies Cheong co-hosting multiple Twitter Spaces on the subject of “citizen journalism” (a topic I’m currently under contract to write a trade-press book about), let alone several events at which Musk himself has appeared.
The point here is that Ian Miles Cheong—racist, antisemite, fraud, liar, foreign troll, transphobe, expert in nothing except (at most) video games—is just the sort of voice Musk not only wants to elevate on Twitter but has repeatedly elevated. For Musk, the solution to major media so often reporting negatively on his failing companies, his trans daughter disowning him, and his own feeling as a White man that there should never be consequences for anything he or other White men say in public, is to replace journalists and legal experts and consideration for the LGBTQIA+ community and any form of Twitter moderation with Ian Miles Cheong, RabbitHole84, and Fentasyl.
The question now isn’t whether scoundrels like this will completely take over Twitter, but when. And I nuked 160,000+ tweets on my Twitter account that ranged in date of publication from May 2015 to the present because I believe we’ve finally reached when.
Conclusion
George Orwell wrote, in his dystopian novel 1984, which centers its plot on a brutally repressive fascist regime, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
Twitter has become the most powerful, well-coordinated disinformation weapon in the world; it is a well-oiled machine whose algorithm and all of its new “features” are geared toward the propagation of disinformation. And it’s in this context that the CEO of Twitter—in Orwellian terms, the “Party Chair”—tweeted out the following:
{Note: If this report were focused on Musk in a more personal way, I’d spill some significant verbiage here about how Musk has spent the last week liking tweets by fans gushing over how much he “loves his kids” and “is a great dad.” Readers will be aware that Musk’s daughter recently filed paperwork to permanently and comprehensively disown Musk, specifically on the self-stated grounds that “I no longer live with or wish to be related to my biological father in any way, shape or form.” Musk using a platform he controls to try to convince his customers he’s a great dad is a classic example of telling his fans, in broad daylight no less, to “reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.”}
Elon is even sly enough to wink at what he knows he’s doing. Consider this “like”:
Musk is so gleefully Orwellian he even “likes” tweets that lie about his autobiography:
{Note: According to Musk’s father, Musk’s “whole career” was “funded” by a family emerald mine in apartheid-era South Africa that Musk put in precisely no work at all to find, develop, or maintain.}
So what does Elon Musk, a man doing more than anyone this side of Donald Trump to remake Orwell’s 1984 as nonfiction, actually want? By the evidence of his endorsements on Twitter—and in a substantial echo of the fascist “Party” of Orwell’s novel—Musk appears to want to advance all of the following:
The end of professional journalism.
The end of educational pedigrees as meaningful.
The end of science (except as used at Musk’s own companies to benefit him financially; Musk is mostly hostile to medical science that imperils the profit margins of entrepreneurs like himself).
Popularization of the antisemitic belief that Hollywood comprises a left-wing conspiracy to destroy, for the sake of sadism and greed, the morality of White children and adults.
Popularization of the idea that the election of serial sexual assailants, traitors to the United States, and career con men as President of the United States is okay.
These five disgusting goals—the fifth of which certainly sits uneasily beside the fourth—are encapsulated by Musk’s recent endorsement of everything he thinks “normal people” are now not just entitled to believe but are profoundly justified in believing:
In Musk’s case, his favored mechanism for advancing white supremacy is, as we have seen, posting single-word digital endorsements of (for instance) racist, misogynistic, antisemitic, and transphobic memes or posts, such as this one reported on by Media Matters for America:
But just as Donald Trump’s Fall 2020 wink-wink-nudge-nudge to white supremacists at a presidential debate—“Proud Boys, stand back and stand by!”—became a rallying cry for both that group and what would become, on January 6, a violent insurrection resulting in over 130 casualties and millions of dollars in damage to federal buildings, Musk’s wink-wink-nudge-nudge encouragement of white supremacy is very dangerous.
And increasingly, it isn’t even that wink-wink-nudge-nudge. Musk is a huge fan of Ayn Rand, who infamously declared that “Racism didn't exist in this country until the liberals brought it up”—an abominable declaration that also happens to be a fairly reasonable summation of Musk’s current, spectacularly deranged views on race.
One finds a disturbing echo of Elon Musk’s life in the life of fellow far-right, hyper-wealthy White provocateur and entrepreneur Peter Thiel. This is from the New York Times, writing (I note this because it will be hard to tell) of Thiel rather than Musk:
There was his home life, where….in South Africa and, finally, in suburban California, he ingested his…family’s complicity in apartheid (his father helped build a…mine in the [South African] Namib Desert)….his requisite enlightenment via the novels of Ayn Rand; his excoriations of libs at [a prestigious university]…
It might have been University of Pennsylvania for Musk and Stanford University for Thiel; emeralds for Musk’s family, and uranium for Thiel’s; but in both cases Ayn Rand and South African apartheid appear to have been the future billionaires’ most abiding teachers. Perhaps the lesson here is that some White boys never reach escape velocity from their upbringing—ironically, the very phenomenon racialized depictions of the American criminal justice system often harp on with respect to Black offenders.
In the case of Ayn Rand, the odious and demonstrably false line “Racism didn't exist in this country until the liberals brought it up” was used—by the author—to try to justify the categorically unjustifiable and unforgivable: the mass slaughter of Native Americans.
So what will Musk use it for?
We don’t know yet.
But we do know what sort of systemically deceitful schemes Elon Musk is for—and they consistently center on blaming progressives (in a nation many worry is hurtling toward a Second Civil War) for every conceivable ill, both online and off, including the fact that progressives have historically been more likely to issue blocks on Twitter because Twitter’s algorithm provably puts considerably more far-right content before their eyes than it’s ever put before conservatives. The lie that progressives are more credulous of censorship than conservatives (at a time when conservatives are mass-banning books across America, no less) is one of the many lies Musk wants “Twitter 2.0” to bake into its recipe, along with the idea that not wanting to daily be exposed to bigoted White men is a vice.
And with all this in mind, we certainly do know, also, what sort of person—with what sort of bigoted views, what sort of alleged criminal history, what sort of pathological penchant for deceit, and what sort of categorical dearth of scruples—Twitter is now for:
I hope you come over to Post, young man. Or at least cross-post from wherever you are (besides Twitter), and substack and email!
No, I am not despicable but I was banned from Paypal because they tried to hold my money, it was against the law, they couldn’t do that. They had to give me my money back and so they banned me forever. >$800... That’s fine. You don’t have to be despicable to lose Paypal, just sticking up for your rights is enough to do it. They won’t close my account either, so I still get PayPal scam emails all the time.
I was banned from Twitter forever, recently, for posting a screenshot of very very poor Starlink service, (under 1-Mbps), that cost me $150 a month. Their peak time is 7 AM to 11 PM, 16 hours a day. It is not all it’s cracked up to be. Free speech, my ass!
When I read “Shibetoshi Nakamoto” as the handle name I couldn't help thinking that this is a reference to Satoshi Nakamoto, the alleged founder of Bitcoin. Shibe also looks related to Shiba Inu, the dog breed used in Dogecoin.