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.
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Introduction
{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.}
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.