How the Unbanning of Nazis Became Corporate Policy
In this investigation, I highlight the damage of Elon Musk’s reinstatement of venal accounts, and how YouTube considers doing same — reinstating conspiracists under the guise of conservative voices
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As we get conditioned to the boom boom boom of shotgun propaganda, it’s imperative that we continually look to the past — both recent and deep — so we do not get lost in the fog of unknowability.
Twitter was used in 2016 to throw the election to Donald Trump. And you may recall that prior to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter in 2022, the platform had banned accounts run by Nazis, insurrectionists, Nazi insurrectionists, Covid lies, anti-LGBTQ, and QAnon superspreaders. After Musk’s purchase, he invited the Nazis and liars to return and often boosted their words to his hundreds of millions of followers, not to mention modified the algorithm to promote their work.
My RadPod team knew in fall of 2022 that his purchase was a $44 billion dollar psyop cannon (HiFi’s words) and the largest on-ramp for brainwashing, coercive propaganda in history (Jim’s words).
We knew his purchase of Twitter would be used to throw the 2024 election to Donald Trump, and it’s important that we take a look back to one of his first sweeping moves — reinstalling banned accounts.
He lied when he assured civil rights groups and advertisers that he would not reinstate Nazi accounts, but he quickly allowed the return of insurrectionist Donald Trump — who used the platform to incite violence on January 6; Project Veritas, supervillain Erik Prince’s operation to infiltrate and blow up democratic campaigns and the lives of pro-democracy activists (myself included); and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was banned for spreading Covid lies. In less than one month after he officially acquired Twitter on October 27, 2022, violent extremists and racists were back, despite the destruction they had caused in real life.
He was still deploying the ruse of free speech absolutism, but as I’ve reported multiple times on these pages — foreign and covert influence campaigns are not journalism. Influence campaigns should be viewed as military attacks on democratic nations, and the influencers spreading those campaigns should be perceived as enemy combatants.
Below is a list of accounts Musk enabled to return:
Andrew Tate
Jordan Peterson
Laura Loomer
Roger Stone
Baked Alaska/Tim Gionet
David Icke
Dom Lucre
Liz Crokin
Mike Flynn
Sidney Powell
Lin Wood
Ali Alexander
Jim Watkins
Ron Watkins
Alex Jones
Nick Fuentes
Donald Trump
Project Veritas
Andrew Anglin
Kanye West
Marjorie Taylor Greene
If you look at those names, what they all have in common is lies and the spreading of conspiracy theories, which we now know are weapons of war.
Some are convicted felons, others are overt Nazis, some spread child sexual assault material, others have been charged with child sex trafficking — all traffic pro-Russian propaganda under cover of patriotism. The stochastic terrorism spread by some of the accounts have been linked to mass violence and murder.
By reinstating them on Twitter, Elon Musk gave them power to help collectively overthrow US democracy, not only in their support of Donald Trump, but in their undermining of democratic institutions.
That is just the short list, btw. Many more anti-science and white supremacist accounts have been reinstated.
Breaking News: YouTube Unbans?
And now, YouTube is proposing to reinstate channels that were taken down for spreading conspiracies, blaming the Biden administration for pressuring the platform to remove Covid and 2020 election lies content.
In September, its parent company Alphabet announced on Twitter/X: “This will be a limited pilot project that will be available to a subset of creators in addition to those channels that have been deprecated.”
In a letter to the House Judiciary Committee sent in response to a subpoena from Rep. Jim Jordan, who is “investigating” the Biden administration to determine whether it “coerced” or “colluded” with companies to censor speech, Alphabet wrote: “YouTube values conservative voices on its platform and recognizes that these creators have extensive reach and play an important role in civic discourse.”
Conservative voices is quite the euphemism.
You might recall, that YouTube suspended 70,000 accounts for sharing QAnon content, inciting January 6 violence.
Prior to the 2024 US presidential election, it reinstated the banned accounts of Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr.
If changes are made, it could mean Steve Bannon and Dan Bongino could be back on YouTube. Bongino is the deputy director of the FBI, and he was banned from YouTube permanently for spreading Covid disinformation.
It’s weird to have a conspiracy superspreader in our FBI, but if you zoom out and look at the current Trump administration, it’s comprised entirely of conspiracists.
As I documented in my book report on “The Hitler Conspiracies: The Third Reich and the Paranoid Imagination”, everything that’s old is new again.
“In Nazi Germany, the vast state-run propaganda apparatus controlled by Joseph Goebbels pumped out huge quantities of ‘fake news’ — or in other words, lies — and Hitler consistently tried to mislead people both inside and outside Germany about his real purposes, assuring Britain, France, and other European countries of his peaceful intentions even as he rearmed and carried out acts of international aggression.”—Richard J. Evans, “The Hitler Conspiracies”
When Elon Musk goes on Joe Rogan’s show to spread racist conspiracies, he is using a playbook that is known to wreak tragedy on the world.
When he reinstates vile Nazi accounts, it’s not about love of free speech. It’s about the destruction of democracies to benefit autocrats.
The Internet is a powerful tool being used in cruel ways to harm all that is decent.
Each dollar of that man’s wealth that came out of the pockets of freedom loving democratic peoples of the world should be snatched back.
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