UNMUSKED: My Latest Report in Byline Supplement + 2 Other MUST Reads
UNMUSKED: My Latest Report in Byline Supplement + 2 Other MUST Reads
My follow up to my Unmusked report from 2022, which warned that Musk was building a $44 billion dollar psyop cannon, today’s report reveals how he’s deliberately using X/Twitter to poison democracy
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I didn’t sleep last night because Dexter was being filmed in my neighborhood. I am always comforted by the sounds and clusterfracas of street filming, because that means my friends in the industry are working. But last night’s Dexter shoot — a prequel to the original series — featured an actor repeatedly begging strangers to call ‘9-1-1.’ Even though I knew it was an actor, the mom in me kept wanting to help lol.
Not sleeping after pressing send on a major investigation is my norm, and I busied my mind working on a 1,000-piece puzzle, while listening to the soothing voice of my main man Barnaby Jones. In the 1970s series, greed is always bad, and the criminals always pay. I find that so comforting.
A shoutout to the Bette Angels who already donated to the upcoming Media Literacy Training/Fundraiser. You each gave me the gift of full days where I could focus on the work and not worry about the wolves at my door, resulting in these two investigations:
Before I publish an excerpt of Unmusked, I want to draw your attention to two vital reports from my colleagues — Thom Hartmann and Adam Bienkov.
Hartmann, who is one of the rare breeds of journalists who shares his platform with yours truly, just published this very important report:
Get ready, he cautions, for the “massive pools of dark rightwing money that are soon going to clobber us. Will Democracy survive this onslaught by the morbidly rich?”
The report is fresh in my mind because I spent time last week writing American Monster No. 15, focusing on The Kochtopus, and the assault we have taken by the morbidly rich has had real-election impacts in our history.
In 2024, failure is not an option. His report helps steel us for what’s to come.
He writes:
If Democrats survive the onslaught that’s coming and emerge victorious at the federal level, the first order of business next year must be to strip the cancer of dark money out of our body politic.
We can’t take anything for granted. We must phone bank, canvas, write postcards, talk to friends and neighbors, help people register to vote, and share the good word.
Who else is spending a chunk of their weekend phonebanking?🙋🏼♀️
Thom will be our guest on Sunday, August 25, at 2 pm Pacific, for an upcoming Speakeasy, open to all levels of paid membership. So please save that date and be on the lookout for registration details as we get closer to the day.
To join our community events, please become a member:
I also want to make you aware of a brilliant report by my Byline Times/Byline Supplement colleague Adam Bienkov, who I just had the pleasure of meeting in real life at the Byline Festival last month. He’s really really tall. Just sayin’.
He’s also a brilliant reporter, and even if you are not a member of his personal substack yet, please at least read the first paragraphs of his report below:
Bienkov wrote:
I sometimes fear that
people think that fascism arrives in fancy dress
worn by grotesques and monsters
as played out in endless re-runs of the Nazis.
Fascism arrives as your friend.
It will restore your honour,
make you feel proud,
protect your house,
give you a job,
clean up the neighbourhood,
remind you of how great you once were,
clear out the venal and the corrupt,
remove anything you feel is unlike you…
It doesn’t walk in saying,
“Our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution.”
—Michael Rosen, When fascism arrives as your friend… (2014)
Our shared history often makes us uncomfortable talking about fascism.
Mere mention of the word makes us panic about falling foul of the immutable rule of Godwin’s Law.
Yet as the past two weeks have so brutally shown, fascism is not something that remains contained within the faded pages of our history books, but is a real thing taking place in the real world.
Right now, wherever you happen to live, there will be actual fascists living nearby. We may not call them that. They may not even think of themselves in that way. But that is what they are.
Because of the awkward historical comparisons, we will normally reach for other words to describe them. Perhaps we will call them nationalists, or authoritarians, or if we’re on the BBC we may even venture to call them “populists”.
Yet there is nothing particularly popular about their vision for the world, or the means they hope to use to achieve it.
One such person who fits into this category is the Spectator magazine’s Associate Editor Douglas Murray...—Adam Bienkov
I reached out to him to see if he might remove the paywall for 24 hours, and if he does, I will let you know so you can read his full report. In the meantime, you can try a seven-day free trial and consider supporting his work with a subscription.
Unmusked: How Elon Musk Is Using X to Poison Our Democracy
I am grateful for the quiet hours I get to dedicate to this work. Yesterday, I cleared the entire afternoon and evening to focus on my follow up to the original Unmusked report from 2022.
Clearing an entire afternoon and evening is difficult when part of my life is dedicated to elder care, which I know many of you can relate to.
So yesterday, when I put all the pieces of the puzzle together — with Neil Young and Crazy Horse on loop in the background — I was simply grateful. Grateful to my sources, who take the time to empty their heads of brilliant quotes each time I request them, and also grateful to the Byline team, who is eight hours ahead and working through weekends to get news out because rust never sleeps, and we gotta keep on rockin’ in the free world. Lol.
I pressed send late last night on my draft, Byline’s editor was up with the roosters getting it prepped to hand off to Bienkov, who got it ready for go-time, and we published the report at 4:46 am Pacific, while I was still up listening to the Dexter shoot, which also included a car chase. Lol.
While all this was going on, I reached out to Musk for comment, and instead of getting back the usual poop emoji, I received an email that said: ‘Busy now, please check back later.’ I suppose that’s an improvement💩.
Here is an excerpt from the latest Unmusked — a brilliant word conceived of by Byline Times co-founder and publisher, Peter Jukes, who I also got to meet in real life last year in New York and this year in July. I will have to write a feature on my convos with Jukes, who is a natural born raconteur — my favorite species.
Excerpt here:
Unmusked: How Elon Musk Is Using X to Poison Our Democracy
“Swimming in a vast cesspool of the raw data of fascism, Elon Musk's AI was trained to become a fascist.”—Dr. Michael MacKay
The video was, well, weird — creepy even by X/Twitter standards.
Speaking directly to the camera in a cult-like, mind-controlly manner and gesticulating robotically, the CEO of X/Twitter Linda Yaccarino offered ‘A Message to X Users’ on how the company filed a complaint against organizations that boycott advertising on the platform due to its pro-Nazi problem.
The clip was so bizarre, Yaccarino earned herself an eviscerating satirical video by comedian Desi Lydic on The Daily Show and thousands of ‘concerned’ trolling comments that she was somehow being held hostage.
In two minutes, the platform’s users were reminded that under the ownership of Elon Musk, up is down, and down is up and truth is whatever he and his collaborators want it to be.
Nearly two years ago, we warned in our Unmusked report that Musk was creating a $44 billion dollar psyop cannon aimed directly at the minds of users. We warned that he was engaging in an assault on truth. We warned that he was using his new toy to influence the outcome of the US 2024 election and to propagandize the narrative of world events.
There’s little comfort in being right — the assault on Musk’s X/Twitter is multi-front and ongoing, and the danger he and his cohorts pose to democratic governance is ratcheting up:
Musk is under investigation by the Attorney General of Michigan for collecting data under false pretenses. Musk created a PAC collecting voter data from those living in key swing states through an online "register to vote" form that does not directly register people to vote.
Five US secretaries of state are demanding he fix his AI Grok chatbot, which is spreading false information about presidential candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris.
On his own X/Twitter account, Musk promoted a deep fake video about Harris — one of two deep fake Harris videos currently circulating on the platform, with one being spread by a Trump-affiliated account. The fakes have been seen by tens of millions of users. The spreading of deep fakes is a violation of X/Twitter’s own rules. The appearance of doctored video before a major political campaign can be very damaging to the target as evidenced in the 2016 US election and in Georgia in 2012.
Musk not only re-platformed dangerous pro-Kremlin propagandists in the US, some of whom are convicted felons with close ties to Trump, but he also replatformed UK right-wing extremist Tommy Robinson, who uses his social media to stoke violent extremism, including the recent deadly riots
Musk is no stranger to legal challenges, and the escalation of information warfare during an election year was anticipated by anyone paying attention to active measures in the last decade. But the fact that it’s being led by the richest man in the world who also happens to own a key virtual battlefield is a new and dangerous frontier in modern warfare.
“Elon Musk seized control of Twitter to turn it into "X" – an anti-democracy weapon of information warfare,” geopolitical analyst Dr. Michael MacKay told Byline Supplement. “Part of Musk's war effort is to leverage heavily-biased artificial intelligence to serve the fascist agenda.”
As MacKay predicted in our Unmusked investigation in 2022, Musk would turn Twitter into a “Russian propaganda outlet under the guise of a social media platform.”
“To carry out his program, Musk needed to destroy Twitter as a moderated online forum for public discourse,” explained MacKay, a Ukraine expert who has a PhD in political philosophy from the London School of Economics. “He did this by removing the designation ‘state-affiliated media’ from authoritarian outlets, introducing paid blue checks to abolish the concept of verification, and brought back the extremist and conspiracist influencers who had previously been banned.”
MacKay said this mass poisoning of the virtual stream was deliberate.
“With the information space poisoned, Musk let loose his artificial intelligence algorithms,” he noted. “Swimming in a vast cesspool of the raw data of fascism, Elon Musk's AI was trained to become a fascist. The headlines generated by Grok and Explore present the world not in the way a human editor would, but only in the way a machine deliberately trained without the values of good and evil could see it.
“Introducing deliberate bias to machine learning models is unethical. But that's exactly what Elon Musk wanted. He is a profoundly unethical man, and the algorithms he fostered are a projection of his base character.”
David Wheeler, the president of the American Muckrakers PAC, filed a complaint in North Carolina for what he says is a “fraudulent voter drive” by a “politically stupid” man.
“Musk gave millions of dollars to MAGA acolytes for an allegedly fraudulent and illegal voter registration drive for North Carolina (and other) voters,” Wheeler told Byline Supplement. “If Musk would have asked any campaign lawyer in NC or took two minutes to read the Board of Elections' website, he would have seen immediately, it's illegal to host a voter registration drive without an authorized registration form from the Board of Elections, nor can you retain any personal voter information.”
Wheeler said after his organization filed the complaint “on August 2, 2024, the NC Board of elections immediately began investigating Musk and his Super PAC for several felonies and misdemeanors we outlined as violations of NC law.”
The methodical poisoning of the infosphere that Musk is engaging in leaves no trace of the former superhero cape he once claimed. He now appears as a shadowy, smirky, 4chan villain, weirdly dancing to his own demise.
“All of this, above and beyond anything else, is a massive insult to the intelligence of the average voter in the United States,” Kyiv-based reporter Paul Niland told Byline Supplement. “What we are seeing, again, here is an attempt to influence the outcome of an election, like the voters themselves aren't smart enough to draw their own conclusions between the candidates and they need an allegedly brilliant mind, like Musk, to lead them to the right decision. What entitles him to involve himself in such a way? How can he be so bloody arrogant and insulting, and get away with it?”
So far, he’s gotten away with it because money talks in America. But the more Musk talks of late, the more weird and even cruel he appears to be.
Seven McDonald, a filmmaker and senior Bernie Sanders campaign staffer in 2016 and 2020, sees a glaring cruelty in Musk’s public condemnation of one of his 12 children.
“I think it says a lot about a person that they would sell their own kid out for their own ambitions and to appeal to a new set of dangerous friends,” McDonald told Byline Supplement, addressing Musk’s recent public statements about his child, Vivian, being ‘dead’. “Elon Musk has a transgender 20-year-old daughter. He has said cruel and dangerous things about her publicly in order to appeal to the MAGA movement’s perverse anti-LGBTQ+ agenda. When someone attacks vulnerable communities, it's punching below the belt. When someone attacks their own kid, it’s clearly punching below the belt. True leaders don’t punch below the belt, they lift people up. Selling out your own kid to make new friends, friends who have already proved themselves to be violent, is the actions of a villain.”
She said the contrast between Musk and the positive, loving energy of Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, who joined the Harris campaign this week as her VP pick, could not be more stark.
“Look at Coach Walz in comparison, how joyous he is, not to mention the pride he has in his children,” McDonald said. “Musk is the richest guy in the world, yet he always comes across as unhappy and desperate for friends. He and his other billionaire friends, let’s call them aspiring American Oligarchs, want to destroy democracy because they think they can run America better than us. What are they basing this powerful ability to lead on? Their wealth. I personally have way more faith in Coach Walz and my fellow Americans and American values, than I do in them.
“Elon’s ambition and seemingly thirsty desperation have played a role in him doing damaging things to his child and potentially very damaging to other people’s children, not to mention America’s collective fight for democracy. For a guy who so easily could be a hero, and was once considered one, he seems dead set on destruction.”
Lead cyber threat analyst on Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, Jackie Singh, concurred.
“Individually and in aggregate, Elon Musk's actions display a callous disregard for the welfare and stability of the nation which has enabled him, as an immigrant to the United States, to obtain vast opportunities and become wealthy beyond measure—even as he openly colludes with enemies of democracy,” Singh told Byline Supplement.
“My view of Musk is not simply that of a traitor to his adopted nation, but as a betrayer of our true American ideals.”
It’s always worth pausing to remember what the world thought of Musk a decade ago and what may lie at the root of his clearly fascist agenda. I document my findings on that subject in our report The Cult of the Genius Tech Bro, where I examine not just Musk’s fall from deified ‘star man’ to poster of Hitler memes and neo-Nazi references but also the substantial financial stakes in both Twitter and Facebook funded by Russian state institutions with close ties to Vladimir Putin…
There is no evidence that even with the growing awareness of the national and international security risks Musk poses to Western democracies, and the litany of investigations and legal challenges he’s facing — including a $258 billion dollar racketeering lawsuit accusing him of running a pyramid scheme to support cryptocurrency Dogecoin — that he will back off from his destructive tendencies.
We need solutions, and we need them quickly…
Dr. Michael MacKay said we need to break through the technofascist stranglehold of billionaires who are trying to save capitalism from democracy with overdue regulations.
“The answer is to regulate the Internet as public broadcasting is regulated,” MacKay suggested. “The Internet is built on communications protocols which are free and open source; nobody owns the building blocks of cyberspace. The dream of building a vast network of networks was that it can be a public forum for disseminating information and sharing ideas. The Internet can contribute to civil society online.
“In private hands, the Internet has been shaped to be a closed information space with a bias towards authoritarianism and conspiracy theories. With no fairness doctrine enforced, the most extreme viewpoints are amplified while reasonable discourse is squeezed out. Regulate Twitter (so-called ‘X’) as motor vehicle traffic and radio broadcasting was regulated in the early 20th century. We deserve online forums that enrich our human experience instead of diminishing it.”
We have known for at least a decade that something is terribly wrong with humanity and that realization was amplified this week as top Democrats in the US went on the offense by simply revealing themselves to be decent people.
We can already see and feel the powerful sunlight of truth returning — that hopeful feeling of joy is back in the US, embodied by the Harris-Walz ticket and the reboot of empathy on the campaign trail.
It is a feeling we have become unused to, as trauma victims always looking to see what pain or outrage is coming next. We need to stay in that feeling of love for as long as we can, while we take measures to revoke the power of those who seem intent on sabotaging our world.—hsc
To read the full report and help support a small, global team of reader-funded investigative journalists, please take out a subscription to Byline Supplement. If you are unable to do so at this time, you have two options: you are allowed to unlock one free post or I am authorized by the Byline publishers to send the full report upon request to those who reach out to me at bettedangerous/gmail.
I believe the most important thing we can collectively do is seek solutions.
As I always say, despair is the enemy of action, and when we focus on solutions, we remain in action.
See many of you in the squares at our upcoming Founder’s Day and Bette’s Happy Hour/Media Literacy Training!
Thank you for supporting my work!
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Begin each day with a grateful heart.
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