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In 2011, political provocateur Andrew Breitbart warned a panel of Fox News anchors that if America wasn’t careful, Donald Trump could become President someday. A year later, Breitbart died, and his longtime associate, billionaire handmaiden Steve Bannon, took over the rightwinger’s cherished website. He would use the site to help Trump do just that.
When Bannon took over Breitbart in 2012, Trump was just beginning to toy with running for President, encouraged by conversations he’d had with David Bossie, the president of Citizens United (the organization that successfully sued the FEC to unleash dark money on the U.S. political system). Bossie was also a friend of Bannon, and Citizens United had received large financial donations from Bannon’s associate, billionaire Bob Mercer. Indeed, Bannon met Trump for the first time, in 2011, through Bossie. As Trump readied a presidential run that would be partially funded by Mercer and coordinated by Bannon, Breitbart (which was also receiving funding from Mercer) began to churn out a steady stream of rightwing content, the likes of which, commentators would claim, helped pave the way for the MAGA movement.
In 2017, a study from the Columbia Journalism Review argued that, in the years since its rise to prominence, Breitbart had become the “backbone” of a rightwing media ecosystem that served to “transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.” That perspective was decidedly “pro-Trump,” the study claimed.
Eventually, Breitbart’s own journalists denounced the site, describing it—as the Los Angeles Times once put it—as having sacrificed its “editorial independence and become a mouthpiece for Trump.” Indeed, in 2016, in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory, Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart spokesman, told journalists: “It will be the propaganda arm of the administration.” He added that the site’s mandate was to “create conflict, controversy and divisiveness” and that it would be used to prop up Trump. Ben Shapiro, himself now a pro-Trump apologist, once claimed Bannon had turned Breitbart “into Trump’s personal Pravda,” a reference to the Soviet Union’s once-prominent propaganda publication.
Nearly ten years later, as Bannon emerges from a federal prison and Trump readies himself to return to the White House, it appears that something very similar to what transpired in 2016 has happened again.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter. The deal was contentious, dramatic, and, from the outside, largely inscrutable. Why did the world’s richest man—a man who already owned half a dozen companies—want to buy one of the world’s largest social media platforms? Public speculation ran the gamut but came up with no real answers. Not long after the acquisition was finished, Musk fired a majority of the site’s staff and renamed it “X.” Since then, it has grown increasingly more rightwing and, in the lead up to the presidential election, allowed Musk to algorithmically promote a host of unhinged conspiracy theories and misinformation that proved auxiliary to the Trump campaign’s messaging. The problem for Musk has been that X is not profitable. The site appears to have no long-term business strategy except losing metric fucktons of money.
Yet within the context of the 2024 presidential election, Musk’s Twitter deal finally seems to make a certain kind of sense. Indeed, if one of the core purposes of the acquisition was to convert the platform into a globally-scaled propaganda megaphone for the Trump campaign, then Musk’s other decisions while running the site (the bulk of which defy all basic business logic) seem more reasonable. The payoff wasn’t the platform’s actual revenue (which has plummeted 80 percent since Musk took over) but a Trump political victory, which would hand Musk unparalleled access to the major branches of American government. It also explains Musk’s increasingly dramatic antics, as they can be read as part and parcel of an overall propagandistic effort. From a business standpoint, telling your site’s advertisers to “go fuck” themselves makes no sense. From the standpoint of someone who wants to represent himself as an avatar of “free speech,” however, (and thus win a significant portion of the public to your political cause) it does make sense. In the days since Trump won the election, Musk’s personal net worth increased by $20 billion.
Elon is such a dumbass. He spent $44 billion on Twitter and all he got was control of all 3 branches of the federal government.
— Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) November 6, 2024
In both 2016 and 2024, the play by the rightwing political movement looks markedly similar. From this writer’s perspective, the play is this: organized money, backed by rightwing billionaires, hijack a media platform, the likes of which then proceeds to churn out a deluge of hard-right content. In many cases, the content seems designed to rile up particular segments of the electorate, thus compelling them to support a preferred political candidate (in both cases, Donald Trump). In Breitbart’s case, the site still ostensibly produced news. In the case of X, Musk dispensed with even the trappings of legitimate news content and proceeded to unleash a veritable firehose of propagandistic dogshit into what had once been considered America’s digital “public commons.”
While there isn’t any concrete proof that Musk’s motivation for the Twitter acquisition was to help Donald Trump get elected, there’s little disputing that that’s what Musk did with the platform once he was running it.
Much like in 2016, the 2024 Trump campaign turned on its ability to rile up its base with a mixture of anger, resentment, and paranoia. To that end, Musk’s X helped promulgate a near incessant deluge of cartoonishly racist conspiracy theories related to immigration and the current administration. Trump also leaned heavily into the alternative media ecosystem of podcasts and social media that are heavily weighted towards young males—a core constituency that helped him win. Many of those podcasts even received a shoutout in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s victory earlier this week.
There is really only one conclusion that can be drawn from the preceding, which is that the political rightwing is incredibly adept at leveraging media and technology towards its electoral advantage. Indeed, many of the media strategies pioneered by Bannon during Trump’s 2016 campaign feel as if they were refined or drastically amplified by Musk during this election cycle.
It should be remembered that, in 2016, Bannon’s Trump-related efforts also used his ties to Cambridge Analytica, a company formed by the SCL Group, a longstanding defense contractor (with ties to the U.S. State Department) that specialized in psychological warfare.
One could argue that Twitter, as a platform, offered Musk the combined powers of what Breitbart and Cambridge Analytica had previously offered Bannon: It functioned as both a media megaphone and a way to collect and centralize data on the American public, both of which could then be used to augment an overall electoral strategy. (There’s no way to say whether any of that data was useful or not, of course.) In 2016, Facebook was central to Bannon’s effort. Cambridge Analytica collected data on segments of the American population from Facebook for the purposes of political advertising, in a notorious case that ended in Congressional hearings. In Musk’s case, he bought a platform that’s similar to Facebook and took it private, thus avoiding any sort of outside scrutiny.
Late last year, I argued that Twitter wasn’t markedly different under Musk than it had been under Jack Dorsey. Of course, that was a long time ago, and things are very different now. I still maintain that Twitter was never a particularly good website—and that the original version of it should not be glorified as some ideal public platform. At the same time, its clear that Musk took a site that had meaningful guardrails, dispensed with them, and proceeded to mould the site in his own image (that image, apparently, is a mean-spirited douche bag).
The real question is what Musk will do next. Bannon left Breitbart in 2018, shortly after Trump had ascended to the White House, and never looked back. It remains to be seen whether Musk continues his tenure at X, or whether he will part ways with the platform. As a means of distributing scaled messaging, X would clearly continue to be useful to Musk and other Trump acolytes during the upcoming administration. That said, how do you continue to prop up a media operation that is hemorrhaging money? The financials of the site are what will have to be dealt with in the coming years, if the propaganda is to continue.
