Extremist Ragout

 I get the nauseous feeling that we are living in a moment of proliferating totalitarian ideas, spreading like wildfire on social media. Obviously, the use of these online platforms to seed extremist ideas is nothing new. But what is creeping me out right now, even beyond the usual baseline concern about rising political extremism that hums as perpetual background noise in our present reality, is the appearance of these ideas in the feeds of tremendously powerful and influential people; plus the eerie cross-pollination that we seem to be witnessing in the promotion of these ideas between the extreme left and the extreme right. That part is new.

Yesterday was an especially bad day for anyone worried about the rise of antisemitism and other forms of extremism online. First, we had the news about Elon Musk's latest comments. If there was any lingering shred of plausible deniability he might have invoked as to his views, prior to these posts, he eliminated it that day. He is now actively endorsing antisemitic conspiracy theories and purveying them to his followers. And the way he talks about them, specifically, shows that this was no one-time gaffe. This was not a case of merely liking the wrong tweet. It's clear that Musk is deeply embedded in the worldview of white nationalists and the web of the ultra-right. He is conversant in their terminology and appears to have embraced their core propositions. 

This means that the world's richest man, the sole owner of one of the planet's largest online fora for public discussion of current events and of much of the Earth's infrastructure for entering space, is a more-or-less blatant antisemite trafficking in some of the most twisted content available on the internet, and pandering to some of the worst actors on his own platform. We should be very concerned. Musk is already probably the single most influential figure today in shaping the worldview of disaffected right-wing men online. He's been feeding them Tucker Carlson links and Russian propaganda; now he is promoting outright antisemitic conspiracy theories. 

Then we also had the news about TikTok yesterday, which has had its own problems with proliferating extremist posts, and where the alt-left, if that's the word for it, seems to be striving to outdo the alt-right for sheer totalitarian weirdness. The users of this platform apparently spent the day disseminating antisemitic conspiracy theories of their own, including sharing copies of a 2002 letter by Osama bin Laden that peddles anti-Jewish canards. 

Apparently large numbers of young people implicitly believe everything they hear on TikTok, with no screen of culture or history intervening that they can use to critically examine what they encounter. And so, this has become the new hot take among Gen-Z influencers: namely, that Bin Laden was right. Apparently the thousands of innocent civilians who perished on 9/11 deserved it. The platform that has recently played host to the majority of the foulest pro-Hamas takes, after the October 7 attack on Israel, is now endorsing Al Qaeda too. Why do people believe this madness, just because they saw it in a video? How are they so easily duped? 

One could hardly find a richer illustration of the old proposition that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Apparently, the unrelenting triviality of most of what appears on these platforms is no protection against the odd totalitarian conspiracy theory that pops in alongside it. To the contrary, the tremendous eclecticism and range of registers—high and low—of the content available makes it even harder to disentangle truth from falsehood. Commenting on the rising generation in his 1986 novel Paradise, Donald Barthelme observes: it's not that they don't know anything, "it was, rather, that what they knew was so wildly various, ragout of Spinoza and Cyndi Lauper with a William Buckley sherbet floating in the middle of it."

So it is with TikTok—the addictive algorithm keeps people's eyeballs glued, flinging at them endless dancing videos and funny cat memes, with the odd endorsement of the 9/11 or October 7 terrorist attacks thrown in. After a few hours of having one's brain melted in this incoherent stew, how is one by the end of it to distinguish one from the other? "One video with nearly 100,000 likes," reports the New York Times, "showed a TikTok user at her kitchen sink with the caption: 'Trying to go back to life as normal after reading Osama bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America’ and realizing everything we learned about the Middle East, 9/11, and ‘terrorism’ was a lie.'" Apparently all it took was reading the letter. People see a letter from bin Laden on TikTok and they're like, "yup, cool, that sounds right"?

Seeing the incredible ease and velocity with which people can promote violent belief systems online, I am inclined to agree with John Berryman. Reading his famous volume The Dream Songs this past week, I found the following lines, written in contemplation of the crisis in Biafra, but referencing as well the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide earlier in the century: "These massacres of [...] the Armenians, the Jews, the Ibos, all [...] serve to remind us that culture was only a phase/through which we threaded, coming out at the other end/to the true light again of savagery." In an autumn already marked by horrendous antisemitic violence and a mass displacement of ethnic Armenians from Azerbaijan, these words ring all too true. 

There are a lot of people who will manipulate the rhetoric of humanism to try to relativize all of this. They will say: we have to listen to the young; or perhaps: Musk deserves a second chance. Don't just cancel him for a bad tweet! I've been arguing with friends for years already about whether there is more to Musk than meets the eye and whether he deserves more credit and patience than I am inclined to give him. People argue: he founded some successful companies! One of them was designed to address climate change! His politics are eclectic, not just conventionally right-wing! There's a Walter Isaacson biography of him! He's neurodivergent and unfairly stigmatized! "Pity the monsters," in other words. I have flashbacks to 2016. It's almost like we're being asked to take Musk's comments "seriously but not literally." 

I have no trouble, though, seeing through Musk and concluding that there is no real merit there. His latest social media posts were not outliers; they are consistent with the increasingly blatant antisemitic trend of his remarks and his interaction with and promotion of far-right content on the platform he controls. Besides, founding PayPal and a luxury car company does not give you a pass on spouting Hitlerian rhetoric. Most of his other sci-fi influenced business propositions have never materialized or amounted to anything, though they have drained plenty of investor cash. In short, he is a charlatan in the key of Trump. 

And so, I respond to the "pity the Musk" argument the same way I responded to the "pity the Brexiteers" and the "pity the Trump" arguments back in 2016, when people likewise tried to persuade me that there was something we needed to learn from the purveyors of the new right-wing extremism in the democratic West, or some message in their content we needed to listen to.  I respond, that is to say, by quoting Hugh MacDiarmid: "It is a God-damned lie to say that these/ Saved, or knew, anything worth any man’s pride." The best that we can say of them, MacDiarmid went on, is the following: "In spite of all their kind some elements of worth/ With difficulty persist here and there on earth."