What Elon Musk is now doing will get somebody killed

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**Dec 4 Edition**

This Time It’s Personal!

On Friday, it was reported that Elon Musk had reinstated self avowed Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin to Twitter. If you are lucky, you have never heard of Anglin. Sadly for me I know Anglin all too well because in 2017 he incited his Nazi supporters to kill me.

I’ll explain more about Anglin below but this is not just about me or even Anglin. Under Musk’s leadership of Twitter, there has been an “unprecedented” spike in hate speech and a deeply alarming resurgence of ISIS linked accounts—as the NY Times detailed in a bone-chilling article published Friday. Recent data from groups that study online platforms have documented that hate speech has exploded on Twitter in the first two weeks since Musk took over. Overall, researchers noted “they had never seen such a sharp increase in hate speech, problematic content and formerly banned accounts in such a short period on a mainstream social media platform.”

Some of the most jarring statistics include that slurs against Black Americans have tripled to 3,876 times per day, antisemitic posts are up more than 60 percent and slurs versus gay men jumped from 2,500 a day to now nearly 4,000 comments per day.

As Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate told the NY Times: “Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business,” adding, “They have reacted accordingly.” (The NY Times notes Musk claims hate speech is actually down on Twitter, but he has provided no data to back this up. And since Twitter is now a private company, he can openly lie about the corporation without fear of shareholders suing him.)

Beyond hate speech, the NY Times also reports that there has been a 69 percent increase in accounts linked to the terrorist group ISIS. This is a national security issue given that ISIS may use Twitter to recruit and radicalize people to kill Americans. Congress should be investigating this but instead House Republican leaders have vowed when they take control of Congress come January 3 they will focus on investigating Joe Biden and his son Hunter.

Musk had already allowed Twitter to become a vile cesspool which had caused many advertisers to pause placing ads on the platform.

And now Musk welcomes back on Twitter white supremacist Andrew Anglin, the founder of the Neo Nazi website “The Daily Stormer” and who in the past called for tearing down Berlin’s memorial to The Holocaust (which he despicably calls a “hoax”) and replacing “it with a statue of Hitler 1,000 feet tall.” Anglin had been suspended from Twitter since 2013 for spewing hate, targeting people with attacks etc.

I came into contact with Anglin in 2017 in response to an article I wrote at that time slamming Anglin’s beloved Donald Trump for refusing to denounce white supremacist violence. (This was months before the August 2017 Charlottesville white nationalist rally.) Anglin first posted fabricated tweets on his white supremacist website that appeared to have been written by me where I claimed responsibility for an ISIS terrorist attack that had just occurred. (I’m Muslim.) He then instructed his followers to “confront me.” Given that readers of Daily Stormer had in the past committed acts of violence--including Dylann Roof, who in 2015 murdered nine African Americans who had gathered at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina in the hopes of starting a race war—they did what Musk asked.

I was soon inundated with death threats. However, If Anglin thought I was going to cower in fear, he was wrong. I sued him in federal court for defamation and emotional distress, where I won a judgment of $4.1 million dollars. While I still have not recovered a penny form Anglin, I have long pledged to donate all the proceeds to organizations that fight the very type of hate Anglin spews.

I’m not alone in who Anglin has come after. He has orchestrated targeted harassment of other minorities, including an African American student who successfully sued Anglin and Jewish American Tanya Gersh, who also sued Anglin resulting in a $14 million judgment. In fact, the person Musk just welcomed back to Twitter had an arrest warrant issued against him by a federal judge just last month for refusing to comply with court orders in the collection of those damages.

Alarmingly, Anglin’s dangerous influence still continues to this day. As the Southern Poverty Law Center documented, the white supremacist who in May 2022 intentionally killed Black people in a Buffalo, New York grocery store, had cited by name Anglin’s Daily Stormer in his manifesto, crediting it as shaping his view that white people were being “replaced” by people of color.

Musk reinstating Anglin on Twitter not only helps normalize a Neo Nazi, but it also dangerously helps Anglin recruit followers. In fact, one of Anglin’s first tweets on Friday read: “Trying to find my friends. I lost them in 2013.”

On Friday night, I was on MSNBC’s “The Reid Report” where I slammed both Anglin—calling him a “deadbeat Nazi” for failing to pay my judgement against him—and Musk for normalizing a literal Nazi. That led to the Huffington Post article that that is the photo at the top of this week’s newsletter. (If you are interested you can watch the MSNBC clip below.)

Even if you do not use Twitter, Musk amplifying the messages of a Neo-Nazi and not cracking down on hate speech has consequences in the real world. At the very least this helps amplify the divisions already present in our society—at worse it can lead to violence against minority communities.

Being on Twitter is a privilege, not a right. Musk has extended that privilege to the worst of the worst. Now it’s time for advertisers to decide if they want to be associated with this type of social media platform. The hope is Americans will refuse to spend their money supporting companies that spend money supporting Musk’s Twitter.

My appearance Friday on MSNBC slamming Nazi Andrew Anglin and Elon Musk for reinstating this Nazi to Twitter:

Rep Chuy Garcia (D-Ill) on my SiriusXM show explains why the Democrats new House leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries is an excellent choice

Slate.com’s Dahlia Lithwick on my SirusXM show talks Elon Musk running Twitter like a King and more

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