Why Elon Musk is now the second most important Republican
Why is Elon Musk, a reported illicit drug user and unmarried father of 11 children by three women, a man whose social media site X is overrun with hatred and pornography, celebrated across the length and breadth of the right, including parts of the Christian right?
The answer is that if Donald Trump is MAGA’s champion, Musk is its gatekeeper. This is because outside of X, the public isn’t reading the right. And as a result, X now shapes the right as much as even Fox News.
Right media struggles
On Feb. 22, a website called The Righting released an analysis using Comscore data to compare web traffic at top right-wing sites from January 2020 to January 2024. The findings are surprising: Rightwing media appears to be struggling even more than mainstream media.
Of the top right-wing sites in 2020, only Newsmax gained audience over the past four years. Every other right-wing site lost visitors, and most lost a staggering percentage of them.
For example, The Righting reports that The Washington Examiner lost 66% of its visitors. The Washington Times lost 82%. Breitbart lost 87%, and The Daily Wire 73%. Fox News lost 24%. Some have lost so many that The Righting could no longer measure their reader numbers.
This means that social media — and principally Musk’s X — becomes the central way in which many right-wing figures reach the public. Musk owns the right wing’s public square.
There are several consequences of this reality. It’s altering the way the right speaks. It bends a person (or a movement) around the attitudes of social media and away from the kinds of arguments that require the length of a column or essay. Social media creates not a marketplace of ideas so much as a gallery of takes, where you can spend hours doomscrolling through short videos and snappy retorts.
That’s how a movement transfers its allegiance from the ideas of a man like William F. Buckley Jr., eloquent founder of National Review, to an X influence r like@ Cat turd2 and his 2.4 million followers. It’s one reason a person like Tucker Carlson devolves from an interesting, idiosyncratic writer and thinker to an online shock jock and outrage merchant.
This transformation has the effect of further radicalizing the right. There’s a “Can you top this?” dynamic to posting that pushes people to extremes. In the offline world, paranoia is a liability. It inhibits you from seeing the world clearly. In parts of the online world, you’re considered a rube if you’re not paranoid, if you’re not seeing a leftist plot around every corner, if you’re not believing that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s romance is a Biden administration psy- op that culminated with rigging the Super Bowl.
Corrosive social media
Moreover, a social mediacentered movement understands what to think, but often breaks down on the why.
To take one vivid example, last month Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz interviewed the founder of the popular X account Libs of TikTok, a woman named Chaya Raichik. Libs of TikTok is one of the most influential accounts in red America. Her posts don’t just trigger public outrage (and sometimes spawn an avalanche of threats against her targets); they directly affect legislation.
Yet the interview is agonizing to watch. Time and again, Raichik proves unable or unwilling to articulate the basis for her beliefs. Her attitude is clear. Her ideas are not.
Finally, this dependence on social media is shaping the right’s position on free speech. As the platforms they created lose traffic, it becomes even more important that right- wing figures secure their place on the platforms they did not create.
Thus, the same Republican Party that circled its wagons to protect corporate speech and the corporate exercise of religion in Supreme Court cases involving Citizens United, Hobby Lobby and 303 Creative has now passed laws in Florida and Texas trying to dictate private companies’ moderation policies.
To be clear: The dynamics of social media are corrosive to both right and left, and it’s not just right-wing sites that are losing readers. (The Righting also reported that CNN had lost 20% of its visitors, for example.) Left-wing activists on social media can be just as conspiratorial and vengeful as the worst actors on the right.
But there’s been a substantial divergence. Whereas preMusk Twitter was once a center of the left-leaning journalistic and activist universes, they have substantially abandoned the site as a sideshow. For the right, meanwhile, Musk’s X has become the main stage.
Ideas down, attitude up
It’s hard to think of a worse pair of human beings to shape the character of a movement than Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Yet here we are, with Trump controlling the right’s access to power, and Musk increasingly controlling the right’s access to the public.
At best, those on the right who wish to maintain that access must cynically ignore, rationalize and minimize the two men’s profound flaws. At worst, it means actively embracing their values to curry favor.
Like Trump’s ugly, erratic politics, Musk’s website is substantially contributing to the devolution of thinking on the right. The ideas are in retreat. It’s the attitude that matters now.