Gab Gets It

The Best Worst Musk Takedown

It does me very little good to be “off Twitter” if all I do is write about Twitter. I’m still Very Online, I still scroll, I still keep up with the latest happenings. The only real different is now I’m a hypocrite as well as an addict. It’s got to stop, I told myself yesterday. No more writing about the lumpy one. There’s a whole world of politics out there, a firehose of weirdness to drink from.

And then, this morning, I opened my inbox and my very first message was “Musk Is In Over His Head” from Gab.com.

For those who do not know, Gab is easily the most abhorent of all the right-wing Twitter alternatives. Let me put it this way: at CPAC Dallas, standing in line to get my complementary copy of One Vote Away autographed by Ted Cruz, I started chatting with the people standing next to me. The topic turned to social media alternatives: Truth Social, Gettr, Parler. “What about Gab?” I asked. Everyone went silent. “I’m not a big fan of Gab,” the person behind me said. We moved on quickly.

If Gab sounds familiar to you it might be because it’s the only non-Chan site heavily associated with an act of domestic terrorism: the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh back in 2018. The platform is barely a step up from Telegram when it comes to hate speech and actual Nazi presence. Andrew Torba, Gab’s founder, is a Christian Nationalist, by which I mean he recently self-published a book called Christian Nationalism.

I have a Gab account because I have an account on every platform that matters — you heard me, post.news — which means sometimes I wake up to a Gab newsletter in my inbox. The letter always reads like a dispatch from another planet where everyone speaks perfect English. Torba has a radical honesty common among the farthest of the far-right folks. There’s no reading between the lines with him; he’ll tell you exactly what he’s thinking. And what he’s thinking is usually very weird.

I’ve written about the Gab newsletter before — “On Christian Masculinity” inspired not one but three articles in the early days of this Substack. Today I’m barely going to write about Torba’s latest masterwork. I’m just going to let it sing to you on its own:

Musk Is In Over His Head

By Andrew Torba

Elon Musk is in over his head when it comes to free speech.

Musk is quickly learning that in order to run a free speech platform you need two things: thick skin and a fanatical commitment to free speech, even when being pro free speech is bad for business, and even when being pro free speech means tolerating the most excoriating criticism of yourself.

Elon’s “free speech” saga at Twitter is really nothing of the sort. He’s treating the product, and his users, as his playthings. Flailing, hyper-feminine emotional outbursts are a substitute for a “leadership style.” All told, he has revealed that he has no interest whatsoever in bringing actual free speech to Twitter.

Hey Torba, love what you’re doing so far, quick question: If gender is so static, isn’t everything Musk does by definition male? Why are gender essentialists so obsessed with policing gender? It’s almost like they know it’s a social construct that has to be constantly reinforced or it will go away forever…

Twitter was, ironically, more measured and free when there were thousands of mentally ill blue-haired Communists with their fingers on the ban hammer. At least the Communists tried to come up with an objective and consistent rationale for their actions. Contrast with Elon, who waved the flag of free speech as soon as he took over but immediately began compromising on that promise for the sake of business expediency.

This is my favorite paragraph maybe ever because it’s so right and so wrong all at once. The best right wrong sentence is the last one. Musk’s “flailing, hyper-feminine emotioal outbursts” have been terrible for business; they haven’t just tanked Twitter, they’ve tanked Tesla by proxy. Advertisers are fleeing for the hills, the platform is falling apart. And yet. Torba might be right. Musk might be doing all these things for the sake of business expediency. Which is hilarious and would make Torba’s sellout claim the most vicious barb of the entire letter.

When it came to Alex Jones being reinstated, Elon had an emotional reaction and invoked the loss of his child. When it came to Kathy Griffin impersonating him, Elon had an emotional reaction and swung the ban hammer on anyone in his way. When it came to Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, posting a symbol of a French UFO cult which combined a swastika and a Star of David, Elon had an emotional reaction and banned him so as to be hip with all of the other California types who were throwing Ye to the wolves.

Imagine how completely uncoupled from general society you have to be to think that revulsion at a swastika is restricted to “California types.” The mind boggles.

Credit where credit is due, though: Torba is what Elon pretends to be. This is what free speech absolutism looks like. If forced tolerance of actual goddamn Nazis makes you uncomfortable, you might not be as much of an absolutist as you think you are. Your discomfort is good and healthy actually. An ancient meme offers the metaphor of a potluck. Whatever food you bring to the gathering, there’s probably room for it on the table no matter how poorly cooked it is or how many people in the room dislike it. But you cannot put a steaming platter of dog poop on the table. This would be dangerous and also ruin the potluck for everyone.

The potluck of ideas is harder to manage in that many ideas fall somewhere on the spectrum between “food” and “dogshit,” but the theory remains the same and anyway, there should be no debate about which end of the spectrum the swastika occupies.

Anyway, back to Torba being the wrongest rightest person on the Internet this morning:

Now with the ElonJet and journalist ban situation, where constitutionally protected information which is publicly available is being removed from the site (despite being massively available practically everywhere else on the Internet) Elon is once again “leading” with his emotions and treating Twitter not as a product, not as an essential and vital publication utility for the entire world, but as a toy, and one controlled by a petulant child at that.

Men who lead do not make decisions and dictate on the whims of their emotions. Weak, hyper-effete men “leading” with emotions instead of reason and logic is a big reason Western society is crumbling. Given Elon’s Reddit-tier political takes and patchy soy beard, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that he is low on the testosterone side. But I digress.

Emphasis mine. A perfect sentence. Torba has collapsed several hideous ideas into just 26 word — ideas that should not be shared — and yet my desire to create a bot account to reply to every Elon tweet with just that sentence is almost overpowering. No notes.

Gab is for free speech. The lefty journalists recently banned from Twitter might not believe it but when they find that they get zero engagement on Mastodon and are looking to join a serious social media platform again, but Gab will be here waiting for them – and we will protect them from all censors, foreign and domestic, to the greatest extent possible– as long as their speech is lawful.

The letter goes on but we lose very little by ending it here, with the man so recently against expedient business decisions attempting to seduce journalists banned from Twitter into joining the most far-right platform of them all. The offer of free speech haven for wayward left-of-centers sounds like a challenge, and I’m not saying I’m going to test their commitment to open expression but I’m not not saying it either.

Anyway, congratulations to Torba for delivering the worst best Elon Musk takedown on a takedown-heavy Internet this morning.

Americafest proper starts this afternoon with an “educator’s summit” — I assume we will be learning how to not groom children into happy and well-adjusted degenerate queers. Did I mention Matt Gaetz is here? He’s here. Gonna be a wild four days…

I’m not yet sure whether I’m going to do a daily report or wait until it’s over to write something, but rest assured I will be writing about it. Yesterday was registration: my accomplishments so far include losing my first conference badge within fifteen minutes of receiving it, getting clocked as a Rolling Stone reporter, and decimating an open bar at the TPUSA Headquarters Block Party. I’m going to go back to sleep now and prepare for another long night. No one should be allowed to have this much fun.